![]() ![]() When the camera pans out, we see that this isn’t just Anderson dancing twirling around for the audience’s titillation, but Barb Wire doing a strip tease for a room full of piggish men at a Steel Harbor club. Eventually, her boobs just fall right out, nearly taking an eye or two with them. ![]() The camera focuses on Anderson for a good couple of minutes as her shoddy blonde extensions and leather corset get soaked. The narration of the film’s exposition ends by telling us that Steel Harbor’s lawless island is the perfect place for “a new kind of mercenary.”Ĭut to what is perhaps one of the most gratuitous opening credits sequences ever put to celluloid: Anderson (credited here as Pamela Anderson Lee) gyrating and whipping her hair while being hosed down with water. Pamela Anderson’s Redemption: We Should Be Ashamed of How She Was TreatedĪs if its ludicrous premise wasn’t enough, Barb Wire opens with a Star Wars-esque vertical text scroll that should send you running to Netflix while the movie is still streaming there until the end of the month. ![]() Even with all its technical achievements, Barb Wire wouldn’t even be worth remembering if it weren’t for Anderson. It’s packed full of whiplash-inducing fight scenes and fantastic set pieces, but its bottom-line bombshell is what makes the film so damn delectable. In short: it was a catastrophic flop.īut like a fair amount of critically reviled stinkers, Barb Wire’s shocking schlock holds up far better than it has any right to nearly three decades later. By the time it was wheeled out of cinemas on a stretcher, a critical panning and negative audience buzz had it returning under $4 million for its total worldwide gross. Barb Wire took a nosedive the minute it hit theaters, returning just a paltry $1 million opening weekend-a fraction of its $9 million budget. Instead of helping the film, Anderson’s mega-fame hemorrhaged it. With Anderson-the actress, activist, and philanthropist-permeating the news cycle in a way she hasn’t in years thanks to her new Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, and her unconventional memoir, Love, Pamela, it’s time to revisit and reevaluate Barb Wire for the campsterpiece that it really is. Well, except for the one remaining free city of Steel Harbor-home of the gun-toting, skintight-leather-wearing titular hero, Ms. The film, adapted from the Dark Horse comic book series, is set in a not-so-distant, apocalyptic future where the United States democracy has been overthrown, leaving every city under martial law. No doubt that “sex” came before “narrative cohesion” on the list of importance when developing Barb Wire. When Barb Wire was around, the world fell away. Despite being very gay, I found its wanton leather-and-boob combo perforated my burgeoning queerness forever. That sensual ceramic might have been my very first introduction to sex. The sight is burned into my brain as plainly as the ink from the pens that the mug housed, which stained its white rim. It’s the sight of Pamela Anderson, emblazoned on a promotional coffee mug for her 1996 film Barb Wire, sitting atop the checkout counter at a local video rental store. It’s neither good nor bad, just there, always present by my side. No good solution without a new scan, which probably was not an option for Turbine here.There is one unusual, particularly vivid image from my childhood that stands out to this day. If they leave it in, people will say it looks noisy and artificial, if they DNR some of it people will say it looks waxy and artificial. Turbine, without access to a better source element, is stuck between a rock and a hard place as neither option of leaving in all the EE or DNRing some of it away it will be all that great looking. Early in Blu-ray life Universal seemed to be adding DNR to soften the sharpening artifacts but more recently they have just been leaving the EE'd image as-is. Neither route is ideal and each has its own disadvantages. So, either you can display the image with the sharpening, or you can add DNR to try and soften the artifacts the sharpening causes. Barb Wire appears to be one of those masters. And they don't want to spend the money to do new scans for these properties. Yeah, I think basically the problem is Universal has a bunch of old 1080p masters with lots of irreversible sharpening that was baked in for DVD. Talk about one step forward and two steps back. So the Turbine disc is more sharpened but less DNR'ed. ![]()
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