The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent

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source: The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent

The boys left to Vike a while back and haven't been seen since. Did they find a kickass brewpub? The girls are throwing spears to choose who gets to decide whether they go after their men -- excuse me, the women are throwing spears, et cetera. You're not going to catch me calling someone who can throw a spearhead through a tree a girl. Eventually they get into a boat and almost drown, but eventually wind up in the .... well, you get it. All the Viking men and women are blondes except for Susan Cabot -- Burn the Witch! -- and I don't think anyone on the shoot though they were making the Scottish Play or such around here. No, Roger Corman shot this down at Malibu, which was the most Viking-like place he could get to without paying a road toll, dressing the weird foreigners in old costumes from THE CONQUEROR -- let's hope the count on a Geiger Counter has gone down -- and making something that the couples necking in cars wouldn't notice on the drive-in screen. It's interesting how many of the participants had substantial careers. Everyone needs a place to start out from, and in the late 1950s, AIP was the place.

Director Roger Corman is arguably the most influential filmmaker of the last fifty years. Not because his films are any good, but because his films and those of his production company have jump- started the careers of dozens upon dozens of actors, directors, and cinematographers. A quick look at his "film school" roster include such household names as, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, William Shatner, John Sayles, Jonathan Demme, Nicolas Roeg, and the list goes on and on. Not only did Corman teach new and exciting techniques to a slew of modern filmmakers, he did so with economy of means and a lack of pretension that still holds to this day. My all time favorite Corman film is the original Little Shop of Horrors (1960) which was quite incredibly shot in 24 hours with a budget of only $27,000. Whatever time, money, and effort Corman spent making The Saga of the Viking Women..., it was too much. The plot revolves around a group of viking women who are awaiting the return of their men from a hunting expedition. After weeks of no word, a group of scouts got out into the North Atlantic in search of their beaus. Their adventures on the seas include tempests, barbarian hordes, shipwreck and their own jealousies; not to mention the sea serpent briefly mentioned in the title. Whatever style and substance used to make Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies (1959-1964) is completely absent in this mess. Despite lead actress Abby Dalton's remarkable beauty her uncomfortable mannerisms betray a person completely out of her depth. Several moments of the film call for strong, brawny viking women hoisting sails and attacking barbarians with broad swords but I'm afraid no movie magic can make someone as slight as her strong and powerful. Having Abby "Joey Bishop Show" Dalton play a viking is like having Powder (1995) play Othello, it just doesn't work. The affable Susan Cabot fairs better playing the vamp; a talent she would later put to good use in The Wasp Woman (1959) two years later. Unfortunately the object of her desire Vedic the Viking (Jackson) is as robotic an Aryan rumba and ultimately sinks her and the film. It is said Corman was inspired to do the picture by the special effects work of Jack Rabin, Irving Block and Louis DeWitt. Opting for the special photographic effects used in Rocketship X-M (1950) and Flight to Mars (1951), Corman found the price tag of his film skyrocketing. As a result the famed sea serpent makes a fleeting appearance at the beginning and climactic end of the movie in a battle that rivals Bela Lugosi's giant octopus demise in Bride of the Monster (1955) in level of camp. Yet to call Saga of the Viking Women campy is a bit of an overreach. As mismatched as the leads are and a cheap as the special effects get, the story itself takes itself seriously. So seriously in-fact that there is no unintended laughter; only absolute and utter boredom. One can't help but think that with a couple more re-writes and a lot, LOT more money, this stinker of a movie might be as exciting as its poster.

With a proclamation of "Our Men Beckon" a group of beautiful Viking women cast their fates to the wind and sail out in search for the men of their village who have been gone for over 3 years. As luck would have it though, they sail upon "the great serpent of the vortex" which causes them to become shipwrecked on the land of savage barbarians known as the Grimaults. Anyway, with a storyline like this, and the fact that it was produced and directed by Roger Corman, it should come as little surprise that this has "Grade B" written all over it. But also true to form he manages to make the most of what little he has to work with to present something that is quite campy but yet fairly entertaining in spite of it all. And while it is hard to overlook the bad dialogue and the silly plot, the action is fast paced and the women were definitely attractive. I especially liked "Asmild" (June Kenney) and "Dagda" (Lynette Bernay) but they were all pleasing to the eye. Likewise, while I don't dislike movies in black and white this one would have been much better in color. But then I suppose that would have been quite a bit more expensive back in 1957 and it probably wasn't feasible at the time.

Absolutely silly from start to finish, the real problem with this female empowerment adventure is that it goes from episode to episode without really flowing from one plot element to the next. It is a badly written but often funny tale of a group of Viking women (lead by Abby Dalton of "Falcon Crest" and Susan Cabot) who decide to head out onto the Nordic seas to find their missing men and end up finding all sorts of other dangers, often going from one danger to the next without really believable explanation of how they got there. Pretty boy Bradford Jackson, who somehow didn't go off to battle with the Viking men, stows away on the Viking women's ship, and unless I blinked and missed it, went from hiding one moment to being amongst the girls in the next, having been discovered somewhere in between. They fight the winds, swirling sharks, a giant sea serpent who turns their ship over yet somehow they manage to all get to shore. There they come across a Barbaric tribe who place them in further danger, and along th way, Dalton and Jackson are threatened with being burnt to death, face another attack by the sea monster, yet somehow they never manage to look dirty or unshaven or with a hair out of place. Dalton, one of my favorite actors on the long running night time soap opera "Falcon Crest", seems far too modern to be clad in cave women dress, as do most of the other females around her. We are supposed to think that the dark haired men are barbarians simply because they are unshaven, yet they seem to have more of a civilized society than the Nordic looking Viking women and the men they are searching for. The sea serpent is appropriately scary looking, and the effects of its attack on their small but elegant Viking ship are actually pretty good. But the idiotic dialog and weak performances exposes this film for the type of drive-in junk it is where scantily clad females run around like some sort of Amazon women from the moon, but never seem to be really ready for the strenuous adventures they will face. I'm sure that real Viking women were closer to the comic strip character of Helga who was married to Viking Hagar, not the pin-up types presented here. This is worth spending 65 minutes simply for a few good laughs at the expense of the film, but like many early American International films, is quickly forgettable.

Anyone looking for sheer fun with a movie should enjoy this Corman classic. Some of the most unconvincing Viking women ever seen set out on a dangerous voyage to rescue their lost men. Blonde Hollywood starlets like June Kenney and Abby Dalton do their best to portray fierce Viking women. They look great, especially Betsy Jones-Moreland as a stunningly sexy beauty. The always reliable Susan Cabot slinks around amongst the blonde maidens with her unique brand of sexy villainy. She gets to sneer and smirk and raise her eyebrows a lot, and manages to seduce just about any man she meets, with her come-hither eyes and menacing purr. She steals the picture from all the " good girls". In the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version, one of the robots remarks that : "You can tell she's the bad one, 'cause she's got black hair!" Richard Devon is fairly impressive as the warrior king, though his palace suggests a high school cafeteria with a few strategic wall hangings for atmosphere. Jay Sayer, who was a total creep as one of the gang members in Corman's Teenage Doll, plays another total creep here, as the obnoxious son of the king. Jonathan Haze gets to display plenty of virile vigor, as he continually leaps on the bad guys ,and wrestles everyone in sight. The title sea serpent isn't really that bad, considering the extremely low budget. Overall, this movie is quite enjoyable, if you like Fifties drive-in flicks and Corman movies. The Viking women are a really foxy bunch of gals, too!