Vengeance for the Lost Tribe
Hundra (Laurene Landon, her character's name pronounced Hoon-druh), a blonde warrior woman in her mid-twenties, goes hunting one day, returns to her all-female village to find her relatives, friends, and every other villager dead, victims of a raid by "men from the South, worshippers of the Bull."
Hundra (1983), released a year after John Milius's Conan the Barbarian, has, like the previous film, a village attacked and destroyed, a revenge story, and was shot in Spain, a Western European country with enough remote locations to make it resemble an ancient land of legend. Dry, irregular rock formations, a castle on a height, livestock, a sense of nothing having changed for 2,000 or 3,000 years.
Hundra, a blonde, well-built tall woman armed with throwing knives, a bow and arrows, and a sturdy shiny steel sword, predates Xena by a dozen years, although Lucy Lawless, who played the latter for six TV seasons, is a far better actress than Landon. What Laurene Landon has going for her is her physical presence, her graceful movements. I would've liked to see her, amid all of the stunts she did by herself--all except one dangerous fall--cut loose and be allowed to carry out her final fight against a dozen or so laughing raping Bull worshippers without Matt Cimber, the director, resorting to slow motion to deemphasize the less than top of the line stunt work. Action shots are best shown in real time. Unbroken slow motion takes away the sense that Hundra is really doing anything a basic fighter couldn't counter. Men falling to her sword leave their bellies exposed, get disemboweled, leave their guards open. I guess they're too used to abusing helpless victims too brutalized to fight back; worshipping a god that apparently encourages them to rape people hasn't set them up realistically to fight strong opponents, like Hundra.
Her quest, bestowed upon her by a dying wise woman, last elder of the tribe, takes Hundra southward, in search of "seed" to gestate the beginnings of a new tribe. Otherwise, the tribe will go extinct with Hundra's death. Presumably, the tribe's language, customs, arts, will be lost. Hundra, never having felt the touch of a man, resists the idea but takes it on as a utilitarian duty. She comes across a Bull worshipper and his half-dozen women, constituting a harem, in the middle of nowhere. She offers herself to the Bull man, a disgusting, belching imbecile whose years of accumulated odors emanate from the screen.
"Hundra," I said, "you can do better."
He's the first man of the South she finds, so she figures, Okay, it's gonna be him.
The old woman had suggested Hundra mate with a man of the South because of their virility, adding, "They almost destroyed the tribe, so it's fitting they should be the ones who continue it."
Why that should have to be the case, I don't know, but Hundra goes along, lying back on the ogre's filthy bed, about to spread her legs, ready for what she figures will be five minutes of male grunting, followed by her quick night-time departure.
He gets rough, really rough, swings her about the tent, hits her head against the tent pole a few times, hits her. Recovering, she hits back, kicks him, struggles, bites him, gets him outside, watched by the man's subjugated women, gets the living shit beaten out of him. She nearly kills him but stops herself. Hundra, essentially a decent person, isn't the type to crack a man's skull in several places while's he flat on his back, unconscious.
Despite her exhortations to the captive women, they ignore her shouted suggestion that they leave, that they're free. As she mounts her horse and rides away, the women gather around their Bull man to attend to his injuries.
At some point, the viewer figures Hundra's going to find a man to plant the seed. A man, moreover, who's not violent, smelly, or hostile to basic concepts of decency. She finds such a man in the healer, Pateray (Ramiro Oliveros, one of many Spanish actors and actresses in what is essentially a Spanish film in English). Pateray, gentle, kind, manly in a good way, handsome, succumbs to Hundra's charms during their second meeting. She has by this point infiltrated the Temple of the Bull God. Trained as a female acolyte/entertainer/eventual sacrifice, Hundra learns the gentle arts, soft flowing clothes adorn her body, her hair gets unsnarled, she eventually kills a dozen or so men who intend to rape and kill her (their "sophisticated" religious ritual). These men have as many redeeming qualities as rich male attendants at a Jeffrey Epstein sex party. It's a reward for the viewer's patience when Hundra kills all of them.
The High Priest, who resembles Gene Simmons, has a horror of being touched by women. In one scene a newly kidnapped girl pleads with him to be let go, her fingers touching his hands. He has a hissy fit, plunging his hands into a nearby water bowl. Epic fantasy has found its genuine germaphobic character.
At the climax, the High Priest ends up flat on his back, swarmed over by thirty or so of his slave women. One of them sits on his face, grinding her snatch against his imperious mouth. The women leave him dead, torn by fingernails, poked, bitten--death by primate.
Hundra conceives a girl child. Whatever tribe comes from this success will be mixed. The girl child will grow to conceive, we assume, another child from a father of a different tribe, race, nation. Do your DNA test, you may find you're part Hundra.
Here's the problem with this movie: the second half lacks the strengths of the first. The first forty or so minutes provide many beautiful shots of countryside, and an exciting scene of a skirmish between Hundra and the pursuers from the Bull worshippers who killed her tribe. There's a sense of mystery in the film's early scenes due to the lack of dialogue. The opening shot is a long and beautiful pan taking in the daily activities of the all female tribe. They live by a river in the woods, there's snow on the ground, the peaceful atmosphere gets interrupted by the raid that ends most of Hundra's tribe's. Later in the film, with far more dialogue, Laurene Landon sounding like a Toronto version of a Charlie's Angel, the movie seems to project into the twentieth century--the fantasy world of legend, as showed very effectively in the first half hour, dissipates into familiar movie territory.
Even so, I did enjoy the film. The slow motion fight scene I could've done without. As flawed as it is, I enjoyed Landon's performance enough to want to see her in another film.
Vic Neptune
Hundra (Laurene Landon, her character's name pronounced Hoon-druh), a blonde warrior woman in her mid-twenties, goes hunting one day, returns to her all-female village to find her relatives, friends, and every other villager dead, victims of a raid by "men from the South, worshippers of the Bull."
Hundra (1983), released a year after John Milius's Conan the Barbarian, has, like the previous film, a village attacked and destroyed, a revenge story, and was shot in Spain, a Western European country with enough remote locations to make it resemble an ancient land of legend. Dry, irregular rock formations, a castle on a height, livestock, a sense of nothing having changed for 2,000 or 3,000 years.
Hundra, a blonde, well-built tall woman armed with throwing knives, a bow and arrows, and a sturdy shiny steel sword, predates Xena by a dozen years, although Lucy Lawless, who played the latter for six TV seasons, is a far better actress than Landon. What Laurene Landon has going for her is her physical presence, her graceful movements. I would've liked to see her, amid all of the stunts she did by herself--all except one dangerous fall--cut loose and be allowed to carry out her final fight against a dozen or so laughing raping Bull worshippers without Matt Cimber, the director, resorting to slow motion to deemphasize the less than top of the line stunt work. Action shots are best shown in real time. Unbroken slow motion takes away the sense that Hundra is really doing anything a basic fighter couldn't counter. Men falling to her sword leave their bellies exposed, get disemboweled, leave their guards open. I guess they're too used to abusing helpless victims too brutalized to fight back; worshipping a god that apparently encourages them to rape people hasn't set them up realistically to fight strong opponents, like Hundra.
Her quest, bestowed upon her by a dying wise woman, last elder of the tribe, takes Hundra southward, in search of "seed" to gestate the beginnings of a new tribe. Otherwise, the tribe will go extinct with Hundra's death. Presumably, the tribe's language, customs, arts, will be lost. Hundra, never having felt the touch of a man, resists the idea but takes it on as a utilitarian duty. She comes across a Bull worshipper and his half-dozen women, constituting a harem, in the middle of nowhere. She offers herself to the Bull man, a disgusting, belching imbecile whose years of accumulated odors emanate from the screen.
"Hundra," I said, "you can do better."
He's the first man of the South she finds, so she figures, Okay, it's gonna be him.
The old woman had suggested Hundra mate with a man of the South because of their virility, adding, "They almost destroyed the tribe, so it's fitting they should be the ones who continue it."
Why that should have to be the case, I don't know, but Hundra goes along, lying back on the ogre's filthy bed, about to spread her legs, ready for what she figures will be five minutes of male grunting, followed by her quick night-time departure.
He gets rough, really rough, swings her about the tent, hits her head against the tent pole a few times, hits her. Recovering, she hits back, kicks him, struggles, bites him, gets him outside, watched by the man's subjugated women, gets the living shit beaten out of him. She nearly kills him but stops herself. Hundra, essentially a decent person, isn't the type to crack a man's skull in several places while's he flat on his back, unconscious.
Despite her exhortations to the captive women, they ignore her shouted suggestion that they leave, that they're free. As she mounts her horse and rides away, the women gather around their Bull man to attend to his injuries.
At some point, the viewer figures Hundra's going to find a man to plant the seed. A man, moreover, who's not violent, smelly, or hostile to basic concepts of decency. She finds such a man in the healer, Pateray (Ramiro Oliveros, one of many Spanish actors and actresses in what is essentially a Spanish film in English). Pateray, gentle, kind, manly in a good way, handsome, succumbs to Hundra's charms during their second meeting. She has by this point infiltrated the Temple of the Bull God. Trained as a female acolyte/entertainer/eventual sacrifice, Hundra learns the gentle arts, soft flowing clothes adorn her body, her hair gets unsnarled, she eventually kills a dozen or so men who intend to rape and kill her (their "sophisticated" religious ritual). These men have as many redeeming qualities as rich male attendants at a Jeffrey Epstein sex party. It's a reward for the viewer's patience when Hundra kills all of them.
The High Priest, who resembles Gene Simmons, has a horror of being touched by women. In one scene a newly kidnapped girl pleads with him to be let go, her fingers touching his hands. He has a hissy fit, plunging his hands into a nearby water bowl. Epic fantasy has found its genuine germaphobic character.
At the climax, the High Priest ends up flat on his back, swarmed over by thirty or so of his slave women. One of them sits on his face, grinding her snatch against his imperious mouth. The women leave him dead, torn by fingernails, poked, bitten--death by primate.
Hundra conceives a girl child. Whatever tribe comes from this success will be mixed. The girl child will grow to conceive, we assume, another child from a father of a different tribe, race, nation. Do your DNA test, you may find you're part Hundra.
Here's the problem with this movie: the second half lacks the strengths of the first. The first forty or so minutes provide many beautiful shots of countryside, and an exciting scene of a skirmish between Hundra and the pursuers from the Bull worshippers who killed her tribe. There's a sense of mystery in the film's early scenes due to the lack of dialogue. The opening shot is a long and beautiful pan taking in the daily activities of the all female tribe. They live by a river in the woods, there's snow on the ground, the peaceful atmosphere gets interrupted by the raid that ends most of Hundra's tribe's. Later in the film, with far more dialogue, Laurene Landon sounding like a Toronto version of a Charlie's Angel, the movie seems to project into the twentieth century--the fantasy world of legend, as showed very effectively in the first half hour, dissipates into familiar movie territory.
Even so, I did enjoy the film. The slow motion fight scene I could've done without. As flawed as it is, I enjoyed Landon's performance enough to want to see her in another film.
Vic Neptune
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