9/12/08: Phoenix the Warrior (1987)We’ve
written before about the whole sci-fi genre of pregnant heroines in a post-apocalyptic landscape, with villains either wanting to kill the kid or simply abduct it to serve a totalitarian government. Our big point was that it was lazy to write entries on the topic. Now, however, it seems everyone’s interested in strong she-women who can thrive in harsh climates and stand up to tyrannical forces.
So we better write about
Phoenix the Warrior, or else some site with a readership will think of it first.
Phoenix the Warrior is a cheap and inept film that still manages to be a lot of fun. For one thing, it’s a low-budget
Road Warrior rip-off set in a world full of sexy women and a few dune buggies. The film opens with some doomed gal upending her buggy while trying to escape from the desert village that houses the Reverend Mother. That’s the main villain, and she’s running things in the wake of a biological plague that killed off all the men. You know there aren’t men around because the village is built out of sheet metal and trash bags. We’re not saying we could build a better shack, but we know guys who can do that kind of thing.
Anyway, there are actually two women trying to escape from the Reverend Mother. The other is named Keela. (You can tell she’s a good gal, because all the evil women have names like Neon, Snapper, Mohawk, and Rattail.) A wandering sand trapper named Phoenix (played by a gal who’ll later marry Lorenzo Lamas) helps Keela escape. Once they’re safe in the surrounding Godforsaken desert, Phoenix gets Keela to finally explain why she was being chased by the Reverend Mother’s goonettes.
“Breeders devised a plan to free us from the Reverend Mother,” Keela explains. “I’m with child! A male child!”
Sure enough, the Reverend Mother wants Keela’s kid. As you can see by that creepy graphic above, she’s a scary old hag who’s kept alive by tubes running through her body. It seems the Reverend Mother is planning to use the child’s blood as some kind of vitamin water. As she puts it, “Do you think I’ve spent a lifetime purifying the gene pool for humanity’s sake?” It’s a rhetorical question.
That night, Keela gives birth. She didn’t even look pregnant before. The filmmakers probably just don’t know how to show the passage of time. The Reverend Mother has some kind of baby monitor plugged into her brain, so she knows that Keela’s got a little boy. She sends out her evil assassin Cobalt, but all that comes of that is the slaughter of several nice topless women who like to frolic in waterfalls.
Keela and Phoenix escape—and suddenly it’s five years later, and her son Skyler is running around and learning how to throw ninja stars. Phoenix goes back to the village for some reason, where all the bad gals are still wearing the same clothes and hairstyles. (To be fair, you can’t go changing your hairstyle if your name is Mohawk.) This leads to more dull chases in the desert, briefly livened up when Phoenix and Keela meet the last man alive. He decides to help out the ladies, but don’t get the wrong idea. “I’m only in it for the dune buggy,” he explains.
That might be an intentionally funny line.
Phoenix The Warrior gets weird in its final half hour, with some genuinely inventive touches. For one thing, our heroic trio gets caught by some mutant types called Rezules. They’re working for the Reverend Mother, who takes the kid and leaves Keela and Phoenix to be used by the Rezules as a religious sacrifice. It turns out that the Rezules worship television. That’s why their holy resting place has skeletons on La-Z-Boys. There’s one Rezule doing a Gregorian chant of old TV shows while another brandishes a knife and prepares to send the gals’ souls to the airwaves.
Keela and Phoenix get saved, of course. Now we’re going to reveal the ending, because it’s the only reason to write about this film. Keela and Phoenix break into the Reverend Mother’s chambers to rescue Skyler and that last man on Earth. To their horror, Keela and Phoenix discover that the Reverend Mother can telepathically control their actions. Our heroines are forced to kneel before her, and the Reverend Mother mocks them for not realizing that she created all the women in the village.
The old hag gloats for a while about how helpless all women are in her presence. Keela (who’d go on to be a Playmate) then figures out that she may not be capable of harming her inventor, but there’s nothing to stop her from destroying the machinery that keeps the Reverend Mother alive. So that’s what Keela does, and there’s your happy ending—and a pretty neat metaphor for modern feminism.
Make it your own: It seems that old VHS copies of
Phoenix The Warrior are more expensive than
DVD copies of the movie under the title of
She-Wolves of the Wasteland. That’s surprising, since we’re pretty sure that the DVD has some footage not in the VHS version. We’ll be sure to look further into that important matter.
We’ve mentioned what certain members of the cast went on to do in their careers. Let’s also note that the star of
Phoenix The Warrior—at least, according to the billing—is Persis Khambatta as Cobalt. She even wrangled a producer credit for her participation. Sadly, she was still in career recovery after starring in
Megaforce after her big role as the bald alien babe in
Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Even sadder, she’d die in 1998 at the age of 49.
