Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
In the 70's drive-in, can you picture yourself watching a Roger Corman movie?, 25 Nov 2007
No need to be put off by this rating I personally love this movie. I am exploitation -enthusiasts and would have rated it much higher but instead I save myself for being a bias. Fashionable feminism, utterly unwarranted nudity, catfights, overdramatic dialogue are all right here in "The Arena," a lavish spectacle (by New World standards) in which the audience is treated to Caged Heat in gladiator drag. Of course, most DVD buyers will probably want to snag this one up for Pam Grier, doing by far the most explicit and unabashed nudity of her career. Luckily, it also happens to be quite a fun film.
The Roman Empire was at its height (and right after the Spartacus revolt, as one minor character is quick to point out), the Romans took delight in pillaging other cultures, slaughtering innocents, and taking the most beautiful women back with them as servants. Bodicia (Margaret Markhov) of Brittany is the token blonde goddess captive, while Mamawi (Grier) is a tribal woman; miraculously, both apparently know how to speak Latin. Along with two other women, Bodicia and Mamawi are subjected to such indignities as public hose-downs and hand waiting on Roman political slobs. When the girls start a nasty catfight (the first of many over the top highlights), the nasty Romans, headed by the questionably named, token gay comic character Priscium (Sid Lawrence), decide that their new acquisitions might make for more entertainment in the gladiator arena. However, after the women witness the brutal treatment of the male gladiators, who are promised their freedom and summarily executed, they decide that perhaps this isn't the most efficient system of government and plan an escape. Not surprisingly, the last third of the film is devoted to the female "jailbreak," filled with plenty of sword clashing and spilled blood. The male contingent of our cast is a sad lot, though much of their performance is damaged irreparably simply by the obvious dubbing. No amount of dubbing, however, could excuse Daniele Vargas' overacting as Timarchus. His eyerolling, sheet-chewing scene when he condemns Septimus to death could likely be used as proof for the (now discredited) theory that Rome went mad from drinking water poisoned by lead piping. Sid Lawrence can be forgiven, he was told to be a cliché as Priscium, and he is a cliché. Paul Muller's Lucilius, however, is a nicely restrained, steady performance by a pro.
Markhov and Grier make a nice team after their previous stint on Corman's Black Mama, White Mama, and visually, the film looks terrific. Though credited to Steve Carver (Big Bad Mama - Special Edition, Lone Wolf McQuade), directorial chores were reportedly handled mostly by the film's cinematographer, Joe D'Amato (Aristide Massaccesi), who later found a profitable career helming horror films (The Grim Reaper) and a slew of highbrow Rocco Siffredi hard porn titles. And believe it or not, this was edited by Joe Dante, long before Corman gave him his big break as director of Piranha. For Grier and women in prison fans, the decision to pick this one up should be a no brainer.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Set Designs, 3 Jun 2007
Pam Grier steals the show in this movie. Overall, the acting is pretty dire and the plot has one or two holes in it. However, the set designs are especially good and Joe Dante was the film editor in an early job and the quality of the camerawork shows. So what we have here is a an extremely good looking movie with lots of nice touches (a wooden cart here, a platoon of Roman soldiers there and so on - very carefully crafted to those of us inside the business) and yet clearly done on a very small budget.
No great shakes, but it's a pleasant enough movie - a good way to spend a couple of hours and Pam Grier and Sara Bay both look great.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Good fun, if a bit dated, 12 Mar 2009
Made in 1973, The Arena is at the tail end of "B" Movies; an outing to the cinema used to give you two features, (A and B), together with trailers for future presentations, some adverts and a cartoon or two. At some point, which we'll leave to an historian to pinpoint, the main or A presentation got longer and the B movie was squeezed out. I saw The Arena at the cinema when it was released - no idea now if it stood alone or whether it was packaged with another film - and I wanted to see it again, remembering it (from a third of a century ago) as quite well done.
The movie opens with a placid druidic scene, with Margaret Markov as the priestess, being violently interrupted by Roman soldiers who murder most of her followers and imprison her as "a nice piece worth saving for the market." If that seems cheesy, the violent interruption of an opening placid scene is standard movie-fare; think of Blood Diamond [DVD] [2006]in which exactly the same technique is used. We then see the same thing happen to Pam Grier at the opposite end of the Roman sphere of influence and both actresses appear together on the auction block in Brundisium where they are purchased (with two others) for the arena of the title.
What I liked about the arena is that it is presented as a down-at-heel out-in-the-sticks venue trying to capture an audience from the area it serves. The time period is vague, but the Spartacus revolt is within living memory and Caesar rules in Rome, so 72-44BC. The girls are put to work, mixture of kitchen duties and serving the patrons in the arena. Ethnic tensions in the kitchen lead to a catfight and the management have the bright idea of training the girl-fighters as gladiators for the novelty value.
The first fight is a comedic farce; the second results in the loser's death and the third female contest is the violent prelude to the slaves breaking out and thence to the film's climax.
OK, it's a B movie; but cleverly done. All the shots are close-in, which minimises background scenery, but that which we can see is well set up and dressed. We never see a wide angle of the arena of the title, for example. Some costumes look machine-made - this is a routine problem in older movies and particularly with the gowns of the ruling class - and the way soldiers and gladiators are dressed reminds me, as does a lot of the acting, of Italian cinema. I wondered if this had been made in Italy with the Californian leading ladies flown in; there's no clue on the credits so it could have been made in California, like so many other movies set elsewhere. The "lazy-lips" style of speech by all the support cast lends itself to easy dubbing, so I had to look carefully to decide whether they had intoned their lines in English or Italian in the first place.
It's easy to critisise 1970s production values, but pointless. What they have handed down to us is, if you liked Gladiator [DVD] [2000], a cheap evening at home. There are some nice touches, such as when, during a fight to the death, the girls notice that the audience isn't watching. I suspect that the movie as presented on DVD has been clipped for length. I have two mental images from seeing this at the cinema that do not appear in this DVD. Their inclusion would not have altered the film's classification, so I suspect that, at some point, the running time has been reduced by a few minutes.
For me, this was a nostalgic purchase, but I wanted to see it again rather than just remembering it, in the context of my current work. You will be disappointed by this title if you want to be cynical and disrespectful to older cinematic work made without special effects, but if you sit back and let this DVD entertain you, I think you will have a good evening.
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