Thoughts on Barb Wire

    On Criterion, they are showing a selection of Razzie-winning movies, movies that got voted as the worst movies, and I watched Barb Wire from 1996, the Pamela Anderson dystopian superhero movie where she’s in a tight bustier, talks in a bored, annoyed monotone the entire movie, and the plot shamelessly rips off Casablanca, where her ex-boyfriend is married to a woman that is a fugitive, and they are trying to escape the Nazi-like government during the Second American Civil War in 2017.

    Pam Anderson is Barbara, aka Barb Wire (and it kept making me chuckle anytime someone calls her “Miss Wire), who runs her warehouse club where an industrial band does a cover of Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot,” and the totalitarian government does retinal scans on people to check their identity and does weird electroshock torture on people that only just seems to turn them on.

    It’s easy to just crap on the movie, and I can’t really defend it as good, but some stuff I genuinely liked. I liked Jack Noseworthy as her brother who was blinded in the war, he was fun with a sarcastic sense of humor, and I cared more about their brother-sister relationship than her past relationship with her blank slate of an ex-boyfriend. The movie is set in 2017, but clearly takes more of the 90s industrial look of raves and hard rock and bondage clothes. Clint Howard is fun to watch because he knows when he’s in B-movies and doesn’t phone it in, he just has fun, especially in this scene. And in the action finale, Pam Anderson’s stunt double clearly was putting in a lot of work doing fight scenes on construction equipment in tight clothing, and it was more of a creative stunt scene to watch.

    And from reading the IMDB trivia, the whole running joke with her getting pissed at being called Babe was from the original comics: “The entire "Don't call me, Babe" leitmotif of Barb Wire comes from the original advertising for the Barb Wire Dark Horse comic book, in which she said those words to differentiate herself from a buxom, slightly airy comic book heroine named Babe by John Byrne.”

    So this was dumb, but not that bad to watch, just kind of schlocky and an attempt for Pam Anderson to star in a big-budget movie, since her previous movies were mostly forgettable straight to video erotic thrillers. She did star in the fun campy TV series V.I.P. after this, which was much more tailored for her style of self-aware comedic skills.