There are worse cinematic experiences than watching a bad movie: one that isn’t quite bad enough, for a start, a category which undeniably includes Dark Horse’s adaptation of its own comic-book series Barb Wire. Mounted as a PVC-upholstered vehicle for the buxom Pamela Anderson Lee, the current UK video release even includes a nine-and-a-half-minute appendix during which the former Motley Crüe groupie swings on a chain and thrusts her cleavage at the camera, presumably to scotch rumours that stunt nipples were drafted in for the more demanding sequences.
I have to admit to considerable bemusement at the erstwhile Playboy pin-up’s rise from the supporting cast of Baywatch to the ranks of those who are pretty much famous merely for being famous. True, cosmetic surgery has allowed her to become the living embodiment of the Barbie doll, but she’s scarcely unique in that achievement; The Playmate Book even dubs her “the single most popular blonde on the planet,” a conclusion presumably founded in Madonna Ciccone’s status as a natural brunette and (credited) author Hugh Hefner’s belief that Marilyn Monroe was abducted by aliens.
But even more surprising was Barb Wire itself, which most UK reviewers had described as Mad Max in a corset. Finally getting around to viewing the damn thing myself, its true identity was swiftly revealed as a gender-reversed remake of one of my favourite movies. Let’s weigh up the evidence: a mercenary bar-owner operating in an intrigue-drenched port evades fascist stormtroopers to provide her former lover and his new spouse — a political fugitive — with a guaranteed escape route to safety, aided by a corrupt cop who comes good at the end. Grief, all they needed to do was stick Pammy in a trenchcoat and have her walk off into the fog, muttering about beautiful relationships.
The fact that none of the British journos appeared to pick up on the Casablanca theme is pretty depressing, but hardly unexpected; critics such as Anno Dracula author Kim Newman, who actually cares about films made further back than last week (and gets to unearth vintage genre junk on BBC1’s occasional late-night showcase Dr. Terror Presents), are an increasingly rare commodity. The situation is even bleaker for British cinephiles attempting to track down older or more obscure movies, given the prohibitive cost of certification (unlike the US, unrated videos are illegal here, as is the sale of secondhand material released before classification was introduced in 1984) and the reluctance of video retailers to stray outside the current box office top twenty.
Meanwhile, Barb Wire offers us Wham Bamm Pam as a top-heavy Humphrey Bogart, Steve Railsback as a vertically-challenged Conrad Veidt and Clint Howard in a performance even Peter Lorre would have rejected as excessively twitchy. Studio logistics may thankfully have denied us the spectacle of Ronald Reagan as Rick Blaine, but now we get to see the role essayed by a silicone-padded, collagen-enhanced British Columbian. Hey, who dares say Hollywood magic is a thing of the past?
[Extracted from my ‘Fannish Memory Syndrome’ for Apparatchik #71, published December 1996]