Producer Roger Corman's masterful female
version of "Gladiator," with Playboy Playmates Karen McDougal and
Lisa Dergan as slave girls who have a chance to win their freedom
by entering the bloody arena. What could have been just another
low-budget ripoff works because of the direction of Timour
Bekmambetov, top director in Kazakhstan and one of the many film
talents rescued by Corman after the fall of Communism in the
Soviet Union. It's actually a remake of the late John
Corrington's script about female gladiators originally written
for one of those sword-and-sandal spaghetti-western factories in
Rome ("La Rivolta delle gladiatrici"). That film was later
released in America as a 1973 vehicle for Pam Grier. Released as
"The Arena," it failed to perform and was re-released as "Naked
Warriors." This reworked version is tremendous, mostly due to the
inspired direction of Bekmanbetov and the performance of Victor
Verzhbitsky as the cruel provincial governor Timarchus, exiled to
the farthest reaches of the empire, where he oppresses the half-
wild populace and amuses himself with gladiatorial combat in an
arena built especially for him by Legionnaires who hack down half
the native forest to gather wood for it. He sends to Rome for
slave girls and warriors, but he ends up with the dregs of the
gladiator stock, property of an old crook-nosed trainer named
Septimus. (Get it?) Anatoly Mambetov, as Septimus, is another
brilliant Russian actor who does Timarchus' bidding, until the
ruler grows bored with the available bloodsport and happens to
see a kitchen fight among the slave girls. He orders Septimus to
train them for combat, and soon the girls are taken from the
flesh pits and armed with swords, tridents and shields. The
fighting is better than you would expect, and perhaps
Bekmanbetov's greatest achievement was to make Playboy Playmates
look like warriors. There's the usual Roman intrigue, all
orchestrated by the sadistic Timarchus, culminating in contests
for higher and higher stakes as the plot thickens and spins.
Bekmanbetov is a master of the quick-cutting that Ridley Scott
used in "Gladiator," using it for violence, sex, and sex-and-
violence together, and the final slave-revolt sequence--which
probably didn't use more than 30 extras--looks as grand as an MGM
epic. Twenty-three dead bodies. Eighteen breasts. Arrow through
the head. Gladiator hacked in half. Sword-flinging. Multiple
shield-thwacking. Rape. Pillage. Spear through the gizzards.
Wooden sword-thrashing. Slave-girl head-butting. Pitchfork
through the throat. Eye-gouging. Sword to the back. Orgy.
Catfight. Arm rolls. Roman Legion break-dancing. Gratuitous hand-
hacking. Gratuitous fire-juggling. Thumbs-down Fu. With Lisa
Dergan as the Playboy Playmate slave girl with the big dramatic
speech about the night her lover tattoed her chest by a beach
campfire before the Romans slaughtered him, Alexsei Osipov as the
oiled-up Bicep Monster who dies in the arena while his girlfriend
is pouring wine on the governor, Severina Kamugisha as the
awkward girl so inept at fighting that the brutal gladiator
trainer Septimus falls in love with her only to doom them both,
Leon Maximov as the barbarian doomsayer ("Our land will be cursed
forever!"), Karen McDougal as the spitfire Playmate-of-the-Year
gladiator who screams "This is your land and these are your
people! The time for asking is over!"
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