(1968/Paramount Pictures) DVD / VHS
Rave Reviews
“So ludicrous it really is brilliant… anyone can make a bad movie: A flick this sincerely bad, though, requires genius." —Ernest Hardy, L.A. Weekly
“A whacked-out romp in the 41st century, an acid-trip light show…. Ultra groovy!" —American Cinematheque magazine
“The highest high camp has ever been … seems to have been co-authored by Jules Verne and the Marquis de Sade … 2002: A Space Idiocy." — Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times
Plot, What Plot? In the Swingin’ ’60s it was not uncommon for movies to be made for the express purpose of being watched by audiences stoned off their gourds. One of the better-known examples of this genre stars Jane Fonda in her then husband’s supreme achievement in softcore sci-fi silliness. It is clear from the moment Roger Vadim’s Barbarella begins, with Fonda floating in midair doing a slo-mo striptease in a space suit, that this film has no intention of being taken seriously. But the level of goofiness Barbarella achieves is nevertheless amazing: The spaceship in which Fonda gets nekkid during the main titles is entirely lined in late-’60s Day-Glo orange shag carpet; the computer that plots Barbarella’s course to Delphi Ceti speaks with a mincing lisp; and every one of Jane’s dozens of exotic/erotic costumes looks like it resulted from a collaboration between Bob Mackie and Hugh Hefner.
Sent from Earth in the year 40,000, Jane is assigned to rescue a missing soldier named Duran Duran. But Fonda instead crash-lands on the ice planet Lythion (which looks suspiciously like the dry-ice-and-fog-infested soundstage where Sonja Henie once skated to screen fame). She is greeted by small children with slightly askew ratty wigs plopped on their heads, speaking angry-sounding gibberish. These Children of the Darned attempt to dispatch our heroine using steel-toothed killer dolls. And just when you’re thinking, “What the?!?!" the first of Barbarella’s rescuers comes to her aid: a horribly dubbed Ugo Tognazzi, who asks in return for saving Jane’s life that they “make love the old-fashioned way." If you’re not following this so far, you must not have toked deeply enough before the film started.
Encased in excessive ’60s facial makeup that almost prevents her from expressing any emotion, Fonda is quintessentially vacuous throughout as she traipses through a series of intergalactic escapades. They include flying in the arms of blind angel John Phillip Law, sharing hand-to-hand sex “the modern way" with a codpiece-clad David Hemmings, and trying to deflect the advances of both the aggressively amorous Black Queen and the missing mad genius Duran Duran, whose orgasmic Music Machine is one of the film’s hootiest highlights.
A piece of intentional over-the-top campiness that has aged so poorly it perhaps belongs in a time capsule, Barbarella has been a source of amusement to lovers of bad movies for over thirty-five years—and a continuous source of embarrassment to Jane Fonda, whose serious Women’s Lib attitudes later in life were clearly undermined by this bare-bosomed performance. Asked years later “where her head was at" when she made this, Jane replied, “I don’t know—up my armpit, I guess!" An armpit liberally sprinkled, it appears, with a potent mix of psychedelic ’60s drugs.
Dippy Dialogue
Pygar (John Phillip Law): “An angel doesn’t make love… an angel is love…"
Black Queen (Anita Pallenberg): “Then you’re a dead duck!"
Choice Chapter Stop
Chapter 16 (“Dr. Duran’s Music Machine"): A nude Fonda is “orchestrated" to a musical “climax" by Duran Duran.