She-Wolves of the Wasteland

• (Also known as Phoenix the Warrior and She Wolves of the Wasteland)
• Directed by Robert Hayes
• May 9, 1990 (Portugal)

In a post-apocalyptic world, female warriors battle to determine the fate of the world. And most of them do it in very little clothing.

There truly is nothing good about She-Wolves of the Wasteland (also known as Phoenix the Warrior and also known as She Wolves of the Wasteland because removing the hyphen makes all the difference). This is a low budget attempt at a sexy version of Mad Max. It doesn’t try to be funny or campy-at least not that one could tell. Rather it takes itself far too seriously but because of budget limitations and extremely bad acting it falls short of even guilty pleasure.

Maybe it was meant as a joke. Maybe it was all they had access to. The women are always sporting guns that are far too big for them to be capable of holding. I know the height of none of the actresses but the then current military weaponry that they are handling looks physically awkward for them to deal with. Small women with big weapons.

Early on there are plenty of cheesecake shots for no other reason than to tease the possibility of MORE bare boobs after the reveals towards the beginning. What boobage we do get was obviously added in when somebody realized just how bad this was going to be and decided to appeal to horny teenage boys in the days before internet porn. A kid may not be able to rent The Opening of Misty Beethoven (I looked that up) but they can get this past the guy at the counter.

Persis Khambatta as main villain Cobalt and Kathleen Kinmont as the heroic Phoenix are the two best known attractive people in this whole movie and you will see neither one of them naked. So don’t get your hopes up. I get Khambatta not doing nudity, but Kathleen Kinmont made a career on her sex appeal and her not going topless seems a little weird to me. It will certainly disappoint a great many guys who have had a long-term crush on her. 

That’s not to say the movie is without its good ideas. Attractive women wearing cave bikinis and the occasional pasties aside, it introduces a few intriguing tidbits though the story does so just before the buzzer rings and the credits roll. Such as the implication that the overall villain of the film known as Reverend Mother (Sheila Howard) may have been the only human survivor from the devastation that preceded the story. And it sounded like she was using some type of cloning to repopulate the Earth with mostly women.

That there is an intriguing idea. She is some apparently long lived human though how exactly she survived is fuzzy. In one line she implies all women are there because she has created them in some way. If this had been a moderately better-done movie that would’ve been a very impactful moment. As it is it gets glossed over.

I must say that the action scenes were far better staged than this film deserved. Not feature film quality, but high-quality television of the era level. Whoever choreographed them knew what they were doing and made the most out of the limitations of this particular production. I did minimal checking but could not attach a name as I wanted to give them a shoutout.

Based on the quality action scenes and the potential (accidental) twist at the end I think with a little bit more effort this could’ve been a moderately well-regarded Cult Classic. By toning down the skin and building up the twist in some way perhaps along the path there could’ve been something that made this genuinely special. Oh and it would’ve needed better actors.

Much of what happens is poorly communicated. Such as how much time passes between the opening scene and the main story. That kid grows to five or nine years old. I don’t know and neither will you. And how exact this male child expands on the Reverend Mother’s power as she seems to think is unclear. She has access to advanced cloning technology (possibly) so what does a male birth do for her? Being that she has some authority if not the sole creator of the current human civilization such as it is why does she even want men? There’s been a clear aversion instilled in the population to males as the source of all the evils as well as the current state of the planet. And where do you get a fresh apple in the middle of the desert? It made for a potentially cool moment but makes no sense.

She-Wolves of the Wasteland (also known as Phoenix the Warrior and also known as She Wolves of the Wasteland) is bad acting and bad execution in something that could’ve been at the minimum a guilty pleasure. Not totally necessary to avoid but not something to try to find on streaming.