The Barbarians

And just guess who ends up getting chucked into the children's revenge-training arena? Titular, you say? Barbarians? The? Yes, it's the titular^[2] Barbarians - Kutchek and Gore - and they've been getting horse-whipped and hotboxed deep within the bowels of the Dirt Dungeons by the Dirtmaster for 20 years in isolation from one another by two different idiots wearing two distinct idiotic helmets, the idea being that they will eventually be stuffed into said helmets and chop each other to bits in the arena without ever realizing the cruel irony of it all until it's too late etc. We're sure that'd make for a really clever ruse, if not for the fact that they're both like five times more swole than anyone else there and are identical fucking twins, but of course the real irony ends up being that in spite of all of this, they still don't fucking figure it out anyway. Hell, even after they break each other's helmets off and get extreme closeups of each other's big dumb identical faces it takes them like a solid minute before they start to get it. That should give you some idea of how stupid these assholes are, but just in case there's any lingering doubt:

For those of you who might be reading this in a cubicle farm and skipping over the videos, here's another sample of the philosophically tantalizing dialogue served up by Kutchek and Gore:

Ibar: Stay where you are, fatty.

Gore: Fatty? Me?

Kutchek: You.

Gore: FATTY! Who you calling fatty, moosehead?

That's just a small taste of the many, many instances of delightful back-and-forth banter between the Brothers Meathead, any one of which makes us desperately long for a sudden EMP blast to disable our movie-watching ability forever.

Like so many movies of this type, including oh, say, the Deathstalker franchise, every other scene is either an orgy or direct windup to an orgy (at least an orgy of violence, or in this movie's case, an orgy of stupidity, or all three.) Granted, it's sort of a conceit of the genre and you expect it going in, but at least in movies like Conan there's the crucial difference that things actually happen along the way too. Not so much in The Barbarians. A big chunk of the second act is devoted to a scene where the brothers go into a seedy bar to buy weapons they don't even need, but end up smashing a table to pieces and beating up everyone in sight for no apparent reason with terrible sound effects. Not exactly a pivotal scene.

In fact, the only thing dumber than the dialogue in The Barbarians is the goddamn plot. Our review would end up being longer than the movie's script^[3] if we tried to point every plot hole or stupid conceit. How about the ruby-guarding dragon which has a fully functional European discotheque in its intesinal tract? Or the fact that the Riddicks enjoyed "1000 years of peace" and free passage before anybody figured out it was probably really fun and easy to rob the unarmed traveling hippie circus with the ruby the size of a bocce ball?

He looks like he's having the stroke we feel like we're having.Oh, our personal favorite might be the scene where the Ricardos try to hang what's-her-face, who is secretly not only one of them but also their chosen one and princess/messiah or something, all of which they could've easily figured out if they'd bothered checking her obvious and plainly-exposed shoulder tattoo everyone in their band of traveling assholes gets, or if she'd bothered to mention that she grew up with all of them in Cirque du So Lame and could they please not kill her, if it's not too much trouble, during the scene where they are actively but leisurely tying a god damn noose around her fucking neck. That's a good one right there. Also, this is probably a good time to remember loudly that the real ultimate power of the ruby macguffin that moves armies and sorcerers and plots and so on involves laughter and juggling.

Deep down, we know that this is all nothing more than an excuse for the Barbarian Brothers to strut around flexing and making retarded moose calls. These brothers, these kings among men; who by the way totally don't look anything at all like walking parodies of human beings too stupid to breathe without being actively reminded every 30 seconds. Maybe this is all secretly a commercial for their whipping and rock-lifting based torture workout, which makes P90X look like P90Regular, guaranteed you won't be able to hold your arms down to your side within 90 days or your sheckels back!

What the fuck were we talking about again? Oh right, The Barbarians. Featuring a groundbreaking musical score by venerated Italian composer Dennio Borricone and the gut-clutchingly realistic foley work of "dog crunching celery over fishbowl full of condenser capsules", there's nothing forgettable about the soundtrack; unfortunately, you won't get a chance to listen to any of it, because you'll be too busy only hearing that retarded gasping moose laugh for the rest of your joy-stripped life, which in our cases we're hoping won't be too much longer now. Remember, when you get to Italian butt cleavage hell, tell them Ruggero Deodato and The Barbarians sent you. ArriveDERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRci, folks!

[2] Both in the sense that they're the dudes from the title and that they have tits the size of mutant pitbull skulls.

[3] Based on what we've seen, there's a pretty good chance this has already happened.

– Garrett "Hydrogen" Neil and Sean "Trillaphon" Neil (@trillaphon)