by Ben Bussey
“I have mastered your god! Accept me! NOW!”
As film fans in the 20teens, just how often nowadays do we truly feel like we’ve made a discovery? Here in the wonderful world of cyberspace – with IMDb, Wikipedia and the proliferation of blogs and fan sites of which your beloved Brutal As Hell is but one – it seems that everyone and his dog can be a movie nerd now. With just a click of a mouse you can find out all there is to know about every weird, silly and obscure film under the sun, from every last plot detail to the names of the best boy and the key grip. Pah! In my day you had to earn your nerdiness! You had to venture out to obscure corners of town in search of musty comic shops and film memorabilia flea markets, where shelves bent under the weight of pirate VHS copies of outlawed European horror films! You had to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with over-or-underweight men riddled with acne and humming with body odour, trawling through magazine racks in search of strange and enticing publications with lurid names and mostly-naked pictures of Brinke Stevens on the cover! None of this new-fangled Google and Netflix malarkey…
Okay, now that I’ve got that ageing geek Luddite diatribe out of my system, back to the point: discovery. That sense that you’ve found something amazing which the masses are not aware of; it’s so pivotal to the cult film experience, and it’s something we seem to be losing nowadays. But hear me, brothers and sisters, it is not gone completely. I can say this with authority, as I have recently had the pleasure of seeing for the first time a film that I hitherto knew nothing about, only to discover one of the most entertaining low-budget fantasy films I’ve seen in a long time; this is a film so gloriously unhinged and outlandish, I’m truly astonished it doesn’t have more of a reputation. I’m talking about writer/director Avi Nesher’s 1982 post-apocalyptic action adventure extraordinaire, She.
(Cue the outcry of umpteen film geeks older and more knowledgeable than I, decrying me as a young pretender for not having seen this film sooner…)
On adding She to my Lovefilm list (alright, so I do Lovefilm, guess I’m not that much of a luddite), all I knew was that it starred Sandahl Bergman – true love of Conan/tyrannical lesbian nemesis of Red Sonja, whose virtues I have already sung here – and that it was said to be a futuristic variation on the classic H. Rider Haggard novel which previously formed the basis of the 1965 Hammer film with Ursula Andress. True enough, Nesher’s film opens with a quote from Haggard and cites the inspiration of the novel in the end credits; however, beyond that the connection is so tenuous, it borders on non-existent. The eponymous She (actually called Ayesha in the novel and the Hammer film) is worshipped as a goddess and is allegedly immortal, the secret of which immortality is bathing in a magical power source, a pillar of fire in the novel, a rock-lined hot tub here (thereby providing the requisite excuse for a nude scene). And… that’s about it. I’ll admit it’s been a while since I’ve read the novel, but I’m buggered if I can see any more of H. Rider Haggard in Nesher’s narrative. And Haggard isn’t the only conspicuous absentee; there’s also the matter of logic, good taste, and restraint…
The plot, such as it is, goes a little something like this: at an unspecified future date, ’23 years after the Cancellation’ apparently, nomad siblings Tom (David Goss), Dick (Harrison Muller) and Hari (Elena Weiderman) – yes, you read those names correctly – find themselves under attack from a tribe of neo-barbarians called the Norks (heheheheheh!), who tend to dress in curious combinations of S&M gear, suits of armour and sports clothing with swastikas drawn on. Hari is promptly stolen away by the Norks (heheheheheh! It doesn’t get old) to their distant kingdom; meanwhile, the shell-shocked Tom and Dick unwittingly drift into the province of She. Naturally, She and her matriarchal military rule with an iron fist, and the daily duties of the populace comprise of standing in what looks like the National Portrait Gallery, bowing and chanting the name of She while chained men in loincloths wait for She herself to emerge and pick one of them as a sacrificial subject. Or something along those lines; I don’t know, it’s never really explained, much as how it’s never explained what The Cancellation was, or why She is venerated as a goddess. Anyway, Tom and Dick cross paths with She and her warrior women, which as you might expect doesn’t work out too well for the boys: Dick gets chained up with the pigs, whilst Tom gets forced to walk blindfolded down a path strewn with big metal spikes, which scratch and stab at his rock-hard abs. However, once they learn that She is the only one who knows the way to the realm of the Norks, they set about abducting her and forcing her to help them rescue Hari. Surprisingly, once She is in their custody they find the goddess/dictator quite forthcoming in offering her assistance, at least in part because it seems she has the hots for Tom. And why not; he’s a beefy, blonde, He-Man-looking kinda guy. Anyway, with She’s right-hand woman Shandra (Quin Kessler) tagging along to make it a foursome, they set off across the wilderness to Norksville.
And what manner of misadventures do they encounter along the way, I hear you ask? Well, there are mutant lepers, vampires, a telekinetic god-king, a Frankenstein robot, and a big burly hairy guy who appears to be a bit gender-confused… and that is to name but a few of the colourful adversaries our heroes encounter. They will do battle, face torture, get magically spun upside down, be imprisoned, don disguises, break free, do battle once more… and so it goes for just over an hour and a half of episodic, swashbuckling, dystopian fun. Most of said action plays out to the sound of early 80s fist-in-the-air hard rock, and synths from none other than the progmeister Rick Wakeman. And from the look of things, it’s all done on a budget slightly less than Kevin Costner’s hairdressing expenses on Waterworld.
No bones about it, She is an extremely silly film; but it’s the greatest, rarest breed of silliness, the kind that, just when you’re sure the film has got as absurd as it’s going to get, it proves you wrong again and again. There’s a madcap, make-it-up-as-we-go-along feel to proceedings that will surely convince many viewers that She is unknowing trash, belonging in the so-bad-it’s-good category at best. Not so, say I. Look at the character names Tom, Dick and Hari. Look at the unrepentant valley girl mannerisms of Quin Kessler, and the goofy antics of Harrison Muller. Take the extravagant theatricality of the supporting cast, from the mutant lepers to the toga-clad romantics to the mad scientists and beyond. Then there’s the laugh-out-loud bridge confrontation that could quite easily have substituted for the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If anyone sitting down to watch this thinks those involved were unaware of just how ridiculous the whole enterprise is, more fool them.
This, of course, is not to imply that there is nothing here of serious intent. Case in point: Sandahl Bergman. Let no mere mortal question, this woman is 100% serious about KICKING ARSE. If I’ve got the chronology right, she actually made this film before Conan the Barbarian (though it seems to have later been sold on that association, with posters declaring ‘Sandahl Bergman tempted Conan and now she is ready to take on the world!’); prior to this her film work had been primarily as a dancer in All That Jazz and Xanadu (the latter of which featured another notable urban savage, Michael Beck of The Warriors). As such, it was She that really started her on the path to becoming one of the great big screen warrior women. Bergman is one of those rare actresses who truly warrants the description of statuesque, and her dancing background must surely have been a benefit to the fight sequences; check out the early cavern confrontation (embedded below), in which she takes on no less than six opponents single-handed. Sure, the overall treatment is cartoonish, but Bergman clearly means business, leaving even the more (in every sense) cocksure men in the audience in no doubt that she could wipe the floor with them… which is, in itself, rather a turn on. Factor in how scantily-clad she tends to be for the majority of the film, and we’re really onto a winner. Nor was this the last time director Nesher would stir the loins of nerds worldwide, given he went on to douse Drew Barrymore’s boobs with blood in Doppelgänger. (I’m sure other stuff happened in that film as well, but somehow those details slip my mind…)
So, the question remains – why isn’t She a widely acknowledged cult classic? Well, a decent DVD treatment wouldn’t hurt; the 2003 edition from Pegasus is in 4:3 with – if you’ll pardon my technical jargon – really crappy sound and picture quality (you can blame them for how murky these screenshots are), and no extras aside from a negligible image gallery. If Arrow or Shameless could get their hands on She and give it the treatment it deserves, I for one would be very happy. But on the other hand, perhaps the naffness of the sound and picture is part and parcel of the pleasures of a movie like this. It’s a low-rent production with poor photography, creaky sets, cheap-looking costumes; to experience such a film in glorious high definition and crystal clear surround sound might be to lose some of that bargain basement charm.
Either way – if you are as unfamiliar with the unique, exotic and insane delights of She as I was, I urge you to make that pilgrimage, track down that goddess and accept her, NOW! I can’t promise that it will be everyone’s cup of tea, but I should hope we can at least agree that there are very few films quite like it.