Review: Barbarella (1968)

This is a Resurfaced review written in 2002 or earlier. For more information, please visit this link: Resurfaced Reviews.

Barbarella

Rating

Director

Roger Vadim

Screenplay

Terry Southern, Roger Vadim, Claude Brule, Vittorio Bonicelli, Clement Biddle Wood, Brian Degas, Tudor Gates, Jean Claude Forest (Novel: Jean Claude Forest)

Length

1h 38m

Starring

Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg, Milo O’Shea, Marcel Marceau, Claude Dauphin, Veronique Vendell

MPAA Rating

Review

Science Fiction spoofs have never been so inane and so funny at the same time. “Barbarella” marked Roger Vadim’s first English-language film yet with co-writer Terry Southern’s help you can’t really tell…or can you.

Barbarella (Jane Fonda) is a young space vixen from a planet where sex is performed through the consumption of a drug and limited physical contact. When a scientist from Earth disappears, she is sent on a question to retrieve him before his new “weapon” would surely bring about the planet’s demise.

Skimpily clad, Barbarella’s ship crash lands on her destination planet. She finds herself on a lake of ice where she meets tiny dolls that want to kill her, but is saved only by a strange, furry man who wants sex for saving her…the kind WITHOUT drugs.

After she discovers how much she loves sex, she uses it to her advantage throughout the film to get to her final destination: Duran Duran (Milo O’Shea). His torturous machine is the Orgasmatron, a hideous device that kills its victims through extreme pleasure.

The cult following for this film is tremendous. It is the ultimate 1960s sex farce without a believable plot. Southern, whose earlier scripts included “Dr. Strangelove” and “Casino Royale” and whose later “Easy Rider” have all become classics in their various genres. What “Barbarella” does is stimulate the visual sense, but turns off the brain. It is a mindless space orgy filled with scantily clad women, sinister villains and fallen angels.

Not that the film itself isn’t funny, it most definitely is, but it is a formless mass of crazy one-liners and ridiculous situations. Similar in comedic style to “Casino Royale,” “Barbarella” also parodies science fiction films of the 1960s including James Bond.

The funniest line in the entire film is one of its few saving graces: “A grave many dramatic situations begin with screaming.” Not only does the film read like a cheap, lurid romance novel, it also appeals to the male preoccupation with sex and never achieves more than a simple futuristic commentary.

“Barbarella’s” religious imagery is both interesting and annoying. It attempts to be a message movie but is marred with horrendously clueless visual effects, insanely pointless sexual diatribes and painfully unmotivated performances. “Barbarella” is neither a masterpiece, nor a waste of celluloid; it’s nothing more than a unique, pointless and sexy spoof.