User Reviews

Back when Video Stores were still a thing, they needed product to fill their shelves, and movies like this were it.

The premise of this film is that a football star and his girlfriend are kidnapped to participate in some bizarre gladiatorial games. After being trained in some Montages by a Wise Black Man, he is ready to fight gladiators twice his size and skill level.

We don't ever get full frontal nudity, and the shootout scenes are done on the cheap. But there is a very big sequence at the end with lots of explosions and the Dominatrix character strafing the getaway truck from a hang glider. No, I'm not making that last part up.

I have no idea why people aren't losing their minds and talking about this movie all the time.

High school football star Billy Hamilton and his cheerleader girlfriend Allison are kidnapped in the middle of a date and taken to an underground base that houses a fight club somewhere beneath Las Vegas because that's the world of this movie and I love it.

They're now part of the Legion of Iron, a place where men become gladiators and women become playthings and man, 1990 wasn't that long ago for a movie like this to be made. It's like someone read all the Gor books and said, "The movies weren't disquieting enough and I'm going to be the maniac that changes that," and made this.

As our heroes watch the first gladiator fight, things get unsetting in a hurry, as the leader of all this, Diana (Erika Nann, who was in Animal Instincts and Night Rhythms before appearing in the video game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots proving that Hideo Kojima loves direct to video 80s and 90s movies as much as all of us) forces them to watch a battle to the death between Mad Dog and Rex (Stefanos Miltsakakis, Frankenstein's Monster in Waxwork II, in addition to being a frequent JCVD fight partner). As Rex is the winner, he's allowed to forcibly take Allison while Diana makes her man watch.

In the first fifteen minutes of the film, we've already had a kidnapping, the revelation of a secret shadow world of white slavery and gladiatorial combat under the Western United States, said gladiatorial combat and an assault. This movie isn't worried about offending anyone and everyone.

Billy is in similar danger, because the guards think this is the Roman empire and keep trying to take him themselves when Diana isn't tying him up and forcibly engaging him in martial congress. So our hero now has a reason to kill Rex and needs a mentor, who he finds in ex-pro football player Lyle Wagner. Enter a series of montages, in which our boy learns how to become a man or least fight in American Gladiator-like challenges to the death. Lyle is also pretty much Yoda, as he utters things like, "Haven't you heard? Superman's black, freakface!" and "The worst thing that can happen is death."

At some point, Billy and Allison try to escape, which ends with everyone in the cast beating Billy down with sticks and when that isn't good enough, Diana repeatedly makes Allison brutalize her boyfriend before allowing all of the gladiators to have their way with her. This makes Billy even more determined to kill Rex, which he does, showing up in a silver sparkly glitter costume that has amazing shoulder pads. His contest with the big bad is pretty much our hero repeatedly striking the much larger man in the testicle again and again. I mean, when you're working a body part, work the body part, even if it is the ball bag.

The entire time this battle was happening, Lyle was making machine guns in the orgy bed chamber. This allows our heroes to have a massive uprising while battling the Chinese version of the Legion of Iron, which posits that there are small gladiator sex cults all over the world. After an insane battle that involves people getting machine-gunned in the nuts, throwing stars and nearly everyone dying, Billy and Allison get away, but not before being attacked by Diana flying the kind of plane John Denver died in.

Seriously, Diana is the heroine of this movie for me. She escaped a life as a showgirl and dancing in Vegas to lead an army of maniacs under the earth and continues said empire by kidnapping high school football stars. In the scene where she ties up Billy and tries to explain the fact that people are all commodities, he spits in her face and instead of being a shrinking violet, she says, "Go ahead and spit on me, if it turns you on." Then she explains the difference between love and hate when giving him an old fashioned. She should have been the main character of like ten more movies.

This was the first movie that Yakov Bentsvi ever directed and he waited fourteen years to make another. Writer Steven Schoenberg was the editor of Can I Do It 'Till I Need Glasses? And Hamburger: The Motion Picture, so who knew he had such pent-up insanity?

If you ever watched the aforementioned American Gladiators and said, "Is there any BDSM-obsessed fan fiction of this show?," Legion of Iron is the film for you.

Much like The Hoff, Billy Hamilton (Walsh) has been lookin' for freedom. Without warning, and quite inexplicably, this high school football player, along with his girlfriend Alison (Carrigan) are kidnapped and spirited away to an underground complex where the guys are forced to battle it out in deathfights to the death, and the girls are sex slaves. The whole operation is run by the sadistic Queen Diana (Nann), who clearly derives a lot of pleasure from other people's misery. Billy then teams up with fellow fighter Lyle Wagner (De Morton) - not to be confused with Lyle Waggoner - but, then, maybe that was the movie's subtle reminder that it's at least better than Robo Chic (1990) because Waggoner was in that. Nevertheless, will Billy fight for his freedom, rescue his girlfriend and blah blah blah? Does anybody care? Another day, another gladiators-fight-to-the-death movie. Sadly, Legion of Iron doesn't add anything new to the formula we've seen so many times before. The whole affair is dour and derivative - not to mention junky and jumbled. Things aren't established very well and there is zero character development. This movie doesn't give the viewer much to like or hang on to. Some movies with varying degrees of cult status people still talk about today, like, to pick a random example, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). Nobody has ever, or will ever, talk about Legion of Iron in a nostalgic or loving way. With so much competition on video store shelves at the time, even with somewhat similar but far superior offerings such as Fortress (1992) spoiling video store patrons for choice, why would someone pick this crud? If someone gave you the choice for an ice-cold Coke or some flat, homemade syrup, who's going to choose the syrup? There are signs on the walls that say "sweat saves blood", patrons yell and place bets via computer rather than shaking the cash in their hands, and with Apple IIc graphics, we are informed that we're now watching "Mad Dog vs. Rex". There are meatheads galore, an Ivan Drago-clone whose only real means of differentiation from the evil Russian is that this guy wears a cape, and one of the background fighters, a blonde, long-haired Fabio clone, should have been the main hero, not the whiny and ineffectual Billy.

With the possible exception of the Asian guy (who is barely in it), there are no cool characters or situations. "Billy" has all the personality and likability of particle board, and he's the hero we're all supposed to get behind. And his badass, intimidating gladiator uniform that's meant to intimidate his opponents in the ring? Well, how can we put this gently...if Liberace fought Liberace in a gladiator fight, Liberace wouldn't wear this outfit. It consists of bright silver short shorts and bedazzled football protective gear. We kid you not. Somehow, this is all done with a straight face. No pun intended. We've seen more heterosexual attire at the San Francisco gay pride parade. We think you get the idea.

Legion of Iron not only has no re-watchability factor, it has no watchability factor. The cutting is an eyesore, the sets are dreary, the plot/dialogue is nonexistent, and the pace is sluggish. Any one of those things wouldn't, on its own, sink the movie, but taken together, this ship starts to take on too much water. It seems worth noting that the great Isaac Florentine worked on this production. Maybe this is where he learned what NOT to do. We would say to avoid this tiresome and unnecessary production.