My review was written in November 1989 after watching the movie on Academy video cassette.
A belated followup to the cult classic "The Wicker Man", "Forbidden Sun" (better known by its shooting title "Bulldance") is a lamentably silly exploitation film, delving into ancient myths; it's headed directly for U. S. video stores.
A brief cause celebre due to having gone over budget (putting its production company behind the eight ball), film awkwardly combines the talents of director Zelda Barron, a helmer of pics about school girls such as "Shag" and "Secret Places", and "Wicker Man" helmer Robin Hardy, this time the scripter. It's not the production but the concept that went awry.
The school girls this time are American beauties training as Olympic gymnasts at Lauren Hutton and Cliff De Young's school on the island of Crete (actually filmed on rugged Yugoslavian locations, with Slavic thesps in the supporting cast portraying Greeks). Samantha Mathis is the new arrival from whose perspective the story starts being told, though picture structurally goes askew midway when she is raped and written out of the film.
Leading role actually goes to lovely blonde Viveka Davis, a headstrong student who's a former juvenile delinquent. She's in love with handsome instructor Robert Beltran, and goes nuts when she spots him in a sexual tryst with Hutton. Davis goads the girls to exercise vigilante justice against the rape suspect (Svetislav Goscic) and then proceeds to persecute Beltran for a different type of revenge.
The classical myth of the Minotaur, half-man/half-bull, is the basis for the film's most ludicrous motif, as Davis becomes obsessed with the ancient ritual of the bulldance -a gymnast vaulting over a live bull's horns, landing on its back and flipping over via dismount. At first practicing this with men wearing bull-masks, by film's end she's trying the real thing. Under Barron's "Shag"-gy direction, such antics emphasize plenty of jiggle rather than Olga Korbut-style beauty of movement.
Add a British rock group, Hard Rain, which appears on camera and provides the music score, and the film becomes more a package of incompatible ingredients than mythic fantasy. Tech credits are fine but acting leans to the gee whiz end of the spectrum.
A belated followup to the cult classic "The Wicker Man", "Forbidden Sun" (better known by its shooting title "Bulldance") is a lamentably silly exploitation film, delving into ancient myths; it's headed directly for U. S. video stores.
A brief cause celebre due to having gone over budget (putting its production company behind the eight ball), film awkwardly combines the talents of director Zelda Barron, a helmer of pics about school girls such as "Shag" and "Secret Places", and "Wicker Man" helmer Robin Hardy, this time the scripter. It's not the production but the concept that went awry.
The school girls this time are American beauties training as Olympic gymnasts at Lauren Hutton and Cliff De Young's school on the island of Crete (actually filmed on rugged Yugoslavian locations, with Slavic thesps in the supporting cast portraying Greeks). Samantha Mathis is the new arrival from whose perspective the story starts being told, though picture structurally goes askew midway when she is raped and written out of the film.
Leading role actually goes to lovely blonde Viveka Davis, a headstrong student who's a former juvenile delinquent. She's in love with handsome instructor Robert Beltran, and goes nuts when she spots him in a sexual tryst with Hutton. Davis goads the girls to exercise vigilante justice against the rape suspect (Svetislav Goscic) and then proceeds to persecute Beltran for a different type of revenge.
The classical myth of the Minotaur, half-man/half-bull, is the basis for the film's most ludicrous motif, as Davis becomes obsessed with the ancient ritual of the bulldance -a gymnast vaulting over a live bull's horns, landing on its back and flipping over via dismount. At first practicing this with men wearing bull-masks, by film's end she's trying the real thing. Under Barron's "Shag"-gy direction, such antics emphasize plenty of jiggle rather than Olga Korbut-style beauty of movement.
Add a British rock group, Hard Rain, which appears on camera and provides the music score, and the film becomes more a package of incompatible ingredients than mythic fantasy. Tech credits are fine but acting leans to the gee whiz end of the spectrum.