Trailer
Plot summary
Sonja rejects Queen Gedren's advances and scars her face. Gedren's soldiers murder her parents and brother and leave her for dead. A spirit answers her cry for revenge with skill at arms, on the condition that no man may have her unless he defeats her in fair combat. Gedren's army overruns a temple where priestesses prepare to banish the Talisman, a relic of light that only women may touch, now too strong to control. Her sister Varna, a priestess, tells her the Talisman must be cast into darkness, or its storms and earthquakes will lay waste to the world. Kalidor, Lord of Hyrkania, offers to ride with her; she refuses. In Hablock, a kingdom left in ruins, she meets Prince Tarn and his bodyguard Falkon, and is told that Gedren rules from Berkubane, the land of Perpetual Night.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Red Sonja (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sandahl Bergman, who had played Valeria in Conan the Barbarian, was offered the title role of Red Sonja but turned it down, choosing instead to play the villain, Queen Gedren.
- Producer Dino De Laurentiis planned to cast actress Laurene Landon as Red Sonja, but withdrew the offer after learning she had starred in the similar film Hundra, fearing the two movies would look too alike.
- Soap opera actress Eileen Davidson later revealed, on a 2015 episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, that she had auditioned for Red Sonja and was the runner-up to Brigitte Nielsen.
- De Laurentiis spent almost a year searching for an actress imposing enough to play Sonja and was still looking eight weeks before shooting when he spotted 21-year-old Danish model Brigitte Nielsen on a magazine cover in Milan; she flew to Rome and won the part on a screen test.
- Brigitte Nielsen won the Golden Raspberry for Worst New Star for Red Sonja, an award she ended up sharing with herself for her performance the same year in Rocky IV.
- A planned Red Sonja reboot lost director Bryan Singer only a few months after he was confirmed, when Millennium Films dropped the project from its slate in February 2019 following sexual abuse allegations against him.
