What can one expect of a film about raving amazons from 1973? I expected something really terrible but it wasn’t at all as bad as I expected. The basic story of a competition between two female leaders is kind of silly, but it has not at all the campy weirdness one would expect with all these big breasted women doing naked oil wrestling, throwing javelin, riding on horses, sleeping together, fighting, et cetera.

There are even sincere dialogues, nice looking sets and mass fight scenes. It has the looks of an expensive film. The story line of Antiope finding affection of a man, and being troubled by it, is not very interesting, but believable in a sense, also thanks to the reasonable acting by Angelo Infanti. All other acting is not very good, but never the cringing kind of bad.

But how to watch this? It is not too bad to get the predicate ‘camp’. It is not funny enough to be a comedy (only a slight bit, when women are torn between aversion and lust for men). And it is certainly not factual to be enjoyed as an historical drama, as many others already have pointed out.

And what about an erotic film? There are pretty women in it, often naked. But the characters themselves HARDLY seem to enjoy sexuality. They have to ENDURE it in order not to die out. Which was perhaps the whole joke of the film, I guess, but only director Terence Young could have told us that.