Thor and the Amazon Women

This is another film which I have just watched but it has already slipped my mind quite completely! Indeed, the peplum genre – especially in its lowest form, and this is easily among the least I have watched! – has a curious tendency to be instantly forgettable.

The fact that this features no recognizable cast members certainly did not help and, though I purposely scheduled it to be viewed right after the brand-new Marvel/Kenneth Branagh blockbuster THOR (2011), unsurprisingly the film has nothing at all to do with that superhero figure despite featuring a character by that name in the English-dubbed version I watched. Rather, as can be gleaned from the title, it awkwardly blends mild feminist attitudes with the vaguest whiff of Scandinavian mythology (I guess the film-makers could not get the rights to Hercules, Maciste or any of those other muscle-bound characters!); incidentally, it was originally released as, simply, LE GLADIATRICI – that is to say, making no reference whatsoever to the dime-a-dozen he-man hero (here played by the generically-named Joe Robinson)!

However I rack my brain to try to recall the plot details, I cannot come up with anything substantial…and the same goes for the rest of the protagonists, be it friends or foes! I can only surmise that the people involved kept the script handy in order to get from Point A to Point B during the shooting stage of this type of unassuming (read: invincibly low-brow) fare – but it does feel odd that, having gone through 86 minutes of it, there is nothing tangible to talk about after only a couple of days! Actually, there is a 10-page dissection of the film available online…but I will be damned if I am going to read it to jog my memory of it all…but, from the accompanying stills, I hazily recall: Thor fighting a caged ape; his having a colored sidekick; the villainous Queen of Babylos {sic} having a fluffy white cat for a pet; and her gladiatress minions not only getting to don Smurf-like head-gear but forever prone to breaking into the hilarious war-cry of "Elt! Elt! Elt!" WTF?!