Le Gladiatrici

Women Gladiators

Thor and the Amazon Women

How to make a bad movie worse

There is no getting around how bad Le Gladiatrici (Women Gladiators) is. The acting is bad. The plot is cheesy, it has all the casual racism and sexism of both Eastern Europe and the 1960s. And yet... if you manage to dig up a copy, it's evident by the costumes and the sets that there was clearly some effort put forth to make a quality product. So what went wrong?

The very premise of Thor (a generic barbarian, no relation to the Norse god as fun as it is to imagine this guy as some mortal form of the same character from the Marvel movies) battling a matriarchal society was bound to be hilariously chauvinistic no matter how it was done. But the English version (the only one I've seen) already took it down a notch by changing the title to Thor and the Amazon Women, and marketing it more for titillation (which it fails to deliver by the way).

The film was marketed completely differently
in the U.S. and U.K. compared to Italy

But then when you add in some censorship, poor film print quality, a terrible film-to-video transfer that among other things puts fight scenes that make use of the wide Totalscope process to have the combatants of numerous fight scenes standing on opposite sides of the screen both cropped out of the picture for pan-and-scan, and a bad translation of the original Italian dialogue to boot - and you still have a film that holds its own against the particularly low-bar of Italian sword-and-sandal epics, you can't help but wonder was there actually an interesting, albeit "B" movie here once upon a time? The world may never know.







The Good: 

• hilariously bad

The Bad:

• almost everything

The Verdict:

** out of *****