Red Sonja (1985)

Published: September 28th 2026 (week 40 of 2026) in cinema

A film from the wood-and-cheese genre. Starring Brigitte Nielsen, in her debut, as the titular Sonja, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as ~~Conan the Barbarian~~ Lord Kalidor.

Before I say anything else, let me say that I like bad films as much as anyone. I have seen the so-bad-it's-good classics such as The Killer Shrews, Robot Monster, and the exquisitely titled Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. In fact, when the Kino Neptun (Kino Leningrad between 1953–1993, and Kino Tobis Palast before then) was still operating in Gdańsk, I used to be a regular participant in the B-movie festival called Najgorsze Filmy Świata (Polish for Worst Movies in the World).

As a quick aside, for those who noticed that I used past tense when mentioning both Kino Neptun and the NFŚ festival. Both the cinema and the festival no longer exist, because the building the Kino was operating at has been repurposed and turned into a Hilton hotel. The hotel chain promised it would keep the cinema running, as it has been an important part of Gdańsk's cultural scene for decades, only to renege on their promise after they got the building.

The old, independent cinema died, the festival died, and a piece of cultural landscape died; but at least rich tourists can now sleep at the very centre of the Old Town. Clearly, it was a change for the better.

Or, to summarise briefly: fuck Hilton.

Anyway, back to the topic.

Apart from bad films, I also actually enjoy pulp sword-and-sorcery stories like... let me think of an example... the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. Mr Howard created a compelling character in Conan, and sent him into the Hyborian world on wild, perilous adventures, and put him against ancient evils, wicked sorcerers, twisted cults, etc. Despite being simple, the stories carried themselves with gravitas appropriate to the setting and text.

Red Sonja does not.

I understand that it may be difficult to take a film completely seriously, or appreciate the emotional weight of certain moments, when the main characters are played by actors whose style is best depicted by the illustration below:

However, wooden acting is not always a problem. Take Conan the Barbarian from 1982 as an example. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the main character to a spectacular effect. The fact that his acting skills have been delivered from a lumber camp a couple minutes before the filming started does not matter at all. The film still works.

Unfortunately for Red Sonja, it also contains plenty of another ingredient:

Wood and cheese are not a good combination. With their power combined the film looks more like an episode of Power Rangers and less like a serious sword-and-sorcery picture.

Obvious jokes are planted at inopportune moments. There is an annoying child character. There a throngs of enemies in thongs (literally, almost) and weird, impractical armour. Did I miss something, and was Red Sonja intended as a family-friendly PG-13 film? Maybe I have just expected from it something it did not intend to deliver.

Suffice to say, at one point I just started treating the film as a cheesy comedy. Treated like this it becomes watchable, but I still would not want to watch it again. Which is a shame because it has some pretty cool elements.

Fantasy landscape — Sonja at the border of the kingdom of eternal night or something like that

Just look at the image above and try to tell me it is not really fucking awesome.

You have a warrior princess riding a horse through a vast grassland, and suddenly she arrives at a river's bank... the bank is more like a cliff, the river is filled with lava, on the other side is land shrouded in shadows and smoke, the sky is dark except when illuminated by volcanos, and the only way across is over the skeleton of an enormous horned creature.

A Storm with a Shipwreck, Claude-Joseph Vernet — A Storm with a Shipwreck (1754), by Claude-Joseph Vernet

The scene looks almost like a proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang Landschaft, except it drips heavy fucking metal instead of tears of young Werthers. Instead of Weltschmerz it promises a world of high adventure!

If that does not do it for you, take a closer look at a still from the very next scene, in which Sonja tests the "bridge":

Skeleton bridge — Sonja on the skeleton bridge

Is it not insanely freaking cool?!

Well, I think it is, which, again, forces me to say that it is such a waste. An awesome idea that fumbled so hard in execution.

Sometimes a pretty bad film can still have an incredible soundtrack. Unfortunately, again, this is not the case here.

Going back to my point of comparison ie, Conan the Barbarian from 1982, the music Basil Poledouris composed for Conan is a hard-hitting classic, carrying enough power to transport you to the Hyborian age by itself. Just listen to eg, Anvil of Crom or Riddle of Steel. To me, it has the same weight as the music Howard Shore has composed for Peter Jackson's adaptation of the Lord of the Rings.

In comparison, the score for Red Sonja sounds like something taken off the shelf from a Movie-Sountracks-R-Us shop at the corner nearest to Red Sonja's set.

Such a shame.

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