Thor and the Amazon Women Review

Quite recently I bought a 50-movie pack called Warriors and movie-wise, it’s about the best $18 I’ve ever spent.

Warriors is a compilation of Italian peplum (sword and sandal movies) from the 1960s and thereabouts. Italian filmmakers churned out hundreds of these films during the 50s, 60s and early 70s before switching over to the better-known spaghetti western genre in the 70s.

Thor and the Amazon Women alone is worth the price of the entire collection. It’s an exciting adventure that is also hilariously silly in parts and sexually strange, often in the same parts.

Our story begins with a narrator telling viewers what total bitches the queen of Babelos and her subjects are. He says:

“In these mountains and valleys arose a matriarchal civilization so frightful that its cruelty and violence has echoed across the abyss of 18,000 years. The men were considered inferior beings, destined from birth to a condition of slavery. Forced to work in the mines, they had lost the last vestige of a rebellious spirit. All power was in the hands of women, who, trained in the arts of war, spread terror in all the surrounding countries. The rare women who dared to rebel against this form of government were segregated and trained as gladiatrices to fight against each other. This was the first time in history that human beings were forced to kill one another in mortal combat for the inhuman pleasure of a bloodthirsty queen.”

My knowledge of ancient history, limited though it is, had my bullshit alarm going off already. Those who are familiar with both the Old Testament and the Koran know that what the queen of Babelos did was standard operating procedure in Biblical times. You fought with other tribes and other cities, and if you won, you killed all the men and enslaved the women and children.

So I wasn’t buying the narrator’s claims of extraordinary wickedness on the part of the queen of Babelos. She sounded like your garden-variety ruler in those days. I just think the narrator was upset because it was men who got enslaved rather than women. Well, tough stuff, buddy. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and all that.

So, bullshit meter on high, we come to the next scene. It’s set in a cave, where the queen of Babelos, who is black (despite the fact that the majority of her subjects are white -- nice to know that the bigotry here does not extend to racism) has come to visit an oracle who has summoned her.

She’s one hell of an oracle too, has the appearing in a puff of smoke and sparkly lights thing down cold. She informs the queen that she will remain in power until the day when a man strong enough to best 101 of the queen’s warriors (women all, of course) with nothing but his physical strength.

The queen is alarmed at this prophecy and might have been tempted to torture the oracle a bit to see if she couldn’t get a better one, but the oracle has that whole disappearing in a cloud of smoke and sparkly lights thing down, too. You know what kind of oracle that is? A SMART oracle.

The queen is not so smart, however, though she has great looks -- very Eartha Kitt (she’s played by Janine Hendy). Told that she will lose her throne when a man strong enough to defeat 101 of her finest warriors comes along, she immediately has her subordinate Yammad scour her country for news of such a strong man, promising a reward of 1000 male slaves to any woman who can give her news of this mighty warrior.

I guess the queen’s reasoning is, why hide from your doom when you can be proactive about it?

Tamar in the peaceful forest of Harr. (If you want to writer her, her full address is: Harr, Harr, Harr.)

Next we visit Hagendaz, a peaceful village in the forest of Harr, (near castle Aaaaaagh) where everyone farms and hunts and is happy and likes each other. Hagendaz is the home of Tamar and her young brother Jujube (well, the name sounds kinda like “Jujube,” whatever it actually is) who are the son and daughter of the rightful king of Babelos who was deposed by the evil queen. They have fled to Hagendaz to avoid being killed, as it is run by some old bearded guy, henceforth known as Oldguy, who is an old friend of the deposed king who has sworn to protect the king’s children and raise them good and proper against the day when they can regain the throne of Babelos and torture and kill the usurper queen good and proper. They have a brand or a birthmark or something that proves they are the rightful heir to the throne, the ancients apparently not knowing anything of tattoo technology.

Hagendaz is also near the stamping grounds of the mighty hero Thor, whom everybody calls “Taur.” This isn’t simple Italian mistranslation of English. (The original film was done in Italian of course, so all the voices are dubbed and sometimes they do a little mild mangling of English, though it’s nothing compared to the full-on torturing of English I’ve seen in the subtitles of some hentai.)

No, the reason the characters call “Thor” “Taur” is that the character’s name was originally “Tarzan.” The filmmakers used the name when they discovered that Tarzan had gone out of copyright. Then the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate got wind of the deal and pointed out that they’d trademarked all the characters and their names and such, and that was the end of that. Tarzan became Taur. Why they switched him over to Thor I’m not sure, since there’s not a drop of Norse mythology in either film.

Either film? Did I say “either film”? Yes, I did say that. Thor and the Amazon Women is kinda sorta a sequel to Taur the Mighty Hunter, the film I cited in my article When Good Bondage Happens To Bad Movies for the really great gag scene that occurs in the movie. Both movies were filmed at the same time, to save money no doubt.

Sadly, the gags from Taur the Mighty Hunter do not recur in Thor and the Amazon Women, however Taur the Mighty Hunter also contained blurry images of groups of women who appear to be wearing yokes. The images were so blurry that I couldn’t be sure the women were wearing yokes in Taur the Mighty Hunter. But the images are QUITE clear in Thor and the Amazon Women, and I have the goods on the yokes.

So, that’s why Tarzan is called “Thor” in Thor and the Amazon Women. If you’ll keep in mind that you’re ACTUALLY watching a Tarzan movie here, things will make a little more sense, but considering where we’re starting from, that’s not very much.

After we’ve gotten an eyeful of Hagendaz and how peaceful and nice it is, we go back to the caves that seem to be a major set for the movie, where the queen has set up court to hear reports from women who know of mighty warriors, who apparently have uses for 1000 male slaves, possibly 1001 uses.

One woman tells of seeing a mighty warrior wrestle a strange beast somewhere. Cue shots of the back of some guy wrestling with some other guy in a gorilla suit, in a cage. Impressive. Another woman tells of seeing a warrior in a pit hanging out with lions as if they were good friends. Cue some guy hugging a bored lion. Scary. The third woman is wearing a skirt so short her panty-clad butt hangs out of it, her hands yoked at shoulder level by a pole that isn’t much wider than her shoulders. Tres sexy.

Gablegore testifies while yoked. They take security seriously in Babelos. Good for them.

She’s yoked because she’s a gladiator (and yes, these are the same yokes seen in Taur the Mighty Hunter). Gladiators are women who’ve resisted the queen. They have to fight to the death in gladiatorial combat, with any gladiator able to achieve 21 victories being freed. And apparently they are so dangerous that whenever they are permitted outside their compound, they are yoked and surrounded by armed guards.

The gladiator, who is named Gablegore, tells the queen that she knows of a mighty warrior who outfought many others without weapons, named Tarzan (er, Taur, er Thor). And Gablegore knows where Taur lives.

Well, the other women don’t know where Taur lives or what his name is or anything of that nature, so the queen has Yammad mount an expedition to Taur-land with Gablegore acting as a guide, to capture Taur and bring him to her. Because when you’ve heard an oracle prophesy that at the appearance of a mighty warrior will be overthrown, there’s absolutely nothing smarter to do than bring any mighty warrior you can find to your kingdom to see what happens.

Interestingly, no mention of the 1000 male slaves reward is made at this point or any point thereafter in the movie, even though Gablegore has arguably fulfilled the conditions for the reward. Such are the promises of royalty.

Next we see said expedition, a line of Amazon warriors wearing what I call “doofus hats” because they make anyone who wears them look like a doofus. Many reviewers have called them "Smurf Hats" and they definitely have a point, but I think my point stands as well. At the head of the line is Gablegore, still wearing that butt-revealing outfit, and still yoked.

Gabelgore on the march with the Smurf squad. Note that A: she's still yoked, B: Nice rack and C: Her butt is hanging out at the bottom of her toga-ish garment. So, not only do the female gladiators have to walk around yoked like animals a lot, they also have to wear dresses that their butts hang out of. And that material the dresses are made out of, well, thin enough that nipple bumps will form if it's cold.

Sweet. The yoke thing wasn’t a one-shot. Still, although it was very clear that Gablegore was wearing a yoke that consisted of a short pole with her wrists tied to it by ropes, I couldn’t see anything attaching the pole to her neck. If it wasn’t attached to her neck, why couldn’t she just lift the yoke up over her head and walk with her hands in front of her, still tied to the yoke but with a little more usability in case of a fall? Maybe there was some subtle way in which the yoke was attached, say by a loop of cloth at the back of the neck of the garment she wore. I didn’t see any closeup shots or shots of the back of Gablegore, so this was a real possibility.

Gablegore leads the Babelosians to Taur-Land, where they run into Taur as he’s lurking about in the woods with Tamar and Jujube, who are hunting a tiger. (Another instance of the Zoo Rule I first cited in my section on Competitors of Wonder Woman, which says that any animals that can be found in a zoo can be found in any jungle, anywhere. Yes, this includes sharks and polar bears.)

Yammad, flanked by a recently unbound Gablegore and her Doofus Squad, tells Taur, “You must come with us. Our queen commands it.”

Taur replies, “I am free here. I do no know your queen. I will not go with you.”

“You must come with us, Taur, whether you want to or not,” responds Yammad in quite reasonable tones.

“Get him, girls!” responds Yammad, and the Doofus squad, spears leveled, charge ahead. Clearly they didn’t become the terror of all the nations around them by refusing to fight with men.

“Wait!” cries Taur, raising his hands and retreating. “I do not fight against women.”

The Doofus Squad ignores Taur’s obvious whining and keeps on coming, backing Taur up until he is standing on the edge of a cliff.

At this point, one of the Doofus Squadders whips out a bolo, let’s fly, and clobbers Taur somewhere about the head.

Boy, er, Umbaratutu, carries Tarzan, er, Thor, to his cave. Nothing gay about this.

Taur plummets backward over the cliff. Fortunately, his black slave, Ubaratutu, is wandering about at the base of the cliff, sees Taur’s fall, and catches him. Ubaratutu then carries the unconscious Taur to his lair, which is a cave cleverly covered by a hidden rock door that looks like, well, a bunch of rocks when it’s closed. And I might add that if a black bodybuilder wearing a leather diaper wants to carry a white bodybuilder wearing a leather diaper there’s nothing gay in that. It’s just what primitive heroes wore in those days, having no access to spandex.

How very handy and convenient it was that Ubaratutu’s lair should be right there within a few meters of where Taur fell. When the Doofus squad comes down to collect Taur, they find nothing.

Meanwhile, Ubaratutu lays the unconscious Taur down on a bearskin rug and undoes his sandals and then leans over and sucks his lower leg. And if a half-naked black bodybuilder wants to sock on a half-naked white bodybuilder’s leg in the privacy of his cave, there’s nothing gay about that. Really. It LOOKS awful damn gay, but there’s an explanation -- the bolo that hit Taur had spikes on its balls, spikes laced with a poison that could leave Taur unconscious for weeks. Ubaratutu was just sucking it out. OK? And don't ask any incovenient questions like, "Didn't Taur get hit in the head?"

Meanwhile, the Doofus Squad has captured Tamar and Jujube, who apparently could think of nothing to do but stand around with their mouths open after Taur was knocked off the cliff (you can kinda see how Dad got deposed, if this is the intelligence that runs in their family). They’re put in yokes (yeah, yokes are gonna be a pretty common sight throughout this film. Yowzah!) and Gablegore gets put back in her yoke, and they’re marched back to Babelos by the Doofus Squad, who have no idea that they just captured the heirs of the king deposed by the present queen.

Gablegore tries to suck up to Tamar, but Tamar says, “I see that you are a captive like us, but you should never have led these women to our land.” I dunno how Tamar twigged to the fact that Gablegore was the one who ratted them out (couldn’t she just be a random captive?) but she has, so it’s unlikely that they’ll be friends. But Gabelgore still tries, because there might be some advantage to her in it, until Jujube smart-mouths her and she attempts to give him a vicious kick which enrages Tamar and in a brief bound catfight, she kicks Gablegore hard enough to send her sprawling on her butt in the grass. Gablegore is back up immediately, ready for round 2, but prissy Yammad intervenes, putting a stop to the fight.

Kudoes to the unknown actress who plays Gablegore, taking a tumble while wearing stocks and staying in character. She even looks surprised. Plus, upskirts.

Some interesting points here. First of all, lesbian bondage catfights are VERY rare in films of any kind, and this scene, brief though it is, qualifies as such. Its predecessor, Taur the Mighty Hunter, also has a better, much longer lesbian bondage catfight scene involving two sisters who do not know they are fighting one another, who are blindfolded and gagged so that their cries won’t reveal that they are fighting one another. And they are watched by their captive subjects, who are yoked just as are the characters in Thor and the Amazon Women. Kinda makes you wonder if some kinky interests are flying under the radar (smirk).

Also, the actress who played Gablegore had to fall backwards with her hands bound at neck level by a yoke. She managed that, even though the yoke wasn’t secured to the back of her neck by anything at all, which is difficult since your natural inclination when you fall is to brace yourself with your hands. Nice work on the unknown actress’ part (you can tell there’s no stunt double here).

The reason I know there’s nothing attaching the yoke to Gablegore’s back or neck or anything (except her wrists of course) is that there are several very clear shots of the yoke from the back and the side and they reveal no attachments.

Another image from the yoked catfight -- perhaps the only such catfight in mainstream films -- reveals nothing at all attaching the yoke to Gablegore's neck.

Now, I gotta tell you, this was just dumb. The yokes are really very dramatic bondage restraints, making their wearers look quite helpless, but their apparent effectiveness decreases greatly when the audience knows the yoke can simply be lifted over the wearer’s head and become a sort of front handcuff.

It’s true, necks are very delicate items, so it’s not a good idea to really bind an actress’s neck to a yoke if she’s going to be moving at all, and maybe not even if she’s going to be immobile, but there’s a very simple way to give the impression that her neck is tied to the yoke without actually tying her neck to the yoke. You just run a couple of loops around her neck and then tie them off behind her neck where they can’t easily be seen. Then you run a couple of loops around the middle of the pole and tie them off on the side near her neck. Then you just have her hold the pole behind her back as usual. She now appears to be yoked to the pole but is in fact no more yoked than the totally unyoked women that are actually in the film.

In fact, if you’re willing to tie the ropes about as tight as the average choker-style necklace, she would appear to be CRUELLY yoked to the pole -- tres dramatic and also very safe. In fact, you could easily sell the cruelty of the bondage by actually yoking a couple of women to their poles, whose roles consist of just standing there with the pole, then doing a closeup shot of them, returning them to the fake yoke state for all other shots. Now viewers will assume all the women in every shot in the movie will be tied just as the slaves in the closeup are, but of course none of them will be. Bondage fan though I am, I would be AGAINST really yoking an actresses’ neck to a pole because necks are delicate places that shouldn’t be stressed.

This isn’t specialized bondage skillz, either, it’s just the products of a few moments of thought on the subject. Would that the filmmakers had done the same, it would have made for MUCH more dramatic bondage imagery.

And as long as we’re talking dramatic, what could have REALLY taken the imagery over the top would be to have the gladiatrices gagged with the gags from Taur the Mighty Hunter whenever they were yoked. That would have REALLY projected their helplessness and the degree to which the Amazons were unconcerned with their welfare. In fact the Amazons could make a big deal out of removing the gladiatrices’ gags so they could speak, further emphasizing their helplessness.

I am sure that someone out there would consider this going over the top with the kink, but it’s not, really. The business with the rope work fixes a small technical flaw in the film in a way that ramps up the drama. The business with the gag adds more drama but doesn’t really change the film very much.

Going over the top would involve, say, a scene where the slaves are put to bed at night in a group, each one of them tethered to a stake by one ankle, and hooded. Then drunken Amazons come in and molest the slaves while they lie there helplessly, unable to escape or defend themselves, while the unmolested slaves have to lie there and listen to their fellow slaves being raped, knowing they could be and probably will be next.

A scene like that, with its lesbian sexual bondage (or femdom/male sub sexual bondage in the case of male slaves) while it would work very nicely within the context of the Amazonian society the film creates, would take the film straight out of family fare territory, and into Deathstalkerish, Amazon Queenish territory, possibly right into Skinamax territory if there were enough sex scenes.

That would be going over the top. I’m perfectly capable of going over the top, but I know I’m doing it, when I’m doing it.

Meanwhile, back at the cave, Thor has finally awakened after three days’ sleep, he is informed by Ubaratutu. Ubaratutu also tells Thor about the spiked bolo.

Thor’s all for rescuing Tamar and Jujube when he realizes that the Amazons must have taken them, but he has pain in his shoulders, and it must have been fairly intense pain for a macho hero like Thor to mention it. Ubaratutu looks at Thor’s back and tells him his shoulder is out of joint -- pretty good jungle doctor, Ubaratutu -- and says he must set it for Thor. This involves climbing into the furs with Thor and pulling his arms backward and so forth while Thor looks pained. And there was absolutely nothing gay about it, OK?

Ubaratutu informs Thor that until his shoulder is healed, he must rest up so the plot can develop, and Thor reluctantly agrees.

Meanwhile, Tamar, Jujube and Gablegore have made the yoked hike to Babelos, and in a set-piece scene, Yammad announces that Tamar will be a gladiator and Jujube will be sent to the camp for young male slaves. So they are parted, amid much blubbering from Jujube, and who can blame him?

At gladiator school, Tamar begins with the ceremony of the 21 bracelets. Yammad (she also heads the gladiator school, kind of a utility villain) tells Tamar as the bracelets are put on her arm, for each victory in the arena, a bracelet will be removed. Should all the bracelets be removed, Tamar will be eligible to become a Babelos warrior, with all its attendant privileges, such as not having to fight to the death in the arena any more.

“How many gladiatrices have won their freedom through victory in the arena?” Tamar asks, demonstrating some sharpness of mind.

This was a tactical error of course. Now the gladiatrices know that the arena isn’t a meritocracy, but protracted butchery.

There is one gladiatrice who seems likely to be the first to break the odds, Gablegore, who has just two bracelets left on her arm.

“She achieves her victories through deceit,” responds the gladiatrice. Having seen how intelligently the characters in this movie have behaved to date, I’m pretty sure all Gablegore had to do was say, “Hey, look, there goes Fabio!” nineteen times and while her opposing gladiatrice was goggling around looking for Fabio, Gablegore would shiv her.

Gablegore is by far the most interesting character in Thor and the Amazon Women, always with her eye on the main chance, ready to do whatever is necessary to advance her own survival and success. Gablegore seems to like Tamar -- after their yoked catfight, she tells Tamar, “You and I are going to become friends.” But whenever Gablegore speaks, you have to wonder whether she is lying for effect or telling the truth. Adds a whole new dimension to Gablegore, and any character in this film who has more than one dimension is an improvement over the rest.

Gablegore’s actions are evil, but she doesn’t ACT evil -- she’s friendly and appears to be considerate. But nobody appears to trust her, probably because of all that Fabio stuff.

The Babelos summer camp for boys, complete with Smurf heads with whips. Nothing femdom/malesub going on here, and it's so wrong of you to think so.

Meanwhile, over at the state camp for boy slaves, we find Jujube in a large space that looks like a day care center playground … if the playground had no facilities other than rocks and dirt. And if the kids had to polish the rocks with the sand, or something along those lines. And if women with whips strode around whipping the kids (must be a Catholic day care facility).

Next we see Amazonian girls drilling in a field. One of them missteps, and the instructress summons her to the front and belts her good in the face, then says, “go over there.” “Over there” is a bare patch right over by the bare patch where the boys are slaving away. The girl, whose name is Annie, sees Jujube and calls him over to her. When he doesn’t come, Annie says, “Come here and talk to me or I will have you whipped.” That gets Jujube off his ass and over by the fence that confines him and the other slaves.

(Here we see the folly of a slave-holding society writ small: if for example two-year-old free kids felt they could order two-year-old slave kids to give them their cookie, a lot of slave kids would get whipped over cookies. Plus, there’s all the other stuff wrong with slavery.)

Annie spots Jujube in his stylish bearskin toga. You can almost see her thinking, "There's something appealing about a boy you can have whipped if he doesn't do what you tell him to."

Annie really likes the bearskin toga that Jujube is wearing as he slaves as away as slaves will, and she asks him where he got it: Bloomingdales, Saks, etc. Jujube replies that the skin came from a bear that he killed himself in the woods. Annie is duly impressed and says she would like to go in the woods and kill some bears, and she wants Jujube to take her there. Jujube explains that as he is a slave (duh!) the guards will kill him if he goes into the forest, thinking he’s escaping and all. So they concoct a plan whereby Annie will sneak back to the slave compound that night with girls’ clothing for Jujube to wear so they can sneak into the forest.

The plan goes off without a hitch (unlike the plans of almost every adult character in the series): Annie brings the clothes, Jujube scales the palisade surrounding the slave compound, puts on the girly clothes, and it’s off to the forest for the two of them. (You have to wonder, if the palisade is that scalable and unguarded, why the Amazons have any slaves at all.)

In a short while, the kids make it to Hagendaz, while they give Oldguy, Thor and Ubaratutu an earful about what bitches the Amazon women at Babelos are.

Thor immediately resolves to go to Babelos and rescue Tamar and all the enslaved men there. Oldguy decides this is the time to overthrow the queen and promises to gather all his allies to overthrow the queen.

Ubaratutu isn’t at all crazy about the idea of going to Babelos and fighting women -- like Thor, he has major reservations about fighting women. But Thor insists that Ubaratutu come along, because their cause is just and also what if his leg should need sucking?

So it’s off to Babelos for Thor and Ubaratutu. In Babelos, Tamar is having a rough time, as are all of the Amazon trainees. She makes friends with a gladiator named Mona, the one who warned her about deceptively smart Gablegore. Tamar gets injured when she runs through the Spinning Cylinder of Pokey Slashy Things as part of her training, which also includes hacking and slashing with a variety of weapons.

The nasty older Amazons have Yammad come by and show them how the new crop of victims is progressing. Two Amazons are set to square off in a Square of Gore. (The gladiator’s battle areas are all distinctive shapes -- Triangle of Death, Square of Gore and in addition, the Irregular Polygons of Cruelty.) The gladiatrices who will battle are chosen by color. Each Amazon wears a belt and matching headband with her own unique color, and there are a couple of dozen of them.

Gladiatrices work out in the Irregular Polygons of Doom. I don't have to make stuff up with this movie. And what are those weird-ass things the gladiatrices in the foreground are wearing? Primitive hoop skirt frames? We don't know, it's never explained.

This shows amazing insight into the sort of society Amazons have. It’s not just the matching belt and headband, it’s the fact that there is a different color for dozens of gladiatrices. Guys feel that there are only half a dozen colors or so, red green blue yellow orange white black and purple -- the colors most football teams wear. Getting into kinds of orange, varieties of blue and so forth is just not necessary or wise since it’s hard to keep track of them all. But women feel there are hundreds if not thousands of colors and telling them apart is a snap. Hence, the gladiatrices are identified in a way that only a female-dominated society would ever use. Brilliant.

Same thing with the arena shapes, really. Guys would never bother with anything other than a circle or a square, (I.e., a rectangle of some kind that they called a square). Triangles and irregular polygons for arenas would just get questioning looks from them.

Tamar is of course picked for the demo battle, but her injury in the Spinning Cylinder of Pokey Spikes Drill disqualifies her for the bout. (Hmm. I see a way out of the arena here.) They pick another color and it is none other than Tamar’s friend Mona.

Mona battles an unknown red shirt (in a Star Trek kinda way, not literally) whom Mona eventually disables but does not greatly harm.

The nasty old Amazons call for death for the red shirt, who immediately starts begging and pleading for her life. Mona, who has sworn never to kill another in the arena, refuses to kill the downed gladiatrice. Unfortunately, the penalty for refusing to kill a downed gladiatrice in the arena when it’s called for is … you guessed it … death.

So Mona is put in the yoke, along with all the rest of the gladiatrices, and hustled off to death by archery while all the other gladiatrices watch. She’s chained, still yoked, to a wooden wall a little wider than she is. She’s offered a gag but refuses it. (Just kidding here.) Then the archers take aim and fire.

Yoked and chained to a wall, Mona fa ... well, she doesn't exactly FACE death. And anyway all the archers miss. Except Gablegore, in about five seconds.

If there was EVER any doubt about the lack of attachment of the yoke to the neck, this clears things up nicely, I think.

Well, more like fire and take aim. Every one of them misses. She’s looking around, bewildered, at the pin cushioned wall, arrows all around her. This is important because the reaction shot makes it totally, absolutely clear that the rod is not secured to her neck.

Unfortunately for Mona, one last archer remains who has not fired her arrow and that’s … Gablegore. I’m not sure what a gladiatrice is doing on an execution squad for a gladiatrice, but there she is, taking aim carefully, firing and planting an arrow right in Mona’s back, killing her in the dramatic but bloodless way of family movies of the time.

Meanwhile, one of the most realistic scenes in any sword and sandal movie ever filmed is about to occur. Oldguy, Jujube and Annie arrive at the rendezvous point for his allies who are going to help him take on Babelos. No one is there.

“All of my allies are too afraid of the queen to go against her,” Oldguy surmises.

At last, a scene where the hero’s putative allies chicken out. Generally they ride in at the last minute. But here at least, a little bit of realism -- no one wants to take on the bad girl on the block when she’s already beaten up every kid on the block.

Things get really unrealistic shortly after this, as Jujube and Annie persuade Oldguy that the three of them can knock off Babelos without any help. You just gotta believe, believe hard enough and strong enough to overcome your cerebral cortex’s numerous whines and complaints about the impossibility of what you are believing.

So it’s off to Babelos for Oldguy and the kids. But Thor and Ubaratutu have already headed out that way. What of them?

Thor and Ubaratutu are apprised that they are in Babelos territory when they come across a pile of the corpses of male slaves. Ubaratutu finds this alarming and really wants to head back to the forest, but Thor insists they press on.

Hearing some noises, they peer over a cliff and discover a Babelos execution squad preparing to do in some poor guy. The arrows fly and they watch in horror as the squad casually clears him from the wall and sets up for the next victim. In a few moments a furiously protesting guy is dragged to the wall, clearly destined to become human arrow quiver.

Thor rushes down to rescue him while Ubaratutu heads for the bushes, unnerved by seeing how some of those corpses they ran across earlier were produced. He’s the comic relief here, comically afraid of being killed for some reason.

Here a pair of modern gladiatrixes at Hogtied.com squares off while bound and gagged. And naked, really naked. The guys at Hogtied.com know how to handle the gladiatrice imagery, all right. Unfortunately, Hogtied had to call a halt to their gladiatorial games for fear that the contestants would injure themselves or one another in their zeal to win.

Thor’s rescue does not go as planned, if planning is the right word for dashing in amongst a group of warriors, grabbing their leader, pointing her own sword at her throat and demanding to know what the poor sod being chained to the wall did to deserve such treatment.

The execution squad generously informs Thor that the guy is the former king of Babelos, whom the queen has tired of so he must be killed.

The former king, who has not been actually chained to the wall, takes advantage of the interruption provided by Thor to high-tail it for the forest. A group of executioners head after him, cutting him down with a flight of arrows, their aim having improved considerably since their attempt to kill Mona.

Thor takes advantage of the hubbub caused by the former king’s escape to run off and hide in a cave, where he eludes the execution squad, since their idea of “searching” is to all run together in a group and gossip with one another by the sound of it. (Really, while the execution squad pursues Thor, we hear a babble of excited female voices constantly exclaiming about this and that. It was like a group of administrative assistants on lunch break at a place that serves margaritas.)

At this point, Thor was the wimpiest hero imaginable in my book. Was he running from the women because he wouldn’t fight women again, or was he just afraid of them? I vote for “afraid.” He’d seen them kill by now, and seen evidence that they did a LOT of killing, in the form of those corpses. There was no reason for him to have moral qualms about fighting such creatures. Thor was just being a big chicken shit, especially compared to MOST peplum heroes, who happily take on whole hordes of foes when the opportunity arises. Most, hell all with the exception of Thor, are like Conan in the Savage Sword of Conan series -- an individual fighting against him is doomed, and a squad of warriors is up against severe odds.

Thor is by far the wimpiest excuse for a hero I’ve seen in any peplum, and thanks to the good folks at Mill Creek, I’ve seen a lot of them.

"Are any of you guys any good at leg-sucking?" Thor confers with the male slaves of Babelos.

The big, bad women having headed off in the wrong direction, Thor is free to wander about the caverns, where he eventually finds a set of iron bars confining a group of male slaves pounding on rocks, and has a remarkable conversation with them.

“Why are you all here?” Thor asks after the men get through warning him that the guards will kill him if they find him.

“They feed us barely enough to keep us alive, how are supposed to have the strength to fight?” asks another. (Umm, they all seem to have the strength to pound rocks all day.)

This dialogue is remarkable for two reasons. First, it shows that the writers were aware that there needed to be some hand-waving to account for the fact that women dominated the society by physical force at a time when combat was committed via edged weapons that required a lot of physical strength to use. Even in these days of gender equality, it’s widely recognized that men, on average, have about 50 percent more upper body development than women do. That meant that, all other things being equal, in the ancient world, any group of men would beat the crap out of any group of women in a physical conflict. That’s why women typically had a social status only a little above sheep or goats in the ancient world -- they were simply beaten up if they objected. Much of the development of civilization has had to do with changing that approach to developing a consensus -- and it’s a lesson many of us are still learning, to judge by the evening news.

Most sword and sandal movies -- hell, most B-movies -- never seem to realize that hand-waving is ever necessary. Things just happen that leave viewers going “what the hell?” and no explanation ever occurs. (See the previous review of “Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity” for some howlers along these lines.) The explanation of the enslavement of the men of Babelos by the women, however feeble, is a big improvement over the norm.

The other remarkable thing is considerably less remarkable: in instructing the slaves to wait for his signal, Thor is actually making a plan that doesn’t involve him seeking out the bad guy (in this case, bad gal) and confronting her. It’s the first time he’s done anything along those lines, and the fact that he does it at all puts him well ahead of some sword and sandal heroes, who basically do nothing throughout the film but seek out bad guys by the most direct means possible and fight them. (Some sword and sandal movies, on the other hand, are full of intrigue.)

All right, so we’ve got Thor agitating the male slaves, Oldguy, Jujube and Annie marching in to set things right: what’s going on with Tamar.

Well, during gladiatrice training, Tamar gets a rip in her toga right where her birthmark or tattoo or brand or whatever the hell it is, is. Yammad spots it and is quick to cover it up.

Later, Yammad visits Tamar’s cell and tells her she knows the significance of Tamar’s birthmark -- that she is the rightful heir of the deposed king. She figures this will help in getting the populace all roused in favor of overthrowing the queen, so she suggests they join forces.

Yammad does a little John Norman-ish anti-feminist ranting to prove she’s down with Tamar, to wit:

Yammad: Ever since I realized that the rule of women was the most horrible and frightful form of government, ever since they killed the man I loved, ever since they took away my children and put them in state camps, ever since I began to understand that a woman cannot deprive herself of every human sentiment in the name of a superiority that nature never mean to assign to them.

Yammad: My best reward will be to build a happy life again, at the side of a man who is stronger than I.”

Tamar sees that Yammad and her are eye to eye, so things are looking up for both her and Yammad the secret revolutionary, but unfortunately, the cells in Babelos aren’t the closed, sealed, private-space cells that are the norm, but more areas of cave partitioned by bars, not at all private, and someone is in a nearby cell listening to Yammad and Tamar conspire -- Gablegore.

Well, you know what a blabbermouth she is. Next scene, Gablegore is in the queen’s court, telling all, while Tamar and Yammad stand around in stocks and look nonplused.

Well, Yammad is a little more than nonplused. Instead of denying all and telling the queen, “Who ya gonna trust, me your longtime right hand woman, or this lying gladiatrice?” Seems to me, something along these lines should have worked, given that there’s no hint that the queen has tumbled to her plotting prior to this, but instead Yammad defiantly and stupidly confirms the queen’s suspicions with something along the lines of, “Yeah, I plotted against you, you evil queen, so what?”

“What” turns out to be the queen ordering Yammad off to be tortured until she reveals the other members of the conspiracy. The queen also points out that since members of the former royal family have been under sentence of death, Tamar is sentenced to death.

After Tamar and Yammad are hauled off to their various dooms, Gablegore suggests to the queen that having Tamar publicly executed as the daughter of the old king might get the populace all worked up. Wouldn’t it be better, Gablegore points out, if during the next set of gladiatorial contests, Tamar were to be matched up against by far the most successful of the gladiatrices -- Gablegore, to be exact -- to ensure her death as just another gladiatrice?

The queen likes this idea so much that she tells Gablegore that if she kills Tamar, thus earning her freedom, she’ll be able to take over Yammad’s old job, it being vacant and all.

(Yeah, Gablegore, ruthless as she is, is about twice as smart as anyone else in the story, perhaps four times as smart as Thor despite his one stroke of actual planning. It really makes you wonder how someone like Gablegore wound up in the desperate straits of being a gladiatrice -- you’d think she’d be far too smart to get caught up in that net. But there she is, at the end of her testimony, Assuming the Position with her hands raised at shoulder height so the guards can yoke her up again. Sweet.)

Next scene, Yammad is hooked up to an Exotic Rack. Instead of just having an axle with a lot of spokes at one end, it has a normal-sized pulley-ish wheel at one end, with a rope going to a very large wheel with spokes and a rim and everything. Maybe it multiplies force or something, because three old women are the one’s pushing the wheel. Apparently they couldn’t find a single burly guy or burly girl so they had to come up with this contraption. (Although I believe when not used for literally breaking people, it was used for opening tight jar lids.)

Yammad is tortured on the Exotic Rack with attached spinning wheel. It's two, two, two machines in one!

Yammad of course refuses to name her co-conspirators in the Glorious Revolution, but she also does some classic John Norman-style ranting. To wit:

“The conspiracy has failed, but others will rise after my death, who will put an end to the mad dictatorship of women! The dictatorship of women is about to end, Omac (that’s the old bitch who’s torturing Yammad). My work will not remain uncompleted. Others will find happiness!” (Croak.)

It’s really strange, because nowhere else have I encountered this kind of anti-feminist ranting coupled with a sword and sandal story. One that includes tons of bondage. Norman’s Gor novels and Thor and the Amazon Women. Hmm.

Meanwhile, how are Tarzan, er, Taur, er Thor and Ubaratutu doing? About the same. Ubaratutu got captured by the queen’s guards, who ran him by her for a look-see, knowing her tastes apparently. The queen, hidden behind a panel, forces Ubaratutu to mount a rotating pedestal (no, not THAT kind of mount, you perv!) and do a prehistoric pose-down The queen likes what she sees, and next thing you know, he’s king of Babelos.

Ubaratutu really likes all the sex with the queen and the wealth and the getting to wear fancy necklaces and so forth that comes with that job. Then, Thor bursts in and tells Ubaratutu that the queen is a royal bitch and he has to do a quickie divorce via running away.

Ubaratutu, in the first instance of reasonableness we’ve seen from him, refuses to believe Thor. Face it: being king and living in a nice, clean palace with servants and having sex with a real woman beats the hell out of living in a cave in the woods and sucking on a white guys’ legs for poison.

Thor will have none of it, there’s a big kerfuffle and fighting and the queen calls out the guard, and Thor and Ubaratutu, what with fighting each other AND the guards, wind up captives and sentenced to death. Brilliant work, really.

Meanwhile, Annie, Jujube and Oldguy have been wandering around not getting a hell of a lot done but not getting captured by the queen, which is more than you can say for any of the putative adults among the good guys. Then even rescue Ubaratutu from the Death by Claustrophobia to which he’s been sentenced.

Annie, Jujube and Oldguy, no allies, wandering around getting nothing much done

Not exactly an impressive record. Based on performance if I had to bet on who’d win the day, I’d put my money down on Gablegore, who’s clearly the most capable person in the movie. (Plus she has a great rack and a nice butt.) Will Thor, Ubaratutu, Jujube, Annie and Oldguy win the day, or will the queen and Gablegore be able to take the advantage of the fact that they have all the advantages? I’ll never tell.

So, what are we to make of this movie? There’s so much going on that it’s hard to figure out what the cheese of the movie is. In any sword and sandal epic, you have to figure fighting by the muscle-bound hero is going to figure importantly, but Thor (and Ubaratutu) don’t do a lot of fighting. In any Amazon film, the cheese is often sexual conquest of the angry, love-starved Amazons by the hero, but this never happens, and anyway the Babelosian Amazons don’t appear to be particular love-starved, though they are quite angry.

There's plenty of gladiatrice-on-gladiatrice action in this film. Plus, panties.

The original title of this film, “Le Gladiatrici” and it’s UK edition title, “Women Gladiators” are probably truer indicators of the movie’s content, anyway. In any movie about woman gladiators, you expect plenty of female gladiators fighting one another to the death And Thor and the Amazon Women delivers on that score in the second half of the movie, with plenty of scenes of scantily clad gladiatrices hacking each other to death in the arena.

You also expect a certain amount of anti-feminism in any 1960s Italian sword and sandal movie about Amazons OR gladiatrices, as the Amazons/gladiatrices must be taught how much more loving and good it is to be loved by men than to fight and kill, and of course, Thor and the Amazon Women delivers on the anti-feminism score, big time, though not in a very intelligent way. Most men aren’t really worried that women will make them work in salt mines or put on all-female gladiatorial contests or make their kids go to state-run summer camps all year. (Well, maybe a few right-wing guys, they’re nervous about a lot of things, though.)

Ultimately, I think the movie was written for a family audience (two ten-year-olds are major characters, after all) by a guy (writer-director Antonio Leonviola) with a lot of sex on his mind. There’s so much homoeroticism, bondage eroticism, femdom/male sub and femdom/femsub stuff floating around in this movie that it hard to imagine how anyone ever mistook it for a family film rather than the proto-softcore film that it is.

Who do you suppose this gladiatrice had to have pissed off to get such a useless weapon? I mean,this has to be about the stupidest weapon ever -- big, unweildy, not particularly dangerous-looking. What next, pillows at ten paces?

Thor isn’t even the central character in the film, he’s a sideshow, like the strongman in a three-ring circus, whose only role is to fulfill the prediction made by the oracle at the beginning of the film. The real conflict is between Tamar and the queen, with Gablegore in there as an Iago in stocks with her butt showing (her nipple bumps make an appearance or two, as well). The film would have made a heck of a lot MORE sense without Thor, though he and Ubaratutu don’t HARM the movie all that much.

It’s obvious that the John Norman-ish rants in Thor and the Amazon Women were not the result of the any influence by the Gor novels on Leonviola -- the movie came out (1963) three years before the first of the Gor novels, Tarnsman of Gor, was published (1966). Maybe Thor and the Amazon Women influenced Norman, though I doubt it influenced him to any very great extent. (I’m sure he enjoyed the hell out of the movie, if he saw it, but it seems unlikely that he would have, in the ordinary course of events.)

More likely, the developing influence of feminism in popular culture was producing a reactive formation in those who held less egalitarian views on male-female relations, and they were moved to present those views in whatever forums were handy. In Leonviola’s case, the forum was a peplum called Thor and the Amazon Women. In John Norman’s case, it was a series of sword and sandal fantasy novels.

You gotta admit, this is a pretty good spectacle for a movie that was probably made for $4.95 US dollars. Tamar and Gablegore duke it out in the Triangle of Death while Thor stands on the Spiky Gantry of Danger and plays tug of war with 101 female warriors on the other side of the colored pole.

If Leonviola had any coherent anti-feminist philosophy he was working from, he certainly didn’t express it in Thor and the Amazon Women. It was more like, “rule of women bad, fire good.” That, combined with the kiddie fare nature of some of the movie and the homoerotic overtones and the fact that it was originally a Tarzan movie that had somehow mutated into a movie about a guy named after a Norse god, gives the movie a certain goofy charm which has been noted by many reviewers. It is an eminently riffable film, but even without skilled humor experts like the guys at Rifftrax on the job, it’s still funny enough to make you laugh out loud on occasion.

This scene occupies just a second or two in the movie -- it's onlookers at the arena spectacle. Why are these men wearing lincoln log versions of Hopi or maybe Yoruba tribal masks? We don't know? And that cylindrical thing behind them? It's a Very Long Drum -- its full extent is blocked by the drummer and one of the lincoln log masks. Point is: great art direction all around. Somebody was doing a great job in what most would consider a forgettable movie -- though it is headed for cult status, I believe.

Thor and the Amazon Women also has some of the most brilliant art direction and design I’ve seen in any sword and sandal movie. With a budget that must have been tiny by US standards, the film’s art director and wardrobe mistress created a really compelling vision of a weird, primitive culture. Instead of going with togas or rags for the slave girls, they went with brief outfits that really set off their legs (though they didn’t set off their breasts so much). Their death and torture devices were original and weird looking, from the Exotic Rack to the Spiky Gantry to the Very Long Drum. The watchers at gladiatorial fights were also something to see, wearing enormous vaguely Mayan/Yoriba headdresses that appeared to be made out of wooden bricks. And let’s not forget the Irregular Polygons of Doom.

Despite the lack of gags, there’s plenty of bondage imagery distributed throughout the film, mostly in the form of images of women wearing the strange yoke devices that the gladiatrices and other slaves wear whenever they leave their pens. The yokes, while not secured at the neck, are not Loosies --- they’re very tight. And there are those mass yoke scenes -- only this movie and Taur the Mighty Hunter have them.

With all this going on, I consider Thor and the Amazon Women alone to have been worth the price of the entire Mill Creek Warriors selection, which means the other 49 films in the set are just gravy. And frankly, some of the OTHER movies are damn near worth the price of the set. However, you CAN watch or download Thor and the Amazon Women free at a number of sites, as it is in the public domain. Just google the name of the movie and have at. If you found this review entertaining, you’ll be glad you did.

A victorious and not at all suicidal gladiatrice prepares to dispatch her opponent in the Triangle of Death. It's the end for her ... and for this review.