PHOENIX THE WARRIOR (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

One interesting trivium about the home video marketing of this 1988 flick: most of the covers I've seen feature Amazon-artworks that don't especially resemble the actress who plays Phoenix, Kathleen Kinmont. I realize that in 1988 she didn't have much "TVQ," having not yet played her best-known role on the 1992 show RENEGADE, but SF-Amazon films usually don't worry about how well known the main actress is. On top of not getting that exposure, in the film's opening credits Persis "STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE" Khambatta gets top billing, despite being the villain. 

I have a mild recollection of enjoyment from seeing this film on commercial TV in the nineties, but it's really not especially good even for a trash film. It's as if director/co-writer Robert Hayes-- most of whose cinematic work was as a cinematographer-- was basing his film on Cormanology 101: lots of babes, bullets and blazing fast cars. Granted, most post-apoc movies are just loose assemblages of whatever rubbish the filmmakers thought they could use to sell a movie. But Hayes approaches even the undemanding material with a clumsy, ham-fisted approach, taking any and all guilty pleasures out of the picture.

Once more, we have a gender-discriminatory apocalypse that kills off most of the men but leaves alive a lot of women who just happen to have really big eighties hair, and as usual, everyone's reverted to barbarism and lives in the desert far from sheltering cityscapes-- though these "she wolves" have enough technical know-how that they never run short of bullets for their machine pistols. One particular Amazon-leader, the wizened Reverend Mother, still possesses enough tech that, when she locates a rare pregnant woman, she plots to spawn some unholy hybrid creation that she can control for the next millennium.

However, the pregnant girl, name of Keela, finds a protector in a solitary animal-trapper, Phoenix (Kinmont). After fighting off diverse henchwomen of the Reverend Mother, including the aforementioned Khambatta, Phoenix takes Keela to a lonely refuge, where the latter births a male child. The two of them live together more or less as "daddy and mommy" to the kid, despite having no romantic entanglements as such, which won't win PHOENIX any prizes at any Lesbian film-festivals. However, the day comes that the Mother's agents find the refuge, wipe out most of the residents, and abduct Keela's kid to serve in the villain's vile experiment. While Phoenix and Keela go looking for the Reverend, she stumbles across a guy named Guy, one of the few surviving adult males. Eventually, after a lot of gunfights and swordfights, Phoenix vanquishes the forces of the Reverend Mother. Then she fades into the sunset as Guy, Keela and Keela's boy become a traditional nuclear family-- another black mark against the film at any Sapphic celebrations. 

There are a few decent fights and a few decent jokes, particularly playing on the Amazons' unfamiliarity with male anatomy. But the biggest problem is that Phoenix is a very one-dimensional heroine. Some of the character's dullness may stem from Kinmont's relative inexperience as an actress-- she's certainly better both in RENEGADE and in her two "CODENAME ALEXA" films-- but mostly I think the script fails to give the heroine any personal motivations for her noble deeds. And even a junky SF-Amazon film needs to give audiences a reason to root for the hero.