She-Wolves of the Wasteland (1988)

 

It is the bleak post-apocalyptic future. The “bacteriological wars” have devastated the Earth. All human men are dead, and only small numbers of women have survived to eke out a pretty miserable existence in the wasteland the wars left behind.

The most powerful figure in this world is the Reverend Mother, who commands an army of bounty hunters that terrorise the other woman.  The Reverend Mother also allegedly commands 'dark powers' and seems to have some source of 'seed', with which she impregnates slaves dubbed 'breeders'.

She is not a nice person.

Keela is a pregnant breeder who escapes the Reverend Mother's clutches and goes on the run.  But many bounty hunters pursue her, and she is soon on the cusp of being re-captured.

Enter Phoenix, a bikini-clad warrior woman who rescues Keela and takes her to a secret valley of clothing-averse Amazons where they can be safe.  This safety lasts just long enough for Keela to have her son (a male child!  Dun dun dun!) before she and Phoenix are on the run again.

Also known as Phoenix the Warrior, this 1988 release was the last film of Persis Khambatta, who is best known for playing Lieutenant Ilia in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  Perhaps it goes without saying, but this is quite a big step down.  

Upon release, this film almost certainly banked on the promise of skimpy outfits and/or topless women in order to draw video rentals.  And to be fair, it does shamelessly deliver both of those things, as well as a lot of the big, big hair you'd expect of the genre.

Unfortunately, it fails to deliver decent acting, competent fight choreography, or a script that makes a lick of sense.

The lack of decent acting will become apparent as soon as you start the film.  Any given five minutes of the film's runtime tends to mostly consist of people not quite looking at the camera while woodenly spouting some kind of exposition to move the film along to its next set piece.

For fight choreography, while none of it is good, the hysterical stand-out of ineptitude is the bounty hunters' assault on the friendly amazons.  It mostly involves lots of women standing awkwardly in place while firing at other women a few yards away.  Despite the short ranges, the vast majority of attacks miss.  Which to be honest is probably not surprising given how uncomfortable they all look with their weapons.

Meanwhile, the film's script seems to have taken its plotting structure straight out of an old school cinema serial - just about every 15 minutes there's a miniature cliff-hanger where one or more of the good guys gets captured, only for the entire situation to be resolved about thirty seconds later so they can set up the next capture sequence.  The most egregious example of this is probably the wacky cult of deformed mutants who worship a mangled concept of TV as "the spirits of the airwaves".  These are abruptly introduced out of nowhere, capture the heroes to hand over to the big bad, then vanish completely from the film never to be mentioned again.

Lots of things happen in She-Wolves of the Wasteland.  Few of them seem to mean anything or lead anywhere much, though, and the script shows little interest in examining the consequences of its own events, or even giving us closure on the fates of major characters.

Only for hardcore fans of trashy 80s post-apocalyptica.  Like me!