“Red Sonja” is a shameless rip-off of the “Conan” movies that steals virtually every scene from those films. However, what is even worse is that plenty of the people involved in the making of the original pictures are attached to this as well.

After ignoring the sexual advances made to her by Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman “Conan The Barbarian”), Red Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen “Beverly Hills Cop II”, “Cobra”) is raped and her family is murdered. After surviving this horror, Sonja sets out on a quest to become the best swordswoman ever so she can kill Gedren. She must also save the world before an evil energy ball plunges the planet into chaos. Along the way she meets lots of strange individuals.

The acting in this film couldn’t be much more wooden. Brigitte Nielsen is alright as Red Sonja and she is pretty much just a female Conan. Arnold Schwarzenegger (“Commando”, “Total Recall”) is horrible as Kalidor, who definitely resembles his Conan character. Queen Gedren is very dull to say the least as she seems incredibly blinded to the fact that her evil will cause her certain death and I don’t like the way she consistently tries to get Sonja to be her lover because it seems very forceful.

“Red Sonja” will no doubt be seen as rather homophobic and intensely sexist. This is a film that is unoriginal, will offend some demographics and all-round just isn’t entertaining. This is one of the blandest sword and sorcery films I’ve ever seen as the plot and many sequences are blatantly taken from the “Conan” films. None of it is done with any attempt to improve or even match the “Conan” pictures. “Red Sonja” isn’t quite painful to sit through and it does have some comedic value but it is a terrible movie directed by Richard Fleischer, who gave us the bad “Conan The Destroyer”.