Oddball adventure movie post-Conan the Barbarian with modern slang/language, setting up a love triangle for young JJ Leigh between dim warlord Rutger Hauer and rich wannabe-scholar Tom Burlinson (title role in The Time Guardian), both of whom are dicks to her anyway. Sure it’s full of raping and pillaging, and a nun gets conked in the brain, and plague meat is catapulted over the walls, but most of the fun is in guessing Leigh’s intentions as she goes from captor to queen of the gang after they conquer a castle, earning Rutger’s respect by teaching him to eat with a fork, then trying to rescue both of her men during the final showdown.

Rutger vs. Octopus:

Untrustworthy bounty hunter Jack Thompson is in all the big Australian movies I haven’t seen (Breaker Morant, Wake in Fright, Jimmie Blacksmith), Rutger’s ex-pregnant ex-queen Susan Tyrrell specialized in weirdo comedies (Forbidden Zone, Cry-Baby, Big Top Pee-Wee). Brion James pops up a fair amount. Matt Lynch: “an incredibly skeptical story of superstition & tradition giving way to pragmatism & capital. Money, religion, love, sex, class; spoiler alert: power is power, everyone’s full of shit, survival is the only cause.”

Displaced Barbarian Queen Susan:

Brion James fate foretold:

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Starship Troopers (1997)

“Oh Johnny it’s us… it’s home.” All the kids are supposedly South American but no two people can agree how to pronounce “Ibanez.” Holds up, never looks cheap, Verhoeven firing on more cylinders than on the 1985 movie. Neil Bahadur: “One gets the sense that Verhoeven took this god-awful script and flipped it without changing a word.”

Where’d these people end up? Jake “Son of Gary” Busey played murderers in The Frighteners and Contact. Dizzy was a cop in the first four Saw movies. Caspar has only ever appeared in two other movies: Sleepy Hollow and Alita, both of which are due a rewatch, and Denise was in Edmond and Wild Things, which, same. Sgt Clancy “Mr. Krabs” Brown has achieved Vaguely Recognizable status after I’ve seen him in twelve movies. Michael Ironside is so cool that I might actually watch that Bob Odenkirk revenge movie now that I know he’s in it.

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Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Semi-rewatch while assembling furniture, really much better than part two if you’re not looking directly at the screen, despite tediously starting with the final showdown instead of making up a cool secondary pre-credits adventure.