#red sonja

[rafagrunje]

Red Sonja e Kalidor

(Brigitte Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger) 🎬Red Sonja "Guerreiros de Fogo" (1985

[stealthilyfoggymist]

Itoscaresme

[chambers-of-crimson-sleep]

Red Sonja by itoscaresme

[coolcomicbookcovers]

[georgettekaplan]

So, Red Sonja. It's actually kinda fun--very much of a piece with the cheesy eighties fantasy films like Deathstalker or Beastmaster. Some good production value and actual actors (Philip Winchester! Rhona Mitra! Strike Back reunion!) sharing space with MST3K-worthy editing and special effects. Largely, it's just weird.

Like Red Sonja herself. You think she'd be a savage barbarian, but they make her go all in on being this nature-loving heroine, pretty much a Disney princess, who is like aghast at people abusing animals. "You use and slaughter animals!" she accuses the villain during the litany of his sins. It's like... honey... it's the Hyborean Age. Beyond Meat isn't exactly a thing at this point in prehistory.

(They have her hunting animals, but then saying a little Avatar prayer over them. Like, does that really make much of a difference? If you shot an arrow into my neck, I don't think I'd care much if you thanked me for my meat.)

Or the hair. They start her off as a redhead, then at the finale they make her really a redhead, and you're like... oh. We really needed to Surf Dracula her having red hair?

Or the armor. The villains try to embarrass her by making her wear a chainmail bikini in gladiatorial games, with the script jibing about how little it protects her (not that the villains wearing full armor ever seems to do them much good). Then she gets some real armor by being nice to the armorer (the script also makes a weirdly big deal about Sonja being super compassionate, like she's Wonder Woman). And it covers, like, ten percent more of her body.

It's like they wrote the script thinking they were going to put her in the chainmail bikini for one scene as a mythology gag and then they'd give her a real costume, but someone said "Fuck, guys, it's Red Sonja, she needs to be in a chainmail bikini," so instead they just put her in a different chainmail bikini and didn't rewrite the part where she's supposedly asking for and getting practical armor.

At one point, the villain sets fire to the forest Red Sonja is hiding out in to smoke her out, then he sends his men into the burning forest to get her. While it's on fire.

The villain is Robert Sheehan and boy, let me tell you, it is a sight to see Matilda Lutz underplaying everything (clearly a graduate of the Gal Gadot School of Acting) while Sheehan overplays everything. If you raised a child on Eddie Redmayne's performance in Jupiter Rising, the result would probably be a lot like "Emperor Draygan."

Clearly a man who knows that the more sniveling and fey your fantasy movie villain is, the better. Look at this guy!

There's a bit where the obligatory Miniboss Villainess Who Is Super Into The Main Villain asks him "Why have we never shared a bed?" and I swear to God, he turns around just like this

iWh

Imagine a Sex And The City character becoming an evil overlord and you're about there. I don't know what movie he thinks he's in... some kind of atheist relationship drama involving cyclops?... but you wish A24 had picked it up instead of burying it in a barbarian revenge film.

Like, his complaint is that the gods didn't intervene to help him when he was enslaved as a boy, and then the gods do intervene when Sonja is mortally wounded and he's won fair and square, so yeah! Valid! If the gods had just intervened during the opening scene instead of the third act, everyone would've been so much better off!

It's a female goddess specifically, too, so I guess we're not supposed to notice.

[negreabsolut]

Red Sonja, per Dan Panosian.

[ultrameganicolaokay]

Red Sonja: She-Devil With A Sword #5 by Rory McConville and Pablo de Bonis. Variant covers by (1) Lucio Parrillo, (2) Joseph Michael Linsner and (3) Mike Rooth. Main cover (4) by Stuart Sayger. Out in September.

"A bold new series, continuing the Dynamite Debut of writer Rory McConville (King Spawn) and artist Pablo de Bonis! In this issue: Red Sonja vs. Demoroq as the hordes of Rising Sun engulf Khorshemish! Who will live? Who will die? Find out in this stunning issue!"

[coolcomicbookcovers]