If you took a camcorder and filmed some people on snowmobiles, and then spliced the footage together with random excerpts from a cross-section of softcore porn films, you’d pretty much have the first half of this movie-- except that your film would have better acting and a more coherent plot. Battle Queen 2020 (2001), a Canadian-made SF flick, 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.

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

Global disasterTM has reduced the world 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 in northern Ontario, where I grew up. Actually, the exterior scenes were filmed in Timmins, Ontario, not so far away from my childhood home.

The Elite of this near-future society, known as "The Elite," spend their time in heated, underground rooms, sipping wine, smoking cigars, and boffing 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. The rebels ride snowmobiles, swing nunchucks, and blow darts. Of course, for attractive women, another option exists; they can become pleasure girls to service the Elite. And that is where the plot, and our heroine, enter.

Former Penthouse model and cult figure Julie Strain plays Gayle, the madame of the Pleasure Girls, who also, conveniently, has been trained as a butt-kicking bodyguard. This, of course, will prove the Elite’s undoing. Gayle has relatives among the dispossessed, among the rebels, and everything she sees gradually turns her towards their cause.

The turning point occurs when the Elite bring Gayle little Clare (Jade Kroll), to prepare her to be the Littlest Pleasure Girl. The moppet brings out the maternal instincts in Gayle, who up until that point has mostly just exhibited her maternal accouterments. Gayle decides to help the girl escape her fate, and, perhaps out of respect for Clare’s tender age, the film’s nude scenes decrease dramatically.

Of course, if you’re in it for the nudity you will have had your share by then. Shots of Julie Strain’s breasts, women removing lingerie (Victoria’s Secret apparently survives the nuclear winter), Julie Strain’s breasts, a therapeutic bath, Julie Strain’s breasts, and the inevitable gratuitous lesbian scene dominate the first half of the film, when we’re not topside watching rebels and Elite toadies buzz about on snowmobiles.

Anyway, Gayle and her newfound sidekick join the Rebel Alliance and.... Tell me you don’t know where this is heading. What shocks is how ineptly and cheaply it heads there.

At times the film switches to static comic book images and voice-over. Unlike Tank Girl, which uses this technique to capture the characters’ comic origins and nature, Battle Queen does this because they didn’t have the budget to film what should have been the movie’s key sequences. Seriously, a critical rescue sequence, and an important scene from the film’s climax both get covered with comic-book images.

Beyond that, we get brief, badly-choreographed snowmobile chase sequences, fight scenes, Julie Strain’s breasts, and surgery without anaesthetic-- which is only marginally more painful than sitting through this film. Seriously, if anything in this review suggests that you want to watch this thing, think again. Even if you’re a sucker for breasts and snowmobiles, there has got to be a better "Boobs and Bombardier" epic out there.




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