Pamela Anderson hasn’t ever piqued my interest. I never felt an active dislike towards her, per se—I simply never found her attractive or interesting. Still, I was strangely pleased when she recently made news for choosing to no longer wear make-up, which I found admirable. I also respect her commitment to animal rights.
What I think of first whenever her name comes up isn’t Baywatch or her tumultuous relationship with Tommy Lee. Instead, it is 1996’s Barb Wire, an infamous action film which she headlined, for which she received a Razzie for Worst New Star. What is interesting is she was nominated, but did not “win” for Worst Actress. Nor did the film “win” for the three other categories in which it was nominated, which seems to suggest this film is not quite as bad as legend would have it.
That said, this picture is still quite awful, as I recently discovered for myself. Apparently, the appeal for most first-time viewers is to see Anderson make a fool of herself. Let me get this out of the way: she’s actually not that bad. The film requires her to be essentially a life-size action figure, and she has the physique to be believable as an action hero. Her line readings may largely be a bit flat, but I’m not sure what anybody could do with the tin-eared dialogue of this script.
No, what makes this a lousy watch is it is a bog-standard sci-fi action film of the 90’s. It is unmistakably a product of that decade, and has all of the worst trappings of such fare from the era. Bad techno-ish dreck fills the soundtrack when we’re not being subjected to tracks like her then-husband’s godawful “Planet Boom”. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world that mysteriously has roughly 100% more dance clubs than I think there would be after the collapse of civilization. But, hey, at least that gives faux-lesbians a place to almost make out together.
Anderson is the owner of this club, which she operates in Steel Harbor. As an interminable text crawl informs us, this is the last free city remaining after the second American civil war. While we’re reading this, a narrator is reading it aloud, presumably because the filmmakers believe their audience is too stupid to read. Just a couple of minutes later, Anderson will relay the same info again in voiceover.
The voiceover doesn’t end there, and it returns from time to time to unload preposterous amounts of exposition on the audience. Techniques like that, combined with the shambolic nature of the film, convinces me this was originally meant to be a longer film, then drastically cut down and stuck to together with bits of ADR’d exposition as a type of Band Aid.
Anderson is extremely well-known in Steel City—seemingly even a bit of a celebrity. That would seem to be a liability in her side-career as a mercenary. At least that work gets her out of the club, as I can’t imagine I’m the only person appalled by the goth-ish house band covering “Hot Child In The City”. She doesn’t even have to change clothes for that work, as she lounges around at home in a leather teddy and fishnet stockings. What could be more comfortable than that?
She, and everybody else in this picture, is after a pair of contact lenses that are the only way to fool the retinal scanners in order to get on a plane to Canada. I like the idea of Canada being the more prosperous country in the future as portrayed in this film. In an earlier scene, she demands payment for a job in Canadian dollars.
There’s also some sort of nonsense involving a cruel officer in the fascist government (Steve Railsback) trying to find a woman whose DNA (?) holds the key (??) to the regime’s greatest chemical weapon (???). We first learn about this when Railsback is torturing a naked woman via some sort of steampunk crap that barely covers her naughty bits. That alone conveys everything anybody needs to know about the mindset of the filmmakers.
Among the actors, the one that fares best is Xander Berkeley. He excels in roles like this, a corrupt lawman who is only interested in things that benefit himself, especially when it requires the least amount of effort. I also liked seeing Udo Kier as Anderson’s valet, just because I always enjoy seeing him get work. Mind you, his presence is not exactly a harbinger of quality.
Altogether, Barb Wire isn’t as bad as its reputation led me to believe. Anderson was unfairly maligned for her performance, though it is also quite evident she isn’t the right person to carry a feature. But, really, nobody would be able to successfully pull off a movie so burdened with the trappings and cliches of 90’s sci-if. Watching it today, it’s hard to believe the film is only roughly three decades old.
Dir: David Hogan
Starring: Pamela Anderson, Steve Railsback, Xander Berkeley
Watched on blu-ray