Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:
There are many thoughts that leap to mind while returning to Red Sonja decades after you’ve last seen it, but the one I kept focusing on was, “Where the heck did Brigitte Nielsen’s breasts go?”
Now, I do have an admitted tendency to over-focus on this sort of thing and I should probably get some help and talk to someone about it, but I’m not wrong in noticing that the international 80s Amazon’s dimensions here in her cinematic debut are somewhat less Amazonian than those found in her later films, which to my mind suggests a direct correlation between getting enormous implants and subsequently starring in a series of shittier and shittier movies.
I may be alone in expressing this, but I think Nielsen actually showed some (unmet) promise here in her film debut. Sure, she’s often flatly unintelligible, but then so is her co-star and that didn’t stop him from starring in Batman & Robin (and becoming the governor of California). As an action heroine, though, she’s entirely credible and was probably the only actress/model of the period with a build both substantial and sexy enough to take on the role of Robert E. Howard’s most famous female character. She was just missing the breasts, which she must have noticed and decided to correct for her future work (which sadly never included that proposed big screen adaptation of She-Hulk she was born for).
The rest of the film manages to serve as a solid example of 80s sword and sorcery silliness. Not as memorable as Cozzi’s Hercules films, but still better than Conan the Destroyer and its many low-budget clones (none of which were foolish enough to copy Milius’ superior original), Red Sonja is a serviceable timewaster lessened only by its distinct lack of a D-Cup.