‘WARRIOR QUEEN’ A SOFT-CORE SEX FANTASY

The place is Pompeii. The time is 79 AD. Football having not yet been invented, the big sport is bidding for sex slaves. Young gals and lads are hung from meat hooks and sold to the highest bidder. Clearly, we are not in the cradle of civilization.

Welcome to “Warrior Queen” (selected theaters), an excruciatingly dull soft-core sex fantasy that depicts Pompeii as the Roman Empire’s version of a raucous Club Med resort. We won’t dwell on any historical accuracy issues, not with a film that stars the unlikely duo of Sybil Danning and Donald Pleasence. Danning plays Queen Berenice, the saber-toting mistress of the Roman Emperor who lops off the heads of her attackers as if she were dicing a cucumber. Pleasence, staggering under a heavy load of robes and jewelry, is Clodius, the corrupt consul of Pompeii, who’s staging a big gladiator contest that has the festive air of a 1st-Century Super Bowl.

There’s a whole lot more to the story, but not much of it makes any sense, so we won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say, there are plenty of other stock characters, including an evil brothel impresario (who runs the House of Venus), a virginal slave girl (who’s best pal is named Veneria) and a pair of beefy gladiators, Marcus (the good guy) and Goliath (the villain). The only other thing we could figure out is that the climate must’ve been very tropical, since the men only wear loincloths, and the women even less.

Give credit to director Chuck Vincent, who doesn’t waste our time with any extraneous chatter. Sybil Danning doesn’t say a word for the first half-hour she’s on screen (which is not necessarily meant as a criticism). In fact, there’s very little dialogue at all. It’s almost as if the film were somehow made just as talkies were invented and the producers only had time to go back and tack on a few dialogue scenes.

This would be delightful, of course, if Vincent was a gifted storyteller. Unfortunately, he has all the visual grace of someone who put in a decade staging headache-remedy commercials. His love scenes are about as erotic as a golf tournament, while his gladiator brawls look like they were choreographed by a guy who dresses a salad bar. The good news--this being Pompeii, after all--is that a gigantic volcanic eruption brings these bawdy proceedings to a speedy halt. As Sam Arkoff once described an equally dreary costume epic: “If you can’t make it a better picture, you can always make it a shorter picture.”

‘WARRIOR QUEEN’ Producer Harry Alan Towers. Director Chuck Vincent. Writer Rick Marx. Music Ian Shaw and Kai Joffe. Camera Lorenzo Battaglia. Production & Costume Design Lucio Parise. Editors Chuck Vincent, Joel Bender, Jim Sanders & Tony Delcampo. With Sybil Danning, Donald Pleasence, Richard Hill, Tally Chanel, Marco Tulio Cau, J.J. Jones, Suzanne Smith and Stasia Micula.

Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (Under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian.)