We haven’t done an old-movie Weekend Review for a while, and summer’s more than half-way done. This one seemed a natural, since it takes place in the far-future world of… 2020!
Battle Queen 2020 (2001), filmed in zero degrees and on zero budget, may well be the worst post-apocalyptic movie of all time– and that’s saying quite a bit.
Cast and Crew
Director: Daniel D’Or
Writers: William D. Bostjancic, Michael B. Druxman.
Julie Strain as Gayle
Jeff Wincott as Spencer
Zehra Leverman as Liotta
Brian Frank as Manson
Bill Baker as Braxton
Jade Kroll as Clare
Paul Rapovski as Joad
Celia Hart as Michelle
Eva Dawn Nemeth as Priscilla
Ken Lemaire as Lincoln
Martina Pernova as Martina
Premise
Disaster has swept the world by 2020! No, not COVID-19, but a cosmic disaster has reduced earth to a darkened place, where snow covers the land and only a few trees, bereft of leaves, poke through. In short, it looks pretty much like winter on cleared land in northern Ontario, where it was filmed. The Elite of this near-future society, known as “The Elite,” spend their time in heated, underground rooms, sipping wine, smoking cigars, and having sex with the pleasure girls, when they’re not stealing the pituitary glands of the underground-tunnel-dwelling dispossessed in order to lengthen their own lives.
The dispossessed live and die in cold tunnels, protecting their pituitaries and perhaps wondering where the Elite get their tobacco and wine. For attractive women, another option exists; they can become pleasure girls to service the Elite. Enter cult figure Julie Strain, a Madame/Bodyguard for the Pleasure Girls, who does a hero turn and joins the Rebel Alliance.
High Points
I derived some pleasure from writing this review.
Low Point
It’s challenging to find just one Low Point in a film that fails on almost every level. Battle Queen is not even good bad cinema. The Lowest Point may be that Battle Queen switches to comic-book panels during certain key scenes—including a couple of the most important scenes in the entire film– that would have cost money to shoot.
The Scores:
Originality: 1/6
Effects: 2/6 The film includes a few effects. They aren’t terrible, but they’re not especially strong.
Production: 1/6
Acting: 2/6 Long tall Julie Strain has an interesting screen presence. I understand why she developed a weird cult following.1 She and the kid (Jade Kroll) are about the most talented members of the cast.
Story: 2/6 If you took a camcorder and filmed some people on snowmobiles, and then spliced the footage together with random excerpts from a very softcore erotic film (think, nothing Game of Thrones wouldn’t do), you’d pretty much have the first half of this movie– except that your film would have better acting and a more coherent plot. Perhaps in deference to the child actor, whose character becomes more important in the second half, the nudity and sexual elements mostly vanish partway through.
Emotional Response: 1/6 If you’re in it for the nudity, you’re obviously pretty desparate you will see, in between the shots of epic badly-choreographed snowmobile battles, Julie Strain’s breasts, women removing lingerie (Victoria’s Secret apparently survives the apocalypse), a “therapeutic” bath, and the inevitable gratuitous lesbian exploitation.
Overall: 1/6 Battle Queen 2020 also includes scenes of surgery without anaesthetic– which is marginally more painful than sitting through this movie.
In total, Battle Queen 2020 receives 10/42
Note
1. Julie Strain, for many years the queen of low-budget cult movies, suffered from retrograde amnesia as the result of a head injury, and lost most of the memories of her youth. That injury contributed, more recently, to the dementia which has removed her entirely from performing.