In the "yet another of those 1980s films I was too young to have seen in the theater growing up" series, some months back TCM surprisingly ran Red Sonja. To be fair, it was part of a night on movies based on pulp-fiction sci-fi and fantasy novels, and the movie is 40 years old now. In any case, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.
A group of priestesses is doing a ritual involing the Talisman, a glowing green orb that only woman can touch and that mostly has to be kept in darkness lest its horrendous power destroy the world. While only women may touch it (we see it kill a man who touches it), it's the menfolk, or at least those in the lineage of Lord Kalidor (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who have the duty of making certain that the power of the Talisman does not destroy the world, with the capacity to destroy the Talisman if necessary to prevent its power from being used from serious harm. Kalidor is, in fact, on his way to the current rites since there are serious plans afoot to destroy the Talisman since its power is getting too great for mere mortals to handle.
Unfortunately, he doesn't make it on time, being beaten by Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman) and her forces. They murder the priestesses while Gedren takes the Talisman with her to her castle at Berkubane. There, Gedren puts the Talisman in a room of lights specifically so that the Talisman will grow in power that Gedren believes she will be able to control. In fact, she won't, and in two weeks' time its power will be sufficient to destory the world. In one bit of bright news, Gedren's soldiers didn't succeed in killing all of the priestesses. One of them, Varna, escapes, running into Kalidor before dying of the arrow wound she received trying to escape.
Varna is the sister of Princess Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), known as Red Sonja for her flaming red hair, and Varna wants Kalidor to find Sonja and warn her that the Talisman has been stolen. After all, it's going to take both men and women to deal with the Talisman since only women may touch the thing. Sonja is currently taking swordsmanship lessons from the Grandmaster, and he's the only man Sonja trusts. She thinks all other men are evil, and she's going to show them what a badass she is. So when Kalidor finds her and tells her about the talisman, she sets off by herself, ignoring the fact that in the real world men have much more physical strength than women (sorry, ladies) and would be able to dispatch Sonja easily if they weren't portrayed as preternaturally stupid.
Well, not just stupid, but fat or obnoxiously hubristic. Along the way to Berkubane, Sonja goes through the kingdom of Hablock, where the child king Tarn, who is a spoiled brat, refused to surrender. He and is court jester Falkon are the only two who survived, and they follow Sonja, providing help at key points along the way. It's a journey of redemption for the two of them two. Eventually, Kalidor finds Sonja again and the four make their way to Gedren's palace to try to find the Talisman before Gedren can kill them all.
Red Sonja was savaged by the critics, and it's easy to see why. The acting is terrible, as is the dialogue. The girl-boss trope is unrealistic, but as with blaxploitation icon Pam Greer, people watch the girl-bosses for the vicarious thrills and the skimpy outfits that show off the women's fit figures to good effect. (Sorry, but I don't think very many people want to see Misery-era Kathy Bates as a girl-boss.) But all the things that make Red Sonja a critical failure combine to make the movie a cult classic, and there's a reason why it's remembered well enough that somebody came up with the brilliant idea to do a remake that got a limited release earlier this year.
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