2/10
Like a cry for mental help
15 October 2010
Warning: Spoilers
Man, the people who made this need some therapy. Not because Slaves of the Realm is a cheap, boring piece of crap. There are plenty of movies like that. No, psychological counseling is in order because I don't think I've ever seen a skin flick so derailed by obvious and unresolved fetishes. Most of the film only makes sense as the product of the unacknowledged and unformed sexual hang ups of its filmmakers. It's like a foot fetish video made by people who have foot fetishes but don't understand what that means.

The plot, as best I can piece it together, involves a long ago kingdom made up of leftover sets from The Land of the Lost. The king has died and his son has ascended to the throne. By tradition, the new king is entitled to select his bride from among the daughters of the nobility. After a pagan priestess (Rena Mero) consecrates these scantily clad princesses, who are repeatedly called such even though they're not technically princesses, the young women are kidnapped by the soldiers of the king.

It seems the new king's sister Briana (Daniela Krhut), who speaks with an thick Eastern European accent that no one else in the cast even tries to approximate, has secretly overthrown her brother. She has had the princesses abducted so they can be put to work in the royal silver mine and so they can be forcibly mated with the imprisoned and drugged up king. Briana's plan, if you can call it that, is to get the princesses pregnant one by one, marrying them to her brother and then killing them off after they give birth. Briana would then become guardian of the children, who would be the heirs to the wealth of their mothers' families. Briana has also abducted a bunch of peasant girls to work in the silver mine and as breeding stock for her army. Oh, and Briana is also bi-curious and enjoys using a candlestick to rape virgins. Are you sort of getting a fetishy feel from the story?

Eventually, the priestess, the young king (Ryan MacDonald) and one of the princesses (Lucie Vondracek) escape from Briana's clutches. They are almost instantly recaptured and then Briana then decides, for nothing more than her own amusement, to engage the priestess in a sword fight with the future of the kingdom hanging in the balance. If you're too stupid to figure how that sword fight ends, you really shouldn't be allowed to vote or serve on juries.

There's basically nothing good about Slaves of the Realm. Rena Mero is so terrible an actress, they would have been better off replacing her with a blonde wig on a mannequin head while one of the film crew read all her dialog from off camera. The alleged action scenes look like they were choreographed by a blind Quaker. Every single spoken word feels like someone rubbing a cheese grater over your ears.

Worse than all of that, however, is how little nudity or otherwise lewd behavior is in Slaves of the Realm. There're lots of girls in short tunics crawling around in the silver mine. There're lots of girls in short tunics getting flogged. There're lots of Sapphic implications. But as for women actually getting naked? There's maybe 4 minutes of that in the entire 99 minute film and it doesn't happen until the movie is two-thirds over. They spend at least 10 minutes on and endless scene where Briana badly sword fights a string of men, but there's less than half of that time devoted to fully unclothed female flesh.

That's because these filmmakers clearly aren't interested in nude women or heterosexual intercourse. That isn't what trips their trigger. These guys clearly get off on watching women being subjugated and brutalized, almost exclusively by other women . Which is bad enough, but these filmmakers also can't apparently admit to themselves that's what they like. So they just fumble around the topic, subjecting the audience to endless scenes of Briana's malevolent bi-curiosity and even more endless scenes of sweaty young women in the silver mine, but only briefly offering up any soft core nude scenes.

Skin flicks are a very low quality genre to begin with. Something like Slaves of the Realm, which has all of the flaws but virtually none of the appeal of even the average skin flick, descends into a whole new underworld of suck.
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