Remembering Barb Wire

With the Pamela Anderson film The Last Showgirl recently getting critical claim, and even Oscar buzz (but alas, no actual nominations) it seems a more than usually opportune time to remember her shot at the cinematic big time way back in 1996--Barb Wire.

As one might guess from how long ago that was, and how she hasn't exactly been in a lot of movies since, the film was a flop on its release in May 1996, just before the start of the summer movie season that gave us the original Twister, Independence Day and the first Mission: Impossible movie. Still, Barb Wire did become a cult hit in time, and it is not hard to see why. Even at the time Roger Ebert, in his far from rave review, acknowledged the film's "high energy level, and . . . sense of deranged fun," and how it bespoke just how much effort and craft the makers really did put into a comparatively low-budgeted ($9 million) B-movie that made for a rather more than passable piece of sci-fi action, assembled efficiently and tightly and with some flair.

Today the movie also has an interest as the kind of superhero film we used to get much more often then than now, and not just its efficiency and briskness compared with today's lumbering spectacles costing orders of magnitude as much. There is, too, its utilizing material drawn from outside the DC and Marvel A-lists, and indeed from outside DC and Marvel altogether (Barb Wire is a Dark Horse comics character, brought to you by the folks who also gave us The Rocketeer, and The Mask), the movie's being thoroughly R-rated (and not just for the copious violence, profanity and ribald humor)--and at the same time its being jokey and "meta" enough that I imagine many of those who really remember the movies of the '90s wonder at the fuss over Deadpool. After all, would you believe that for the plot we get a gender-switched pastiche of Casablanca in which Pamela is in the role of Rick, and Bobba Fett is in the position of Ilsa in a Kickpuncher-ish version of the then distant-seeming date of 2017?