Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 8:0	Budget Medium

All in all, I think I'm rooting for the Alligator Queen in this one.

A meteor crashes to Earth and a wizard makes a sword out of it with his bare hands. We then switch to a ceremony where a young man is being sent off to the Alligator Queen's lair where she immediately has PG sex with him. This is followed by yet another ceremony, this one seems to be a wedding. We switch back to the Queen who commands a warrior to break up the ceremony and bring the groom to her. Hopping on the nearest boulder, the warrior complies and soon is fighting the entire town. After kicking the crap out of dozens of people, the bad guy ends up facing the bride who turns out to be the only person in town who can give him a decent fight. Then our hero shows up and admonishes the bad guy for killing innocent people. They fight but the bad guy manages to get away with the groom whom he delivers to the Queen and they immediately have sex. The good guys and bad guys fight several more times and the bride and the good guy recover the titular sword and confront the Queen only to be captured. The bride is tied up and the good guy has sex with the Queen but eventually overcomes her spell and takes on her boy harem. Eventually he stabs an Alligator statue causing the Queen to die and the cave to collapse. Our hero then rides off into the sunset.

I've mentioned that some strange shit comes out of Japan in the way of movies. Apparently the Philippines have their own brand of weirdness. For a movie with an insatiable queen who taxes the local villages for boy toys, there is little nudity. In fact, none. Though we do get to see one guy's butt entirely too clearly. The Alligator Queen writhes around on various couches fully clothed pretending to have sex with various guys. It seems she is able to put people under a spell that makes them do what she wants. As she mostly seems to want to have sex, I am not sure how potent the spell has to be. She is the only woman in the movie to have sex and pretty much the only person who seems to want it. The bad guy does ask for her "blessing" which turns out to mean "have sex with me". As I said, there is no nudity and the sex is very tame but oddly there are a lot of sex scenes. When we are introduced to the Queen, she immediately initiates a bit of an orgy featuring her and about 8 guys. Before she orders the bad guy to go get the groom she does another guy. Of course, once the groom arrives she does him, then the bad guy and then the good guy. I am not sure when she gets around to her nefarious plans, she seems to have a pretty full schedule as it is. Apparently the censorship in the Philippines has varied over the years but is similar to the American version. You can film what you want, but can't show or advertise NC-17 films (or whatever their equivalent is). I am sure that theater owners over there put the same economic pressure on filmmakers to make movies with the largest target audience (PG-13). There is almost certainly some subtext that I am missing, but I can't tell if the Queen is considered evil because she takes the young men from the village or if she is evil because of the reason she takes the men (that would be sex). In a farming society, losing strong young men can be very damaging. Of course, for the young men living in a farming society, plowing the Queen might be a more popular option than plowing the fields. Perhaps she has is a bit of a succubus and is draining the young mens' vitality. That might explain the large cage containing something like zombies.

When we are introduced to our hero, he is slowly riding a horse. No one else in the movie has a horse or for that matter any pack animals at all. Anyway, he is slowly riding his horse and sees a bunch of people running away in a dead panic. He looks on calmly. He rides a little further along and is nearly run over by another wave of people clearly fleeing something awful. Again he watches thoughtfully. Eventually he makes his way to the remnants of the town to find our bad guy standing in the middle of a pile of corpses. Whereupon he has a conversation with the guy. Seems they were students of the same master, but one of them never got the "don't kill innocent people" concept. After some exposition and back story, they get to fighting. When things start going poorly for the bad guy he calls upon some alligator men that come popping up out of the ground. While the good guy is dispatching the cannon fodder, the bad guy gets away with the groom. The good guy then wanders off to check on his teacher. When he gets there the teacher is nearly dead from an attack by some evil warriors including the one that was attacking the village. He then goes on a quest for magic mushrooms to cure his teacher. Well, almost cure him. After consulting with the teacher, they opt to cut his damaged legs off.

The story line does not follow any normal logic and the hero's motivations are way off what we expect. We have a hero and an evil queen. Yet they are not particularly at odds with each other. He is not one of those reluctant heroes that only fight when they have to. But the Alligator Queen seems to have been around for quite a while in the same locale as both the hero and his master. Did they just never get around to helping out the villagers by getting rid of her? The evil warriors seem to have a plan to kill the good warriors and capture the Devil's Sword. This seems to have nothing to do with the Alligator Queen and is apparently just a side project for the bad guy when he is not procuring boy toys for the Queen. It is unclear if the hero would have gone after the Queen if the bride had not tagged along. Despite the fact that there are a lot of bad guys, there is not the feeling that the good guys have any urge to fight them unless they have to. Thinking back, the good guy never fights to defend anyone but himself. He arrives far too late to save any of the villagers and when the Queen's lair collapses he helps the bride save the groom, but lets everyone else die in the cave in. Our hero only kills cannon fodder, in this case mostly Alligator men. In a climatic scene he stabs a gold statue of an Alligator that explodes which causes the Queen to suddenly turn ugly whereupon the hero stabs her with the Demon Sword and she dies. Normally I would expect our hero to be more heroic.

The three main characters that are women in the movie are treated pretty well. The Evil Warrior woman seems to survive the movie. After her head is cut off and shoved into a crevice, her body flies up to rejoin with it and there is an explosion. I think this means she teleported to another place. Of the four Evil Warriors we met, she is the second most powerful. The Bride can't quite beat the bad guy, but neither is she beaten by him. Though we know that he is the stronger of the two. The Queen is strong enough to take out the bad guy mostly on her own and though she is taken out by the good guy, the Bride has to help. The handmaidens on the other hand have a tougher time of it. They seem to be there to provide a backdrop for the Queen. They are always in the throne room, but the Chamberlain chases them out four or five times during the course of the film. I don't think any of them survive the cave in and no one in the village complains about missing a daughter.

The hero does get a sidekick in the movie and against all movie logic, the sidekick survives the movie. Not only that, the sidekick is female, in fact, she is the bride of one of the Alligator Queen's boy toys and yet does not need to be rescued nor is she a liability in a fight. I'm confused. New partners for main protagonists are notoriously short lived. If they do live they tend to be comic relief or so inexperienced they need to be rescued all the time. Most times the hero will actually almost have the bad guy in his grasp, only to have to let him go to save the sidekick. Here our hero idly watches the girl fight several times without stepping in. Which turns out to be okay as she holds her own against the bad guy. She doesn't take him down but neither does she get killed by him. In a strong bit of silent communication, we see a flash of betrayal in her eyes when she sees her husband defend the Queen (he also has sex with the Queen and with one of the handmaidens). As our hero is saying goodbye to the pair he wishes them well and hopes that they can regain the love they once had. Wait! What? Up to now this has been one of the stupidest movies of all time and then at the end, in nearly the final frame they have the nerve to introduce a subtle event and an honest thought! Yes we know that the groom was under the Queen's influence when he did those things and we know that the bride rescued him despite the things that he did. She might still love him, but it is going to take a while for her to trust him again, if she can. And our thick headed, moronic hero recognizes this and verbalizes it. Seriously up to now the guy hasn't had a clue as to what is going on and now suddenly he starts talking like Dr. Phil.

It is hard for me to tell if this is a good movie or not. The fight scenes are poorly staged, go on too long and too numerous. The plot makes no sense at all. There are cultural references that went straight over my head as I am not familiar with Philippine folklore. There are lots of women in harem costumes but we don't get to see any of them naked. Probably worth seeing from an oddity standpoint.

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