Pamela Anderson was no Humphrey Bogart when she was offered a role that in theory had a lot to do with Rick from Casablanca, but was in practice a flimsy adaptation of a comic book published by Dark Horse. Which milonga would her agent tell her to get her involved in such nonsense. I imagine something like what Elizabeth Berkeley must have been told about showgirls. Both films (Barb Wire and Showgirls) were to cinema what the HSM Erebus and Terror were to sailing ships.
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But while Showgirls is rightly being rehabilitated, Barb Wire is gliding through the Netflix catalog in the wake of the documentary about the most desirable woman alive and at the same time the most reviled: Pamela Anderson. Recording home porn isn’t a crime (nor should it be considered one) but doing Barb Wire is a bit.
Not only is it a synod of post-apocalyptic tropes, it’s also a fossil from a time when comic book movies were neither serious nor important: The Shadow, The Raven, Judge Dredd, Darkman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dick Tracy, Howard Duck, Spawn, Tank Girl and others that will make you roll your nose when you remember them.
I bet that during Barb Wire’s pregnancy more people expressed their opinions than was necessary as the only two things they saw clearly were Pamela’s two boobs, sorry. Seeing Barb Wire in 2023 when the film is set in 2017 is pure cognitive dissonance. The future is always worse than what dystopias sell us, but with no carding, no leather suits, no tuned cars, and no Pamela Anderson. Really: give this teen sadomasochistic pop fantasy a try, it sure is better than this series that will bore you to death but you have to see it because you have to comment on it.
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