Gladiatress (2004)

Am I Missing Something?

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Three British sisters - a chieftaness, a loser, and a warrior, get involved with the invading Romans.Ostensibly a feminist spoof of Gladiator, this is actually essentially a feature-length sketch from the Channel 4 sketch show Smack The Pony, providing a vehicle for the three women performers to do their thing. In practical terms, this means that Fiona Allen comes out best, since her warrioress demands underplaying: conversely the overacting of Doon Mackichan and Sally Phillips, which works quite well in the context of a sketch show, becomes irritating and downright exhausting after half an hour. The film is 89 minutes long, so draw your own conclusions.The script is not bad, roaming between situation comedy, slapstick, wordplay, daftness, and wit. And, for a low budget film, it looks more expensive than it is, although you are unlikely to mistake it for a big budget blockbuster.

This is a very funny movie. Just finished watching it and can only say I was pleasantly surprised. It is full of little jokes, but unlike the moronic "meet the Spartans", these jokes are clever. Typical English wordplay and silly modern day parallels and plays on pretty much every cultural stereotype. It seems like this movie is full of strong fun roles for women and the guys just don't really count. Italians speaka lika da pizzamanna.. its actually funny to see in a movie like this and Celtic warrior women looking for love in a very "special" way.Considering the crap thats been coming out of Hollywood and labeled "comedy" its hard to imagine this one got overlooked.

This movie is awful, don't waist a perfectly good disc and the time to watch this please ! OK, so I got misled by the cover, featuring one of the three sisters, in a Gladiatress outfit... Which she never wares, not even a second! So don't fall for that one. Then there's a very thin story about three sisters. The oldest one is the most normal (and 'cute') one and about to become queen of some country in the UK. (We're talking Caesar-era here). Then there is the stupid blond sister, and the savage, abandoned sister. The about-to-become-queen gets kidnapped by the Romans, so the stupid one is sent out to save her. Se gets the savage sister to come with her and... that's about it. There are a few minutes of 'gladiatress' action, that isn't funny, exciting or sexy at all. So this movie totally missed it if you ask me..

The girls of UK comedy TV show "Smack The Pony" take on the "Gladiator" story- like an answer to the lads of "Spaced" doing "Shaun Of The Dead" (except that "Gladiatress" was filmed at the same time, or possibly even first?) It's a real shame that this film got overlooked, and possibly even buried, in the shadow of "Shaun Of The Dead" as it's a funny film in it's own right. There are a lot of parallels in the style between the two films though. For a start, I was falling off my seat with laughter in both films.Like "Shaun..", a lot of the jokes wouldn't be funny if you had only ever seen them written down- a lot of the real comedy is in the delivery. For example the line "I don't even know where Rome is... s***..."- dull written down but laugh-out-loud when you hear Sally Phillips saying it. Also like "Shaun..", it's really vulgar in parts but never too much, and even though you don't expect to, by the end you're empathising with characters you thought at the beginning of the film you couldn't possibly like.My only criticisms would be that the first ten minutes are a bit shaky- which might explain why this film has got some poor reviews, as it doesn't leave a good first impression. Also, Doon Mackichan is, surprisingly, a bit weak through some parts of the movie, which is a shame as Fiona Allen and Sally Phillips are on top form. Oh, and the tag-line "does my Gluteus Maximus look big in this?" isn't funny, and it under-sells the film. But these are all minor points, and don't really detract from the entertainment.The reviewer who commented on the "odd feminism" in the film has, in my opinion, firmly grabbed the wrong end of his stick (or has problems listening to women as equals). If he was expecting a sexy women-in-leather soft porn, this film happily isn't that. It isn't a chick-flick either- you don't have to be one gender or the other to laugh at this film.In a nutshell, if you liked "Shaun Of The Dead", and/or "Smack The Pony" on TV, this is worth hunting down a copy of. I eventually had to get a legitimate DVD copy from the Netherlands in order to see it- this film is too good to go unnoticed!