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.
