Red Sonja

Howard created Red Sonja with “the splendid swell of her bosom beneath the pliant mail, the curves of her ample hips and rounded limbs.” Lutz has a lean, athletic build, and she isn’t that tall, making her appearance look more suited for a Gator Bait reboot. There are even a few times where she seems like she is swimming inside the metal breast plates of the bikini, instead of filling it out to the point of bursting.

Audience expectation is set at a physique similar to Babezilla, as many of us grew up seeing Red Sonja as the towering red-headed goddess of death with tits the size of your head and a butt to rule them all. To have honored this characteristic was a rare lost moment where representation would have twined perfectly with objectification. Booking a brick house built beauty would have been fulfillment for full-figured women everywhere, as well as the middle-aged men who love them. Audiences wouldn’t accept a skinny Conan, so it is a hard pill to swallow to look past a scrawny runt of a Sonja who is barely as big as her sword.

However, like many swallowed hard pills, the effects of Red Sonja are wonderful once they kick in. When Lutz begins to fight, we suddenly see why she is the new Red Sonja. Lutz can fight, oh boy, can she fight. The fury she displays during swordplay to epic, rising to Tura Satana levels of cathartic vengeance. Dropping the voluptuous tradition of the character works her in, bringing us closer to the glorious violence that really is the whole point of a Howard tale. This is director Bassett’s second Howard adaptation, the first being the woefully underappreciated Solomon Kane. She gets the brutal elegance that Howard imbued his dark fantasies with, giving everything a jagged spine of iron.

Wallis Day plays the white-haired warrior Annisia in Red Sonja.

“She gets the brutal elegance that Howard imbued his dark fantasies with…”

Bassett shoots great gritty action, with the sword-fighting scenes swiftly executed with kinetic flair. The statues of gods and the over-the-top architecture are very Howard, with that sinister grandiosity that marked the Texan’s imprint on literature. Screenwriter Huo goes to great lengths to tie in lots of Howard references to Hyborian the whole thing up, like the Kingdom of Shem and such. The director makes sure Red Sonja has everything you want from a she-devil with a sword picture. It has truly despicable villains, which gives the narrative a lot of teeth of the pointy variety.

Sheehan is marvelous, giving us that ultra-creepy calm spoken treatment, just like the heavy in Jupiter Rising, except you can understand what he is saying. Day is perfect as the psychotic, drug-dependent killing machine in an ice queen shell. We also have a great deal of monsters thrown in, which is butter on this kind of movie’s popcorn. The ape people were really cool as well. But it is Lutz who slices her way to success with her steel-coated determination, radiantly a power that threatens to burn the screen down. By the end of the movie, Lutz is the full-on Red Sonja I remember, and I am ready for more from her.

Red Sonja is classic high adventure that earns the gold in its pocket by spilling blood the way that only a woman can.