Legion of Iron

Vampy Erika Nan chews the scenery up in this! As the sexy, evil "Queen Diana" who lords it over her subterranean desert gladiator/gambling liar, she plays the deadly bitch broadly (heh heh) and with obvious relish! The twisted villainess will have most male viewers drooling!

High-school football player, Billy, is merely trying to get in the pants of his frigid girlfriend who's having none of it when they're both kidnapped. He's to be a gladiator fighting for the whims of millionaires in an underground bunker, and she to be a virgin sex slave. All the while plotting to escape from the prison and it's campy queen bee. What could've been a fun crappy campy movie somehow misses that mark and ends up a badly dated, lame, mess of a film. Badly acted characters with bizarre motivation and clunky dialog made the movie feel longer than it actually was.

Back when Video Stores were still a thing, they needed product to fill their shelves, and movies like this were it. The premise of this film is that a football star and his girlfriend are kidnapped to participate in some bizarre gladiatorial games. After being trained in some Montages by a Wise Black Man, he is ready to fight gladiators twice his size and skill level. We don't ever get full frontal nudity, and the shootout scenes are done on the cheap. But there is a very big sequence at the end with lots of explosions and the Dominatrix character strafing the getaway truck from a hang glider. No, I'm not making that last part up.

Here's a premise dear to the 15-year-old boy in all of us. A high school football star is kidnapped with his girlfriend and forced to fight duel-to-the-death gladiator matches run by a sexy dominatrix! It just doesn't get any better than this. As expected, the resulting movie is one of those fun-bad affairs, with hokey dialog, cardboard sets, and hopelessly inadequate casting, but if it were any better, it'd actually be worse. (Still, one wishes it had shown a bit more skin since there are ample opportunities for displays of this sort.) Kevin Walsh makes an enthusiastic though implausible hero. He doesn't look tough enough to win a food fight back at Sweet Valley High and yet here he is knocking off muscle-bound gladiators and subduing prison guards who want him to, shall we say, bend over in the showers and pick up the soap. Especially worth noting is the outfit he wears in the arena -- a silvery hot-pants affair such as might be donned by a drag-queen at a Salute-to-Cher Festival.