Warrior Queen Review (1987) (Throwback Thursday #9) (Sword, Sorcery & Sin: The Never-Ending Countdown

Warrior Queen Review (1987) (Throwback Thursday #9) (Sword, Sorcery & Sin: The Never-Ending Countdown — Entry #2)
Director: Chuck Vincent
Starring: Sybil Danning, Donald Pleasence, Rick Hill, Tally Chanel, Samantha Fox
Runtime: 89 minutes
Released: 1987

If Deathstalker set the floor for what the Dungeon considers acceptable entertainment, Warrior Queen arrives one week later to test whether the floor can go lower. The answer is mostly yes, with a few notable exceptions that kept this from being a complete disaster.

The setup is actually more interesting than Deathstalker on paper. Ancient Pompeii, August 22nd, 79 AD. Slaves bought and sold, gladiators fighting in rigged contests, a corrupt ruler named Clodius played by Donald Pleasence with the specific energy of a man who genuinely needed the paycheck and decided to make the most of it. A mysterious queen named Berenice moving quietly among the elite while secretly helping slaves escape. Mount Vesuvius sitting in the background waiting to end everyone’s problems simultaneously. That’s a legitimate dramatic premise with real historical weight underneath it.

The film wastes almost all of it.

Warrior Queen runs 89 minutes and a significant portion of that runtime is stock footage lifted from higher budget Roman epics. You can tell because the production quality shifts dramatically during the crowd and battle scenes. The film’s own footage looks like a 1987 low budget exploitation production. The borrowed footage looks like an actual movie. The contrast isn’t subtle.

Sybil Danning plays Berenice and she’s the main reason anyone remembers this film exists. She’s statuesque, commanding, and carries genuine screen presence into a production that doesn’t deserve it. The problem is the film barely uses her. She drifts in and out of scenes, delivers her lines with more conviction than the material warrants, and then disappears again while Tally Chanel’s slave girl storyline takes over. For a film called Warrior Queen, the actual warrior queen is criminally underutilized.

Donald Pleasence as Clodius is the other performance worth discussing. He plays the corrupt ruler of Pompeii as a shambling, enthusiastically depraved villain and he’s clearly having a better time than anyone else on set. Every scene he’s in is more watchable than the scenes without him purely because he commits completely to the hammy villainy the role requires. Pleasence understood exactly what film he was in and acted accordingly.

The gladiatorial contest sequences have some imagination to them even if the execution is weak. An arm wrestling match where the loser gets their hand driven onto a poisoned spike is exactly the kind of creative violence the genre promises. A contest where two fighters are chained to pillars throwing discuses at each other is equally unhinged in the right way. The actual sword fighting is weak throughout but the contest concepts at least suggest someone was trying.

Then there’s Tally Chanel.

Tally Chanel plays Vespa, a slave girl sold at auction in what is genuinely the film’s most memorable sequence. The slave auction delivers exactly what the Dungeon was built to document and Thalia has strong feelings about it that she’ll express in her bump below.

The rape content in this film is pervasive and mean-spirited in a way that goes beyond Deathstalker’s already problematic approach. Multiple scenes, multiple characters, played with an ugliness that sours what genuine entertainment value the film manages to build elsewhere. It isn’t edgy or transgressive. It’s lazy filmmaking using assault as a substitute for actual dramatic tension. The Dungeon doesn’t reward that regardless of what else the film delivers.

The ending at least provides spectacle. Vesuvius erupting gives the film its biggest production moment, mostly accomplished through stock footage of actual volcanic activity, and the chaos of the escape sequence provides forward momentum that the preceding hour sometimes struggled to maintain.

Warrior Queen is worse than Deathstalker as a film. It’s slower, emptier, and more mean-spirited in its worst moments. But it delivers more in Thalia’s specific areas of interest and that’s going to move the Dungeon Score in directions Theia finds personally objectionable.

Warrior Queen gets a zero out of five: CONDEMNED.

“The stock footage alone represents a confession that the filmmakers knew they hadn’t produced enough watchable content. Miss Danning’s talent is entirely wasted. Donald Pleasence deserved better and so did the historical record of Pompeii. Gary has again submitted a recommendation I find suspiciously generous and I have again overruled it. The Decree stands at zero.” – Theia