War Goddess

War Goddess (1974) from Tuna

War Goddess or "Le Guerriere dal seno nudo" ("the warriors with bare breasts") is basically a titty flick, but it must have been conceived as a legitimate film. How else could the producers have enlisted the distinguished anti-war poet Robert Graves (author of "I, Claudius" and its sequel) to be the scenarist? The director was Terence Young, who did the respected Wait Until Dark and three of the popular early James Bond films.

At any rate, the project seems to have taken on a life of its own, and morphed from an historical epic about an Amazon society into a titty-fest.

The films opens with a slaughter of a group of men by Amazon women. We meet Oreitheia (Sabine Sun) and her sister Antiope (Alena Johnston), who is in the process of collecting her first male head, evidently a rite of passage in her society. The two must rush back home to participate in the contest which determines the queen for the next four years. The contest consists of martial skills including spear-chucking, bows and arrows, etc, until there are only two women, who then wrestle topless for the crown. Antiope wins. Oretheia immediately starts to develop an attitude.

The next event on the social calendar is the annual compulsory mating which is necessary to insure the survival of their society. As distasteful as it is, the women will have to have sex with a group of men, and they will pay handsomely to do so. This time, they have chosen a Greek Army. The king of this group spots Antiope, and masquerades as a common soldier to have her. To her surprise, she enjoys the encounter. He also advises her of a short-cut back home but unfortunately it leads the women directly into an ambush.

Antiope gets rather frustrated with her reign. The man she enjoyed seems to have led her into a trap, and her baby was a boy - thus had to be killed. She decides revenge on the Greeks is in order. Of course, things don't really work out. I will leave those details for you to discover, but I will say that as the film ends, Antiope has become the first women's libber in history.

DVD INFO

Part of a two-film set with War Gods of Babylon
The image quality is not at all good, and there is an apology at the beginning, announcing that they had to piece this version together from several sources.

NUDITY REPORT

Alena Johnson - full frontal and rear nudity.

Sabine Sun - nude except for a modesty patch

The Critics Vote ...

No reviews online

The People Vote ...

IMDB summary. IMDb readers say 3.9 based on 39 votes, so I am clearly not the only one who had never heard of it.

The meaning of the IMDb score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics, or a C- from our system. Films rated below five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

Our own guideline:

A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre.
B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. Any film rated B- or better is recommended for just about anyone. In order to rate at least a B-, a film should be both a critical and commercial success. Exceptions: (1) We will occasionally rate a film B- with good popular acceptance and bad reviews, if we believe the critics have severely underrated a film. (2) We may also assign a B- or better to a well-reviewed film which did not do well at the box office if we feel that the fault lay in the marketing of the film, and that the film might have been a hit if people had known about it. (Like, for example, The Waterdance.)
C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but will be considered excellent by people who enjoy this kind of movie. If this is your kind of movie, a C+ and an A are indistinguishable to you.
C means it is competent, but uninspired genre fare. People who like this kind of movie will think it satisfactory. Others probably will not.
C- indicates that it we found it to be a poor movie, but genre addicts find it watchable. Any film rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of film, but films with this rating should be approached with caution by mainstream audiences, who may find them incompetent or repulsive or both. If this is NOT your kind of movie, a C- and an E are indistinguishable to you.
D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. We don't score films below C- that often, because we like movies and we think that most of them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-. Films rated below C- generally have both bad reviews and poor popular acceptance.
E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre.
F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

Based on this description, as a mid 70s exploitation film, this is only a C-, but the caliber of the writer and director make it an interesting anomaly.