Battle of the Amazons (1973)

Just perfect...

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.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Craptastic madness that brings the swords and sandals genre into the seventies (i.e just the same only with more nudity and gore) and adds a slightly feminist angle. That's feminist in an Italian sense, where a bunch of strong willed, independent women oppress a bunch of weak willed men, only mostly with their boobs hanging out and some of them being lesbians and what not. These amazons are being a pain in the arse to all and sundry, and first we see them a bunch of then have captured hunky bandit Zeno making out with one of their own. After cutting off one of their arms, he gets himself enslaved with the added bonus of having to watch his girl get impaled on some spikes during one of the amazonians demented rituals. It's not a surprise that first chance he gets, he throws a scorpion down the back of an amazon's neck and legs it. After nearly dying in the forest, he's saved by a strong headed but fairly conservative village girl whose village is constantly being invaded by these blobstrop-suffering murder-junkies. Of course, Zeno gets roped into teaching the villagers how to fight back, but not before all his mates sexually harass and nearly rape the village girl. Feminism indeed!These villagers are barely worth saving to be honest. A few of them, including a guy who thinks he's going to marry village girl, don't want to fight the amazons and just want to hide every time they come rolling through the village with their hilarious war cry. They even get the chief of the tribe killed when he tries this approach. Others, mainly women, want to get stuck in and fight back, but even one of them is a planted traitor! Zeno would be better off just heading for the hills and forgetting about it to be honest, but then he has a naked horseback ride with the village girl, in slow motion, and that changes all that.Even with all the fake sex, amazon murder sprees and subsequent orgies with non-murdered new slaves, endless scenes of training and treachery, the main part of the film is the actual battle. Now, there's some sort of premise about a god the amazons worship that causes them to don masks while heading into battle, but seriously, this is just a ploy to cover for the fact that during the big battle, the amazons are all played by stuntmen! Add to this insanity (they don't even pad the men out) the bonus of everyone jumping at each other from hidden trampolines and screaming in a bizarre voice and you can't help but enjoy it. Well, I did anyway. I'm not sure Julie Burchill would.Alfonso also stuffs the film full of stupid dialogue just to fill the atmosphere with more crapness. I wonder why they bothered having Frank Bana there? He just kind of stood around.

'Battle of the Amazons' is obviously derived from 'Seven Samurai', with a spaghetti western score. Talk being cheaper than action, the film sadly devotes far more time to the hapless farmers debating what they're going to do than to the Amazons themselves doing what Amazons do. (In the case of Lucretia Love as Eraglia, blonde sidekick to Genie Woods' Queen Antiope - both with their hair tied back in severe buns like ballerinas - this includes - in a rare bit of wit - snaffling for herself a pretty girl when all the other Amazons are heading home with the village's young men to use as breeding stock.) In readiness for a return engagement, four passing ruffians are persuaded to show the men how to handle swords; while in the final battle all the women suddenly show a skill with crossbows that would have ended the film several reels earlier had their aim been that good when the Amazons had staged their original horseback raid on the village.The biggest single disappointment of the film - as most of the previous reviewers on this board have already commented - is the long-awaited Battle of the Amazons itself; set at night and filmed mainly in long shot with the Amazons all wearing masks to camouflage the fact that most of the combatants are stunt men rather than women.

I watched Battle of the Amazons only a few hours ago and I'm already having problems remembering many of the particulars about the movie. It wasn't necessarily as bad as some of the other movies I watch, just unmemorable. You'd think a movie about a band of Amazon warriors that raids a town to kidnap young men for sex slaves would standout more than that. But that's apparently not the case.The movie follows the same plot line we've all seen any number of times. The Amazons raid a small village. Those left in the village fear the Amazons will be back. The villagers hire a band of outlaws to train them to fight. Of course it all leads to a climatic brawl where the villagers come out on top and, in the end, the outlaws redeem themselves and decide to stay on. Can anyone tell me where they've seen this before? Magnificent Seven maybe? How about Seven Samurai? As I indicated, it's been done to death.Battle of the Amazons is a dreary looking affair. It's almost as if the director decided to film the movie through a layer of mud. The acting is generally abysmal. The lone exception is Lucretia Love (Is that a cool name or what?) who I've begun to notice recently in a few movies. By the way, I got a kick out of the fact that Love's character, Eraglia, was the only Amazon that brought back a female when they raided the village. The final fight scene is pretty much a letdown. I also found it humorous that the Amazons don masks for their climatic battle. This was done so that the females could be replaced by men in wigs. Did they think no one would notice that the shapely Amazons suddenly turned into beefy men? One highlight from Battle of the Amazons for me was the score. Although it would have been more at home in a Spaghetti Western, the music was quite nice.

This is basically yet another variation on the "Magnificent Seven" theme, only here we have (not 7 but) 4 people coming to protect a village and teach the villagers how to defend themselves (not against Mexican bandits but) against an aggressive army of Amazons. The film begins rather well: the grungy, dirty look, the stunts, the Amazons' mean-spiritedness, they all have an air of authenticity. But most of the action sequences occur at night, and it's often hard to see what's going on. And the biggest disappointment of all, during the big climactic battle nearly all the Amazons have their faces covered by white masks, apparently to camouflage the fact that they have been replaced by male stuntmen. Blech. At the end, there is a fierce swordfight between the bravest woman in the village (well played by the profoundly beautiful Paola Tedesco) and the Amazon Queen, but it's a case of "too little, too late". (**)