Customer Reviews

Barb Wire

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I went into this film not expecting much, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

It's very easy to poke fun at an obvious target like Ms Anderson, who, lets face it, has more than her fair share of knockers, but this film shows what she is capable of doing on the big screen.

The storyline is nothing special, admittedly, and infact there are a couple of obvious boobs in it, but if you're prepared to look over these (admittedly large) issues then the film is enjoyable. At times it's quite surprisingly emotional - I used more than a couple of tissues whilst I was watching it!

All in all, this gets a cautious thumbs up. As Pamela's on-screen b'f Del Trotter might say - "luvverly jubblies".

The Blu-ray edition is the 98 minute rated (theatrical) version, not the 100 minute uncut version available on DVD. Also, the Blu-ray includes none of the special features that you get with the DVD. Very disappointing.

Wow. Now this is not good. However, the movie sets its level right away, by having a stripping, dancing wet Barb (Anderson) already in the introduction of the movie. So, there you have what this movie is all about. Sure you get some violence, explosions and bad costumes as a bonus. Clearly, there is no relevant story in the movie, all revolves around (Barb) to show her off in different ways. The mentioned costumes are almost offending to the audience. Whoever responsible for them clearly did not work very hard. Barb competes with herself to wear some leather-thing that shows off as much as possible, but actually must be considered well dressed as compared to other ladies. The villains wear something that bear a striking resemblance to nazi-uniforms. Well sure, we know who's the bad guys, thank you. And some other people wear broken calculators and other piece of machinery that you'll find in a scrap-heap as hats, and are automatically dressed up like guys from the future. If it was this easy to make a good movie, I could have made it myself. Fortunately it is not, and Barb Wire is not a good movie.

But, and this is a mysterious but, I actually didn't get bored out of my mind and switched off. The movie actually, in some way, had some small piece of entertainment value throughout that made me stay. And that something, whatever it was, is what ultimately saves the movie from being complete junk.

So, if you have absolutely nothing else to do, you may want to watch this one, once. You may get some ideas how to (or not to) dress for the next masquerade.

...with the opening scene; Pam's twins! It was a decent plot (but who is watching this movie for a plot?) with decent action and decent acting. The twins however were at their best!!!

The 1996 Pamela Anderson vehicle "Barb Wire," her supposedly logical transition to superstardom on the silver screen, bombed at the box office. The vivacious blonde bounced back, of course, but the verbal jabs directed at this vanity picture must have hurt on some level. What I don't understand after I recently viewed this film is why so many people bashed it. Perhaps it concerned one of those overexposed celebrity issues, that people wanted to see her fail after seeing her so often in the tabloids and on television. I know I cannot stand the sycophantic blather about celebrities, so seeing one of the anointed crash and burn every now and then provides some comfort. But in the case of "Barb Wire," I think a reassessment is at hand. This movie is far from objectionable when viewed within the context of its genre: "Barb Wire" essentially falls into the post-apocalyptic genre, a cinematic category in which most entries are extremely low budget potboilers that appeal to a male fan base. The emphasis in these types of movies is on special effects, quirky ideas, and beautiful women. "Barb Wire" meets all of these criteria quite nicely. It looks like director David Hogan had a hefty budget to play around with, and he certainly put the money in the right places as well: "Barb Wire" sports lots of big explosions and copious gunplay.

Pamela Anderson plays Barbara Kopetski, known as Barb Wire to her clientele at the Hammerhead Inn in Steel Harbor, who is a former soldier working as a bar owner when she isn't out bounty hunting. The year is 2017 and America is in the throes of a second civil war, with Steel Harbor the only "free city" left in the United States. The warring factions in this conflict, although never elaborated on as much as I would have liked, seems to be a fascist, right wing dictatorship called the Congressional Directorate and a more populist faction called the United Front. Barb once fought against the Congressionals until an event in the battle for Seattle soured her on the idea of morals and choosing sides. She now spends her days playing hardball at her bar, bantering with her headwaiter, and caring for her blind brother. Just keeping up with payments to the corrupt chief of police and his thugs keeps Barb endlessly busy, along with her frequent encounters with the sleazy bail bondsman Schmitz. Life in war torn America is tough.

Unbeknownst to Barb, problems back in the ruins of Washington, D.C. threaten to upset her lucrative business. The Congressional Directorate initiated a virus program called Red Ribbon with the help of a female scientist named Corrina Devonshire. This weapon, derived from the HIV virus, can wipe out the United Front areas in less than twelve hours. Unfortunately for the fascists, their doctor defected to the resistance, changed her appearance through plastic surgery, and is now headed to Steel Harbor with some type of special contact lenses that can hide resistance fighters from identification scans. Barb wants nothing to do with this rogue scientist, her resistance friends, or anyone else who wants something for nothing from her. Predictably, Barb soon finds herself in the middle of a conflict between Congressional thugs headed by the notorious thug Colonel Pryzer and the local resistance fighters who still maintain an ideological hold on her brother. The whole thing boils down to massive amounts of gunfire, big booming explosions, and lots of shots of Pam strutting around in skintight outfits. For a post-apocalyptic movie, "Barb Wire" works overall despite failing on a few critical levels.

"Barb Wire" hinges on whether you accept the idea of Pamela Anderson as a ruthless bounty hunter capable of beating even the toughest guys into submission. This is a tough call. Sometimes Anderson pulls it off, but more often than not she doesn't and this hurts the film the most. Put a Sigourney Weaver in this role and it would have been a winner, but a rail thin woman with a big blonde coif and a waist you could wrap one hand around? Nope. Fortunately, we do see Udo Kier in a minor role, along with Steve Railsback as the unbalanced Pryzer and the ever-reliable Clint Howard as the smarmy Schmitz. Ultimately, the acting isn't nearly as bad as many entries in this film genre.

Another problem with "Barb Wire" concerns the plot. The people behind this film tried to do too much with it. There are so many subplots going on at once that it becomes slightly irritating trying to follow the various threads. Plot holes abound, for example Devonshire's claim that she developed Red Ribbon and wiped out Topeka, Kansas with it. If the virus worked and the Congressionals tested it, why not simply use the virus to destroy Steel Harbor and the rest of the United States? Why waste time tracking down this scientist if you could simply use the virus and solve the problem? Moreover, Barb constantly claims she wants nothing to do with anyone unless it is on her own terms. It is because Barb doesn't give anyone what they want that leads to the trouble in the first place. A smarter person would do a small favor just to keep problems away.

Despite a few difficulties, "Barb Wire" does exactly what this type of film should do: blow stuff up, show some pretty women, and sport a high body count. Fans of the genre who can look past its myriad flaws will find plenty to like with this movie. The DVD includes a trailer, cast bios, and expanded footage of the risqué introductory scenes (you will know which scenes when you see it).

This video is just not good. I rented it, thinking it would be so bad it would be funny. It's just not good. I also figured it would be sexy, what with Pam Anderson starring in it. But it's not. She's not photographed very well, and "strips" all the way down to a full length dress in her strip scene. The story is bad and the acting stinks. Don't bother with this video.

Garbage, total trash. There should be a rating less than 1 star for this stuff...

Okay - the plot IS a rip-off of CASABLANCA, and it's cheesey beyond belief. But this is one of those so bad it's good movies that you wish MST3K would get a hold of! It's fun. Pamela Anderson Lee looks great, and you see flashes of her self-knowing good nature which was exploited in VIP. The DVD contains the UNRATED version with extra nudity and a complete version of the opening credits where Pam is suspended from a swing and sprayed down with big hoses. The soundtrack is pretty cool too including covers of funk hits like "Word up!" and "Spill the Wine". It's BARBARELLA for the 90s!

Pam Anderson Lee gets her big screen debut in "Barb Wire". A story about a government controled Earth except Steel City. Barb must help retrieve some special contact lenses that will enable people to sneak past the government's retina scans.

An adventure movie starring Pamela Anderson, sometimes clothed in little more than a bubble bath? This has got to be a trick-question right? From the sound of it, you'd think that reviews of this flick would tell you that the movie has a surprise to it - that there's something here besides Anderson's unbelievable body and the hopelessly clueless villains and even side-kicks who must be reminded not to call our heroine a "babe"; that the plot holds at least as many surprises as "Casablanca" which it shamelessly rips off from; and that it's either fully concious of its ludicrousness and manages to either highlight the humour or untapped drama of the situation.

Instead, this flick seems to spend most of its time reminding you how little there is to it - the villains wouldn't last a second in a decent movie - while taking itself incredibly seriously. As everybody knows, this flick riffs on "Casablanca" about a wartime resistance leader's efforts to escape Nazi occupation for America. In "Barb Wire", the resistance leaders are trying to escape a fascist America for free-Europe, though it looks like they'll be happy just to escape this movie. The stunts are painfully unspectacular, the script and supporting characters (especially a black-market kingpin meant to suggest the amiably corpulent Sidney GreenStreet) agonizingly unfunny and its vision of a fascist America seem redolent in its hypocrisy given that this flick seems to cater to a fascist mentaity of its own (characters who don't rise from their archetypes; violence, objectification of women - no matter how much power they seem to have). This was a follow-up to "TimeCop" which approached a very simple subject and more or less suceeded (how to make Ron Silver as detestable as possible - and then how to make killing him look as satisfying as possible). In short, there's nothing you won't see of Pam that you couldn't find on her home movies. Even had her private videos been entirely wholesome, they would have surpassed this movie in which Anderson's chief expression is a well deserved frown of utter disgust to her audience.