Movie Review: Hundra (1983)

Last year, I gave a shout out to one of my favorite cheesy 80s Swords & Sorcery romps, "Red Sonja".

This week, I wanted to take a look at another 80s Swords & Sorcery yarn featuring a sword-wielding female barbarian that, by contrast, had far too much bad to be So Good, It's Bad, "Hundra":

The set up is fairly typical for an 80s barbarian flick (e.g., The Beastmaster (1982)): Hundra (played by Laurene Landon) and her tribe are living peacefully when their village is suddenly attacked without warning by raiders, who slaughter everyone except the main character.  Now, Hundra is off on a quest for vengeance.

The particular twist here is that Hundra's tribe is all-female, and Hundra is the most all-female of them all, having never been with a man and being loudly misandrist (e.g., she berates her faithful dog for being male).  So, when she travels to the tribe's old wise woman after the massacre, she is taken aback when the latter tells her that she must breed to repopulate the tribe!

Of course, pretty much all men in movie are terrible, if not downright rapists, so, as you might expect, many of them die on Hundra's blade.

I wanted to like "Hundra" but it's just not good: the acting is terrible even for a low budget 80s Italian-Spanish production.  Laurene Landon is the only one who's even competent and while she makes for a striking and statuesque figure, Landon plays things far too straight for the film to have camp value.

Also, the fight scenes are poorly choreographed and the "humor" is often tonally jarring and out of place (e.g., random farting noises).  And the film is far too rapey for a rollicking swashbuckler.

So, if you want to watch a Swords & Sorcery with a strong female lead, go watch Red Sonja again (I've done so dozens of times and still find it quite amusing).  If you still have some spare time and are a completist of Swords & Sorcery films, maybe think about this movie.