Eye Candy #30 - "Barbarella"

Barbarella: It stands to reason that if Jane’s last name wasn’t Fonda, that this film should have scuttled her career decades ago (you know, like it did John Philip Law‘s). Based on the French comic heroine of the same name, I know this film is supposed to be campy. I get that. That point is made so obtuse by the film, it borders on the insulting. But just because it’s camp doesn’t mean it has to be crap. You can have solid production values, you can have good acting, you can have a coherent plot with dialogue that isn't godawful. But we get none of that here. Barbarella is a space-faring adventuress tasked with finding scientist Durand Durand and is absolutely inept at her job. She stumbles from encounter to encounter, not actually DOING anything, but she certainly has things DONE to her. Supposedly it’s a parable about female sexual liberation, in a way some would call “erotic“, but I would call “clumsy” and “cheap”. I have no problem with the whole liberation take, but did they have to make her SOOOO stupid to prove their point? “Be an idiot and get all the sex you want!“ You can almost here the Muppets singing, “Hedonism…in SPPAACCCEEE.” We get evil mechanical dolls with metal teeth, spacecraft outfitted with orange shag carpet, plenty of implied nudity from Fonda, the Evil Budgie Cage of Death, a character named after a sex toy…the hits just keep on coming. This really is one of the worst movies of all-time and makes other poor sci-fi (like “Zardoz“, for example), look like Shakespeare. I would say it’s easily the worst comic book adaptation as well. The only thing good about this movie is that it gave Simon Le Bon a name for his band. Woodchuck sez, “You’re been warned.”