I was going to skip 1984's She (1985's by Amazon's reckoning) because it looked like it was totally unrelated to H Rider Haggard's novel and it looked terrible. But damn it, I'm too much of a completist, and there it was for free on Amazon Prime. So I soldiered through it. It turned out to be a terrible movie but not totally unrelated to Haggard's novel. It has a quote from the book at the beginning. It features a female ruler as one of the main characters. The male lead is a handsome blonde. Otherwise, there's no resemblance.
It's kind of like a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Mad Max with a dose of Terry Gilliam. It's labelled as "post-Apocalyptic" but I seriously started to wonder, halfway through the movie, if that was the filmmakers' intention. After the Haggard quote comes a caption that informs us it's "Year 23, After the Cancellation". This is preceded by crude but effectively creepy animations of burning corpses and floating skulls. It could have been a depiction of apocalypse. On the other hand, we're never told what "the Cancellation" was exactly or how "Year 23" relates to our calendar. If it is meant to be a post-apocalyptic story, writer/director Avi Nesher must have decided everything would be totally random after the apocalypse. This movie has a mad scientist wearing an 18th century justincorp and a baseball helmet, a society of werewolves who wear short Roman tunics by day and tuxedos by night, and a comedian guarding a bridge who spawns duplicates of himself whenever one of his limbs is cut off.
The title character is played by Sandahl Bergman, the biggest name involved with the movie, except perhaps Gordon Mitchell, who appears very briefly (Mitchell's Wikipedia page says this movie was made in 1982). Bergman is best known for playing Valaria in Conan the Barbarian and she seems to still be wearing her costume from that movie in this one. Since this is an Italian production (though the director's Israeli) the real protagonists have to be men, of course, so we have a Clint Eastwood-ish guy named David Goss played the handsome blonde, Tom, accompanied by his best friend, Dick (Harrison Muller) and his sister, Hari (Elena Wiedermann). So, yes it's Tom, Dick, and Hari. Hari is kidnapped at the beginning of the movie and is absent throughout. This is not to remain a source of tension, Tom isn't on a quest to rescue her throughout the story. The movie just seems to forget about her, possibly because Wiedermann was clearly no actress, and she bears the same blank expression in every scene she's in.
She, the Sandahl Bergman character, has what appear to be a dozen or so people worshiping her as a goddess. She goes through a trial that requires her to be topless at one point. She captures Tom and Dick, who escape, then she chases them with her second in command, Shandra (Quin Kessler), they all team up for no apparent reason, and they have a series of bizarre episodic encounters. They meet several groups worshiping an apparent human as a god, the most powerful being a guy named Godan who can shoot green lasers from his eyes. He's adopted the hammer and sickle as his symbol for no apparent reason.
Perhaps this was meant to be more post-modern than post-apocalyptic. But if this movie was trying to say something, anything, damned if I know what it was.
She (1982/1984/1985) is available on Amazon Prime.
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