Barb Wire: Is It Really That Bad?

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Film critics – at least mainstream film critics – are pack animals. With a few notable exceptions, they tend to have a hive mind, all agreeing more or less on which films are classics and which are terrible. This opinion is often cemented when the movie is first released and it stays that way afterwards, with new generations lazily parroting the opinions of their predecessors about films that they often haven’t even seen – or if they have, have done so through crap-tinted glasses, expecting awfulness and so finding it.

It’s curious because what makes a film good or bad is actually pretty subjective. Film writers might claim otherwise but it really is down to taste rather than things like the directing, acting, screenplay or technical qualities. That and the idea of a film fulfilling its remit. A comedy needs to be funny, an action movie exciting, a horror film scary or unsettling… and if it is made as escapist entertainment, then it has to be judged on that level.

There are several films that I’ve watched and wondered just what the hell the critics were missing when they laid into them so ferociously. We’ve already discussed Caligula, a personal favourite of mine that even now has so few defenders that a half-baked inferior reworking of the material has been hailed as a long-overdue restoration of artistic vision, so keen are people to dismiss the original film. Even more so, Showgirls is a film that has now found cult status after years of critical contempt, but still only on the level of ‘so bad it’s good’ for the most part. I’ll defend Showgirls to the death as a masterpiece and the criticism of that film often felt like a deliberate misinterpretation of the film by people offended by the very concept of the film.

And then we come to Barb Wire.

Barb Wire was a comic book adaptation at a time when such things were still rather novel, and like many of its contemporaries like The Crow, it was pitched at an adult audience. It was also a vehicle for Baywatch star and Playboy Playmate Pamela Anderson, and that was part of its problem. Film critics in 1996 were not inclined to take comic book movies or Pamela Anderson particularly seriously. Add to that the fact that Barb Wire was sold very much on Anderson’s cleavage and you can see why this was never going to have good reviews. Caligula, Showgirls, Barb Wire… all films sold – however inaccurately in the latter case – on sex. Film critics tend to be very suspicious and dismissive of celluloid sex, lest they be seen as finding it titillating. Sex on film is usually only approved of if it is dour, depressing and laced with moral disgust.

Now, before we go any further, I’m not for a moment suggesting that Barb Wire is a lost masterpiece. It’s not on the level of the other two films mentioned, not remotely – and to be fair, it’s a very different sort of film, one that is more cartoonish than erotic. It gets most of the T&A out of the way straight away during the notorious opening titles, satisfying the people who came for that – but it also sets up a false expectation of what the film is.

Famously, Barb Wire lifts its plot from Casablanca, transposing the World War 2 drama to the distant future of – ahem – 2017, when America is in the midst of a civil war with a dictatorial government (whose agents all press like Nazis) that has seized control, leaving just one free city standing. This was all fantastical stuff in 1996 but looking at divided America since 2016, it feels a lot more prescient. Barb is a club owner and bounty hunter who gets caught up in a plot to steal contact lenses that contain some secret formula that a resistance scientist who holds the cure to an extra-lethal government-engineered strain of HIV in her DNA. It’s all a bit confused, as the film was thrown together piecemeal and only bears a passing similarity to the comic book that it was based on. To be fair, it has a stronger and more coherent narrative than most Marvel movies, but this isn’t a film that you watch for its complex storyline.

Barb Wire feels more like a comic book movie than most other comic book movies. Just not an American comic book movie. It instead has the vibe, the outrageousness and the mix of sex and violence that drove European comic book films – this film belongs to the universe that brought us Barbarella and Diabolik, Satanik, Gwendoline and Baba Yaga. It’s also part of that 1980s and 1990s collection of sci-fi fantasy films with scantily-clad kick-ass female protagonists, many of which were also hated by critics – Red Sonja, Sybil Danning in Battle Beyond the Stars, Galaxina, Sheena and so on, movies with a comic book edge and cartoonish characters that didn’t try to be anything that they weren’t.

The film has that great 1990s cyberpunk alternative vibe that we’ve long since lost – a pumping industrial metal and punk soundtrack, bars that look like fetish clubs and moody lighting. It’s a reminder that movies like this used to be cool, edgy and sexy rather than the po-faced affairs that they are now. It’s big, loud, fast-paced and outrageous, with impressive physical effects and stunt scenes that show just how dreadful modern CGI-dominated superhero cinema is in comparison. There’s a physicality here that you don’t see in movies any more.

I do wish that Adam Rifkin had remained as director, especially if he really was taking the film in an outlandish, Russ Meyer-inspired direction as has been claimed – I think that was absolutely the right move for the material and for the star, though it seems that Pamela Anderson – Pamela Anderson Lee as she is credited here, still married to Tommy Lee at the time – had a bit of a contradictory attitude to nudity during the film’s production; she was happy to do the extended sequence where she dances topless on a trapeze while being hosed down that appears briefly in the opening titles (and is included in a nine-minute sequence as a disc extra on the new UHD for those of you interested in such things), but seemingly reluctant to allow the film to be as raunchy as it perhaps needs to be. As it is, Barb Wire is more tease than titillation, with her boobs front and centre at all times, but covered – barely, admittedly – by leather and latex outfits.

It’s easy to scoff at or condemn this film for its fixation on Anderson’s body, but is that really so odd? Let’s not pretend that the male action stars of the 1980s and beyond weren’t also sold on their larger-than-life physiques rather than any acting ability. In our rush to find sexism everywhere, we tend to forget that action movie stars of the era were almost all absurdly cartoonish figures – and if you think that the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were not sexualised, I suggest taking another look at those movies and the publicity stills.

Of course, Pamela Anderson wasn’t an actor – not really. Or at least, she wasn’t the sort of hard-assed performer who could pull off the cynical, world-weary character dialogue that she has to speak here. She has a monotone delivery that is not entirely awful but perhaps needs more emotion, and she appears to be taking it all a bit more seriously than is necessary. It does seem that director David Hogan, more used to music videos and second-unit action scenes, was not an actor’s director. By all accounts, the actors were not directed at all, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on Anderson. She was employed because of who she was and for her physical attributes, so complaining about her performance seems to be missing the point, especially when she is no worse than any of the male action movie stars of the era – no one complained about Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme or Seagal being one-dimensional in their movies – and if they did, they were probably missing the point, just as they are here. If you watch Barb Wire expecting an acting masterclass, more fool you. It’s like complaining that Ken Loach films don’t have enough explosions.

And the supporting cast are great, and all seem to be having fun. Udo Kier is on record saying how much he enjoyed this and loved Anderson, and he’s great as usual, while Xander Berkeley, Clint Howard, Nicholas Worth and Steve Railsback all play it very tongue in cheek. Railsback, of course, was also in Lifeforce, another fantastic film that the critics hated, perhaps because it had too much nudity. You can see the pattern here…

Now, look: once again, I’m not saying that Barb Wire is a great film. But it’s great entertainment, and maybe that is the only criteria that it needs to fill. It works how it is supposed to and for the life of me, I can never quite understand why films like this are dismissed while other movies are praised to the sky, despite being the same sort of thing, only done less entertainingly. This is fast food cinema, but that’s fine – it isn’t pretending to be anything else. In the grand scheme of things, it’s throwaway and fairly forgettable, but I’ve seen a lot of genuinely awful, boring sci-fi action cinema and this isn’t that. The film needs to be more outrageous – but it’s solidly entertaining.

Those people who say it’s one of the worst films ever made need to give their heads a wobble and perhaps watch more movies – notably, it was nominated for several Razzies and is on a list of the 20 worst films ever made by the defunct website The Stinkers – a list that notably only seems to contain films from the 1980s and 1990s, which suggests that the idiot voters were unfamiliar with movies from earlier decades. I hope I don’t need to tell you that these smug ‘worst film’ awards are moronic, cynical exercises in snobbery from the sort of no-talent hacks who are wrong about everything all the time, and that anything that they sneer at is sure to be worth a look.

Do you need a Barb Wire UHD? Well, no. But should you pick it up anyway? I’m going to say yes. Time has been kinder to this than you might expect and what might have felt generic at the time now feels pretty edgy and daring. I mildly enjoyed it when it came out and I enjoyed it a lot more watching it again. It’s big, brash, noisy and dumb – and sometimes, that’s what you need. It’s the sort of thing that works well on a big screen with the sound cranked up and your brain switched off. If modern superhero movies could get back to this sense of unpretentious comic-book fun, I might have more time for the genre.

DAVID FLINT

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