Barbarella

Rating:
Summary: The Best Movie Ever!!!
Review: I first saw Barbarella when I was 12. It was on the USA network on July of 1987. I didn't really know what was happening, and I was reading the Sunday comics while watching it. But the scene that got my 12 year old mind's attention was when Barbarella appeared to be naked in some sort of strange box with cables and lights all around it.
The evil doctor appeared to be playing a musical tune on it and the machine started to do a wave motion over her body. She was squealing and smiling and looking nervous and happy at the same time.
The machine was doing something to her, but I wasn't sure what. All I remembered was that whatever it was doing, it was doing it to her naked body.
That scene and the vision of her naked in the machine was my obsession for the next three years as I searched every video store to find the movie. At that time you couldn't find it anywhere. It was out of print and no one seemed to know what I was asking for.
Well to make a long story short, here we are over 15 years later and I have a massive Barbarella collection. I am still obsessed with Barbarella and the scene where she is tortured inside the sex machine. It is still one of the most erotic things I've ever seen in any movie. Even hardcore porn, which really bores me, doesn't top it.
The idea that a woman can be forced to endure incredibly intense yet unbearable sexual pleasure as a form of torture fascinates me.
Even cartoons borrowed the Sex Machine scene. An Anime cartoon called F3: Frantic, Frustrated, and Female showed the girl being subjected to a tireless sex machine being operated through a musical keyboard by a mad scientist.
I am not alone here. There are websites devoted to Barbarella and the sex machine as well as numerous other Barbarella sites.
The dvd only contains the movie and the trailer, nothing more.
I would love to see an Ultimate Edition Barbarella DVD with deleted scenes, extended takes, Jane Fonda commentary, still photos, wide screen and full screen options, all the bells and whistles but I know it will never happen.
I give the dvd four stars because for as popular as this movie has become, the dvd should have had more on it.
This movie still contains the Ultimate Sexual Fantasy for me and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I have for the last 15 years.

Rating:
Summary: Fab....
Review: If you want to see one of the best sci-fi flicks watch this one...

It has set a standard in 60's design and it's utterly corny and jane Fonda is finger lickin' amazing.....

This is one of my faves of all time....

(And yes I like Tarkovsky and Kubrick too.......)

Rating:
Summary: BARBARELLA PSYCHEDELLA.....
Review: Roger Vadim's sexy sci-fi opus starring his then wife Jane Fonda as the outer space adventuress Barbarella opens with the now famous strip-tease scene over the opening credits. Fonda peels out of her space suit accompanied by the sexy sixties pop theme song. She is totally nude but discretely covered here and there by her arm or a letter from the credits. You can still see her breasts anyway. Based on a notorious French comic strip character, this futuristic saga is more of a fetishistic ode by Vadim to Fonda's kittenish sexuality. Through all of her sexual escapades throughout the film, he focuses (like he did with Bardot) on her beauty and body whether nude or clad in skimpy "futuristic" costumes. What stuns me is this got a "PG" on DVD. It's too raunchy for a "PG". Parents should be cautioned before letting their kids see this. Although, older boys will find it a turn on like their fathers did---but it's very campy and a lot of the humor will be lost on today's generation. Still, it's a nice time capsule for what the sixties had going on and Fonda is beautiful.

Rating:
Summary: Can't Go Wrong with Barbarella
Review: If mid sixties kitsch is your thing, you can't go wrong with Barbarella. I show it at parties and eventually it always BECOMES the party. Great art direction and an intelligent performance from a gorgeous Jane Fonda elevate this from sheer T&A drek. Anita Pallenburg makes a great cameo as an evil Empress, and Jane's costumes alone are worth the price of admission. I was a little disapointed with the lack of DVD extras. No widescreen capability, no deleted scenes, no digital remastering, etc. But it is struck from a good print and the movie is so much fun that it reall doesn't matter. You NEED Barbarella!

Rating:
Summary: pop art
Review: Immensely entertaining camp classic from director Roger Vadim.
Jane Fonda is utterly charming as the title character playing her with an innocence and optimism that is completely beguiling.
The opening credit sequence with the wonderful theme song is worth the price of entry alone.Great sets and lovely Panavision photography make this required viewing at least once a month.

Rating:
Summary: A classic, a gem!
Review: What is it about this movie? Partly it's Jane Fonda, possibly at her physical peak and in lots of different sexy outfits (then of course there's the opening sequence). But also, for me, it's the period - a late sixties movie where the hippy ideas of the time have crept into the movie. Ironically, despite the setting, it's this element that contributes to the entertainment value. Even the music (also very good) is strongly sixties, as you'd expect.

Rating:
Summary: hehe
Review: for the longest time i had only seen this film on TV. it had also been a favorite of my mom's as well. (my mom has interesting tastes in movies). so last christmas i bought this as a gift for her. only when i started watching it did i realize the nudity at the beginning with shock! and this movie is rated PG?!? haha!

a great camp classic!

Rating:
Summary: Simply the best camp movie ever!
Review: I remember vividly the first time I saw that film. It was in 1978 and I was only 10 years old. I was trying to find something to watch on television and then, saw the first scene at the beginning where a woman in a space suit strips, ending up completely nude. The scene begins as the space "bubble" on her head gradually lowers, revealing Barbarella's face for the first time. Breathtaking is not strong enough a word. In my opinion, she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen up until that time and I was instantly hooked.

The combination of the music, which is also a very strong element here, in total harmony with the highly satirical tone not to mention those cheesy sets are all dead-on perfect. Everything was put there to create a world where a highly sensual creature like Barbarella could flourish. Jane really knocked all my senses in terms of feminine beauty in this movie. She looks like some living Barbie doll, with breathtaking features and a gorgeous mane of thick blond hair: the perfect sex kitten always eager and ready for sex.

This is a truly wonderful performance from a great actress. She deliberately plays the character as a "bimbo" while letting the audience in on the joke. Here is this very intelligent woman playing some "nymphet" in the most convincing way possible. She ends up sleeping with practically every man she encounters even though the sex is only suggested through some clever images. And all the while, she lets the audience knows in very subtle ways that she's acting in parody mode. That is probably the most interesting aspect of her performance. Even with simple lines like "Oh", "But that's monstrous!", "That's nice", she succeeds in delivering them completely "straight" with just the right amount of tackiness as if to say "don't take any of this seriously, just have a good time...". There are countless classic lines here and I can admit I know them all by heart.

Roger Vadim who also transformed another former wife "Brigitte Bardot" into a sensation in 1957 with "And God Created Woman", did the same trick some 10 years later with Jane. "Barbarella" is an erotic comedy disguised as a bad sci-fi movie. Everything in it is tacky: the clothes, the sets, the plot, the acting... But the big difference between this and a truly bad movie is that it is tacky "on purpose". Therefore, it becomes a camp movie which defined itself as such before any critic could do it. Roger knew exactly what he was doing and succeded on every front.

I must say it is in my top ten list of my favorite movies of all times. I have seen it at least 50 times over the years and for some reason, the movie easily bears the repeated viewings. Sure, the story might seem quite silly to some but that's beside the point. If you view this on the first level, you will probably find it all quite ridiculous and farfetched to the extreme. But if you look at it closer, you'll realize just how well-conceived it is. I won't tell you about the plot as I feel it has been covered already in previous reviews. The plain fact is that the story mainly serves the purpose of displaying Jane as Barbarella in all her youthful glorious beauty in one skimpy costume after another.

I can not recommend this movie enough. If you like camp movies, you will love this one. And even if you don't usually enjoy fanfares created for no other purpose than to entertain the hell out of us, you can at least bask in Jane Fonda's beauty here seen at the age of 29. Just for the chance to stare at that perfect face and body is worth the price alone.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoy the title sequence and then get ready for high camp
Review: "Barbarella" is the infamous 1968 camp classic from Roger Vadim that made Jane Fonda the most fantasized-about woman in the world for a while (I think she was replaced by Raquel Welch, but do not quote me on that one). Of course a decade later Fonda would be attacking her ex-husband for his sexual exploitation of women, but it was certainly pretty much impossible to ever take "Barbarella" seriously. Based on the European comic strip which emphasized the sex at least as much as the science fiction, this film was originally rated X and then censored to get a more commercially viable rating. I think the main problem with this film is that the title sequence, with Fonda doing a weightless strip tease while floating in some sort of giant test tube (?) promises so much more than the film actually delivers. Ultimately, what we have here is pretentious soft porn, and, even with Fonda in her "queen of the galaxy" outfit or cuddling with the blind angel in the loincloth (John Philip Law), it is unrelentingly, um, uninspiring soft porn. Fonda plays it straight, which is why "Barbarella" is much more enjoyable as a camp classic. Otherwise the visually stylish but emotionally devoid sequences are just going to depress you big time. Too bad that flock of killer hummingbirds could not inspire the eight screenwriters to come up with half that many good ideas for this film.

Rating:
Summary: Big Time Ultra-Camp Fun
Review: You can't get much more bizarre than this sexed-up but super-silly saga of an intergalactic secret agent sent to a rebel planet to find a mad scientist named Duran Duran. The story is extremely flimsy and seems to have been created largely in order to showcase new and increasingly strange ways of stripping off most of Jane Fonda's clothes--and in this the film succeeds extremely well, beginning with Fonda's "weightless" striptease over the title credits and finally fetching up with Fonda disrobed by the evil Duran Duran's fiendish orgasmatron. The costumes, sets, and special effets are swinging 60's at their most excessively fab; the cast is so relaxed that you may think they're performing under the influence.

No one in the cast takes this film seriously, and neither should you. BARBARELLA has all the intellectual depth of a pancake, not so much flatly funny as merely amusing and appealing to a truly high-camp sensibility. As cult movies go, however, it rates very high--give a party and show it on a double bill with FLESH GORDON!