Wonder Women (1973) – A Movie A Day 2021 #43
Wonder Women (1973) – A Movie A Day 2021 #43
For today’s movie I went into my digital library over on RiffTrax to see if there was anything I’d bought but hadn’t watched. It turns out I had started watching a movie titled Wonder Women, but I must’ve never finished it because I could not remember how it ended. Well, I’ve seen it all the way through now, and, as with most of the RiffTrax movies I’ve seen, it’s a lot of fun.
Wonder Women is an action movie from 1973 with a mad scientist/sci-fi undercurrent. Set in the Philippines, the diabolical Dr. Tsu (played by Nancy Kwan) has a business harvesting body parts from top athletes to transplant them onto old rich people so she can make tons and tons of money. Dr. Tsu has a small army of beautiful women who all know martial arts to do her bidding, and the first scenes we see are of her female army swarming and kidnapping a bunch of different people from sporting events. One of the athletes has a huge insurance policy though, so a private contractor, the womanizing Mike Harber (played by Ross Hagen), is called in by the insurance company to find out where he went. This is all just an elaborate excuse to have a bunch of fight and action scenes with pretty women, and for that, Wonder Woman absolutely delivers.
It’s cheap and cheesy, and it’s kind of sleazy sometimes as well, but its kind of a typical action exploitation movie that feels like a distant cousin of the James Bond brand of spy movies. The womanizing hero doesn’t necessarily have any fancy gadgets, but the villain is over-the-top with 1970s-futuristic science stuff stacked all around her domain. Also, Dr. Tsu’s henchman is the great Sid Haig, so yeah, there’s a lot of fun to be had here.
That said, Mike, Bill, and Kevin from RiffTrax absolutely make the experience much better. I would probably enjoy Wonder Women on its own, but the RiffTrax guys enhance everything they lend their voices to. If you’re going to check this movie out, I recommend watching the RiffTrax version. I bought the movie a while back, but it looks like it’s included in their $5.99 a month streaming offering they began fairly recently. So go do that.