Stars:
Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law
Choice Dialogue:
* Pygar: “An angel does not make love, an angel is love”
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* To the Mathmos with this winged fruitcake!
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* Barbarella: "Are you an Angel?"
* Pygar: "I'm Pygar, the last of the
ornithothropes."
Conclusions:
* The 60s are not an excuse for bad taste.
* It is possible to have a free love generation that requires no physical
contact whatsoever.
* The world will come to a violent end, but the perpetrators are gonna
make it groovy baby!
* If you are an aspiring actress with plans on taking your career seriously,
it’s probably wise to avoid a script that has your character being
orgasmed to death.
* If you are an aspiring actress and you DON'T plan on taking your career
seriously, it’s probably wise to avoid a script that has your character
being orgasmed to death.
Review:
Everybody makes mistakes. Luckily most of us never have our mistakes turn
into cult items. Jane Fonda on the other hand is the exception. In 1967,
just before Ho Chi Min's favorite exercise guru started making a name
for herself as a real actress, there was Barbarella. Yes Barbarella, a
60s French sex farce that has been a pain in the butt for dear Jane for
over 35 years.
She agreed to this mess at the insistance of her then husband, French director Roger Vadim whose body of work consisted mostly of parading his mistresses and wives onscreen in very stages of nudity. The fact that Vadim was married six times only helps us understand how well this tactic played at home.
I've seen the movie several times. Several times because you watch Barbarella in horrified facination but have to return because you simply can’t believe it the first time.
How do I describe it? Hmmm that's tough. It is an extravagant exercise in bad taste, an attempt to graf a female James Bond onto the daffiest episode of Star Trek while throwing in killer dolls, angels, and a torture machine that orgasms its victim to death.
Fonda plays the title character, a 41st century British agent/sex kitten who buzzes around the galaxy in a spaceship made mostly of shag carpeting and run by a computer with a voice that sounds like a gay Big Brother. I'm not sure what has happened to the British government by this century but I have to say I like the required uniform, or should I say uniforms because she changes into a new one about every four minutes. NOT that I am complaining!
Barb comes from a generation where sex is performed through the consumption of a drug and very limited physical contact. Their idea of sex simply involves staring blankly into space while holding hands. So, would that make Hands Across America one huge nationwide orgy?
The movie opens with one of the most legendary scenes in B-Movie history, Fonda stripping in an anti-gravity environment as the letters of the opening credits pour out of her spacesuit. One waits to see if the movie will fulfill it’s promise only to find that the scene is more tease than strip because director Roger Vadim has three little stars bubble up from the sides of the frame and float strategically over Ms. Fonda’s goodies. Roge, you’re a real sadist.
The story begins during her latest shagedlic outing when Barb gets a message that a famous scientist has disappeared and she must find him before he lastest weapon brings death to a distant planet. When she locates the planet, we see first-hand the limit of her piloting skills because she doesn’t so much land on the surface as crash into it.
What happens after that has to be seen to be believed. Barb gets help from a grizzly chested man who insists on sexual favors (the old fashioned way) in return for saving her from a swarm iron toothed, cupie dolls. This is Barb’s first physical contact (the sex, not the dolls) and she uses it to get what she needs for rest of the film until she gets to Duran Duran (the scientist, not the band). His plan for Babs is to strap her into a very odd device that looks like a waterbed crossed with a pipe-organ. The intent is to orgasm our heroine to death and in a movie this bad, the scene comes as both embarrassing AND annoying. But I can't decide which is more irritating, that a line like: "A grave many dramatic situations begin with screaming." Um, yeah!
Finding the true root of irritation is not easy when it comes to Barbarella, the movie is a grand headache from one psychadelic migrane to the other especially the opening song which contains a line like "Barbarella psychedella, there's a kind of cockle shell about ya."
Dear lord, I can't believe I just quoted that. BAD CRITIC!! BAD!!
