The firing squad is ready. Their target, a gorgeous woman dressed as a prostitute, stands defiantly before them with a mixture of anticipation and apathy. Death seems imminent when, suddenly, the soldier called upon to order the shooting throws down the sword and refuses to kill a woman. Her life potentially spared, how does the woman react?

She calmly fixes her lipstick.

By this point, the finale of the tawdry, exciting, and altogether outstanding film DISHONORED, this action is the only one that would make sense. The woman has no name, is a spy for the Austrian empire, and is played with unforgettable style by seductress supreme Marlene Dietrich.

She begins, as she ends, dressed as a prostitute, only when she begins, she really is one, though the 1930s screenplay has to dance around the subject a bit. She is recruited to become a spy -- code name X-27 -- because, as a woman with power over men, she could be used to accomplish missions male spies could not. In other words, she screws the enemy and steals his plans.

Her target is another unnamed spy, one working for the Russian army, who falls for her seductive charm even while he realizes she is not who she claims to be. The two conduct a complex dance throughout the film; sometimes pretending to be in love to accomplish their goals, and other times betraying their orders because they really are in love and that matters more than plans or empires.

Dietrich was toiling away to little acclaim in the German film industry, when director Josef von Sternberg discovered her while casting THE BLUE ANGEL. Sensing he'd discovered a new star, he gave her the key supporting role in ANGEL, then brought her back to the States with him, and introduced her to the American public opposite Gary Cooper in MOROCCO. DISHONORED was the third collaboration, in a series that would grow to become one of the strangest and most interesting director-star pairings in Hollywood history. He was always casting her as women in doomed relationships, sometimes the torturer, sometimes the tortured. And she was always underplaying everything, her face concealing her interior emotions, creating inscrutable characterizations that worked perfectly with Sternberg's mysterious intentions. The two were always at their best with each other and yet both were very hesitant to admit that, since both wanted to claim it was they, not the other, that was the key to their joint success.

A sexy spy thriller made decades before movies were allowed to be sexy or obsessed with spies, DISHONORED is the sort of movie they don't make any more. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If they still made movies like it, this one wouldn't be as special.

IF YOU LIKED DISHONORED, CHECK OUT: BLONDE VENUS (1932), where, two films later in their collaboration, Sternberg was making Dietrich perform stripteases in gorilla costumes and giant white afro wigs. An absurd, unreal odyssey of a film.

THE BAD

BARB WIRE opens with a credit sequence set against images of star Pamela Anderson Lee dancing on a pole while being sprayed by gallons of water. Illogical as it is, the concept is not altogether unpleasant, and I admit that I was sufficiently distracted enough to miss the names of WIRE’s composer and production designer. Eventually the credits disappear, yet Ms. Anderson (Lee, she had yet to divorce the drummer of Motley Crue) continues to show off her enormous talent, far past the point of desirable length. It becomes clear that the DVD's "unrated version" boasting sexy footage of the star is all dumped right here in the beginning. And as appealing as this display may be, even it grows tiresome. The rest of BARB WIRE is tame enough for a PG-13 from the MPAA and boring enough for a bad rating from me.

The Barb Wire character is based on one from Dark Horse comics I have never read and I'm guessing you haven't either. She lives in the dystopian future of 2017, where the country is engulfed by "The Second American Civil War" and Steel Harbor remains the only free city left in the union. No explanation is given for the War, nor is the "free city" designation really clear; Steel Harbor runs like a border town in the old West, and its citizens are under constant threat from the fascistic government. But this is already far more thought than the filmmakers intended to be applied to a single viewing.

Barb, we learn, is a mercenary and bar owner with a drunken loser of a brother named Charlie (just Charlie? Why not Trip or Fire?). She previously worked as a resistance fighter, and a fellow soldier named Axel (Temuera Morrison, a.k.a. the man who would be Jengo Fett) needs her help smuggling an important doctor out of the country. The bosomy avenger is hesitant to help Axel since a shadowy event from their shared past destroyed her idealism and continues to haunt her. The film builds toward the revelation of their catastrophic altercation. When it arrives, it is as follows: Barb sits waiting on a helicopter. A man approaches and says that Axel is not coming as promised. The helicopter departs. End of life-altering, confidence-shattering, allegiance-changing scene. She lost all hope for society because she got stood up on a military-escorted date? Honey, life goes on.

Villainy in BARB WIRE is limited to the generic action movie kind that make lots of big imposing threats, shoot lots of bullets, and never ever hit its intended targets. The main bad guy, Colonel Pryzer (Steve Railsback) is not to be toyed with. When someone does something he doesn't like, he spits back, "I will personally rip your heart out and shove it back down your throat!" That's impractical and disgusting!

The film was made before the advent of DVD, and it shows, since freeze-framing the film at key moments can add the humor the film sorely lacks. For instance, be sure to pause when Barb hands her "License of Prostitution" to the john: even though the film is set in the year 2017, her license reads "Good Health as of 1-07-19." Either the production designer made a big boo-boo, or Ms. Wire has a nasty case of the clap, and it's not clearing up for several years.

Still, I cannot recommend BARB WIRE, at least not for anyone who has seen CASABLANCA (which BARB WIRE rips off freely). The only DVD extra of note is something called "Sexy Outtakes" -- basically ten more minutes of the same footage that began the movie. Here I applaud the filmmaker's audacity: they have presented BARB WIRE's only worthy element in a way that eliminates all that pesky plot and characterization and saves you from wasting 100 minutes of your life.

INSTEAD OF BARB WIRE, CHECK OUT: HELLBOY (2004), the only really good Dark Horse comic to film adaptation I can think of. I’m sure I’m going to get a dozen e-mails this week from people telling me I forgot a better one.

THE UGLY

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME. Quite an alluring title, full of mystery and promise. What, I wonder, is the shape of things to come? According to this Canadian science fiction disasterpiece, all our futures involve bloated overacting, effects held together by invisible tape, and robots so cumbersome they make Robbie The Robot look like I, ROBOT.

Based on an H.G. Wells novel, SHAPE occurs in the distant dystopia of "the tomorrow after tomorrow" (which would make it, when? Friday?), when Earth has been destroyed by "robot wars," which is what I constantly warn people about when they start watching BATTLEBOTS. Humanity now exists in colonies scattered about the galaxy. It sounds like quite a tragedy, but when SHAPE OF THINGS' heroes return to Earth in search of someone, the ruined, lifeless rock looks like a lovely fall afternoon in the Canadian wilderness. The worst you can say about the place is an overcast sky, but I've never felt that seasonal clouds is a valid reason for planetary abandonment.

The colonic system (I made that word up, but let's stick with it) hinges on a constant supply of a drug called Radic-Q2, which only comes from Delta Three and, unfortunately, its government has just been overthrown by the power-mad Omus, played by Jack Palance in all his squinty, scowling glory. A couple of well-meaning kids, a barely-functional robot, and a doctor dying of radiation poisoning whenever it is convenient for the plot, steal a spaceship and head off to stop Omus’ plans for interstellar domination.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS may not sound appealing, and that is because it is not. But the cheap special effects never let up, making it the perfect viewing for the mentally unstable and fans of terribly made sci-fi. The idea of an audience of any age being convinced of this film's fabricated reality is unfathomable. The future is uncertain, but I am confident that space stations won't look like aluminum siding warehouses and intergalactic citadels won't look like the basements of underfunded elementary schools.

If your prefer your cheap plastics in actors instead of set dressings, may I recommend the performance of one Carol Lynley as Nikki, the deposed ruler of Delta Three, whose performance makes conventional everyday bad acting of the Lifetime Network seem like the finest performance of John Barrymore as Richard III. As Lynley trips over the simplest dialogue, I kept looking for an excuse for her genuinely awful performance, like she didn't speak English or didn't realize she was on camera, but none materialized.

To be fair, she's not upstaged by anyone else in the cast and the screenplay is about as literate as bathroom stall graffiti. My favorite line of dialogue: ""We should get through the tunnels all right but the citadel -- it's like a fortress!" OF COURSE it's like a fortress! That's why it's called a citadel, because a citadel is LIKE A FORTRESS! Why do I think that zinger didn't come straight from the original H.G. Wells novel?

If this is the real shape of things to come I'd rather just stay in the here and now thank you very much. You can keep your Jack Palance roles and your tinfoil spacesuits.

IF YOU LIKED THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME, CHECK OUT: THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1996), another bungled H. G. Wells adaptation, with Marlon Brando covered in white makeup, playing piano with a midget twin that would inspire AUSTIN POWERS’ Mini Me. So stupendously bad it’s like some cracked work of art (or, perhaps, art made while on crack).