Review of Amazons and Gladiators (2001) by Mec R — 21 Mar 2008

How is this film best summed up? I'd go for 'a lamentable bag of dog eggs'. Featuring the sorriest assemblage of sets, costumes and fake weapons since the fall of the Roman Empire, the film tells the less-than-rousing tale of Serena. She's a slave and she's also a dancer. In fact she's been training as a dancer for ten years (oddly, the best she and her pal can manage is best described as naff, sex-show shuffling). She escapes from her captors and hooks up with the Amazons, whose camp has been borrowed from a Lithuanian Dark Ages re-enactment society. The Amazons are proto-feminists, but they don't hate men: Serena meets her new love living amongst them. His name is Lucius and he's an honorary Amazon (he was allowed to join up on account of the size of his boobs). With her new friends in tow, Serena heads off to mete out some revenge to naughty old Crassius (or is it 'Crassus'? He gets called both...).

Had the film not featured some quite random and marginal nudity, its sub-Xena fight sequences would have made it suitable fodder for Channel 5 on a Saturday morning. As it is, the potentially genius combination of amazons and gladiators comes nowhere near to living up to its promise as a fun piece of exploitation trash.