NOW ON TUBI! Up in the heavens, there is a brand new constellation in the Milky Way of bizarre cinema: the mind-melting British dark superhero film The Phantom Warrior, written and directed by the next great cult moviemaker, Savvas D. Michael. Nemesis Knight (Nicole Bartlett) was given her unusual name by her junkie daddy, who was blasted on acid at the time. He left, and then her mother died, leaving the now grown Nemesis nothing but the family stable and an old horse named Zeus. Nemesis lives off the land in Chaos County, hunting for what she eats, while bidding time until the sun sets and sleep creeps up. Nemesis doesn’t care for what she calls “the unconscious world”, because when she goes to sleep, she is visited by strange gods, who are beautiful, and bathed in light. The gods interest in her confounds and confuses Nemesis, until she realizes they are all pointed her toward her path. Nemesis rises from her slumber to step into her destiny, riding her horse into the night with a shotgun.
“Nemesis rises from her slumber to step into her destiny, riding her horse into the night with a shotgun.”
She enters a neon churchyard and has to confront a cyclops (Charles Rawes) before she can seek direction from the oracle of Delphi, Pythia (Ivana Radjenovic). Pythia informs her that Nemesis has always been the instrument of vengeance for the gods, with all of her previous lives lived as a phantom warrior. She travels to the unconscious world where all the gods still exist, meeting with the lord of the underworld himself, Hades (Steven Berkoff). During the slaying of a particularly nasty child abuser, Nemesis gets a chemical burn across half her face. To cover up her disfigurement, she wears a golden mask while she dispenses the wraith of the gods from the barrel of a shotgun. However, behind the scenes, the fabulous evil demigod, Dollos (Elijah Rowan) is gathering together a deadly army of wronged women is about to cross Nemesis Knight’s path of destruction.
The Phantom Warrior is instantly awesome because it keeps refusing to behave like an ordinary movie. It’s like the first bad kid you brought home that said outrageous s**t to your parents. At first, you like it ironically. Right from the beginning, Michael establishes an aura of high camp, the kind we have not seen in years. You think you are liking it ironically, until you discover that you are flat out liking it. Then it starts tricking with your head in the oddest ways, at which point you have fallen in love with this R-rated violent super-heroine film. You are also treated to that amplified London perspective of American culture, complete with heavy southern accents and 90s slide guitars. It is a star-spangled world very similar to the one Nick Cave would visit in his lyrics for the classic gothic group The Birthday Party.
