She (1984)
(In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) In the realm of bad movies, She is in a class of its own. Despite the title, it’s far from an adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s classic adventure novel. Taking the barest essentials of the novel’s plot, it recasts everything in a strange bazaar-market future of warring tribes, mutant powers and episodic sequences. Featuring a trio of characters named Tom, Dick and Hari (that’s right!), it has a protagonist go through various adventures to find his missing sister, accompanied by his best buddy and the formidable queen named She. The film places much emphasis on Sandahl Bergman as She, clearly trying to associate itself with her breakout role as Valeria in Conan the Barbarian. It’s a wise choice—she’s one of the most interesting elements in a film that generally doesn’t quite know what to do with its actors. Of course, She doesn’t quite know what to do period—the film feels like a feverish jumble of unrelated sequences, occasionally dipping in the supernatural, the comic, the dramatic or the plain nonsensical. Every ten minutes, it’s off to a weird new post-apocalyptic group with crucial narrative tissue omitted from the final results. Some of the episodes are actually fun—it’s hard to resist the utter lunacy of David Traylor during the bridge sequence—but the post-apocalyptic nature of the film feels like an excuse to go shoot whatever and wherever, with barns being as good as palaces and industrial plants as backdrops. None of this is handled with any coherency, wit or skill: it’s just one thing after another until the film gets bored and has the heroes complete their quests. Curiously enough, the film is an early piece of juvenilia from director Avi Nesher, who ended up helming far better Israeli movies. At least Bergman looks good—although I slightly prefer Quin Kessler in a minor role. She is a terrible film by almost all standards, but it manages to get viewers involved by sheer dint of not knowing what’s going to happen next: By throwing elementary screenwriting structure and conventions in the trash, the film escapes moment-to-moment predictability and gets to that elusive “so bad it’s good” quality. I’m probably, as dismaying as that sounds, going to watch this again at some time in the far future—and whenever I do, I’ll try to catch it in the original English because, from reading about the film, it feels as if the dialogue was “improved” (i.e.: normalized to something less awful) in the French dub. The good news, I suppose, is that this 1984 version of She has and will forever retain its very distinctive quality away from its source novel. This may not necessarily be a mark of quality, but at least it’s something.