Jane Fonda's memorable, zero-gravity striptease during the opening credits of this 1968 Roger Vadim movie is the closest the film comes to a liberated marriage of wit and sex. Based on a French comic strip, the story concerns the adventures of a 41st-century woman, who pretty much gets it on with whomever asks. The sci-fi sets were pretty interesting at the time, though they look rather anachronistic now. Appreciated today mostly as a camp classic, the movie is actually more trying than anything else. --Tom Keogh
2.
In this notorious film version of the popular French comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest, Jane Fonda plays a sexy yet innocent space-age heroine in the year 40,000 A.D. who never gets herself into a situation that requires too much clothing. BARBARELLA opens with the titular heroine stripping down to nothing in zero gravity among strategically placed credits. From there Barbarella embarks on a mission to find a peace-threatening young scientist named Duran Duran (Milo O'Shea) by order of the president of Earth. En route, she's attacked by killer dolls, is strapped into a contraption known as the Excessive Machine, and falls in love with a blind angel.
Remaining true to its comic book origins, Barbarella's adventure unfolds in a series of dramatic difficulties and unlikely solutions, making for a galloping pace and never-ending opportunities for Mario Garbuglia's hallucinatory set design to dazzle. With guest appearances by 1960s icons Anita Pallenberg, Marcel Marceau, and David Hemmings, and featuring dialogue by novelist Terry Southern, among others, BARBARELLA is not only a comic sci-fi sex romp but also a sly, tongue-in-cheek portrait of the legendary debauchery of that era.
3.
Barbarella is marked by the same audacity and originality, fantasy, humor, beauty and horror, cruelly and eroticism that make comic books such a favorite. The Setting is the planet Lythion in the year 40,000, when Barbarella makes a forced landing while traveling through space. She acts like a female James Bond, vanquishing evil in the forms of robots and monsters. She also rewards, in an uninhibited manner, the handsome men who assist her in the adventure. Whether she is wrestling with Black Guards, the evil Queen, or the Angel Pygar, she just can't seem to avoid losing at least part of her skin-tight space suit!
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