Rarely does an object come along that so sublimely exemplifies the cultural zeitgeist. A spectacle of such extravagant profundity and disregard for modesty that you’d be willing to cart out to the bonfire every Dostoevsky ever published, every Miles Davis ever captured on tape, every Botticelli ever framed, all the while suffering a heavy dose of acute embarrassment at the substandard antecedents that besmirch the object by their mere presence. Devoid of precedent, Actiongirls: Soldiers of the Dead – Part 1 cannot be classified as anything less than the zeitgeist incarnate, a supreme microcosm of all the multifarious aspects of the human condition that make one stop mid-sentence to breathe the air in solemn remembrance of the transitoriness of life.

The cruel fate of temporality mocks those figures, long-deceased, who may have had reason to gaze and meditate upon the charms of the object: what path would his ruminations on the cogito have taken had Descartes experienced the pleasures of Actiongirls: Soldiers of the Dead – Part 1? How might the Crimean War have concluded had some or all of the participants been privy to a viewing of the film cited heretofore? In what ways would the most gruesome atrocities of the Stalinist purges have been averted had Joey been sat down to an exclusive screening of Actiongirls: Soldiers of the Dead – Part 1?

As with all these speculative matters, it’s impossible to answer with any level of accuracy. However, my supposition would be that the kernels of history that could have been feasibly ameliorated by the interpolation of said flick into the situation are immense in number. Its multifaceted quintessence can simultaneously function as sweet anodyne syrup to hostility and sagacious riposte to warbles of stupidity. In short, those spectres of the past missed out, we don’t have to.

Actiongirls: Soldiers of the Dead – Part 1’s narrative, like Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological terminology, is dense and intricate, encompassing a panoply of shades that, looked at from the wrong angle, can plunge the beholder into a deep chasm of endless philosophical wrangling. With this in mind, let’s address each strain of synoptic fruit with fastidious intensity.

The film is set in a barren future where women are held as slaves, forced to battle one another to the death in front of baying hordes of male savagery. Helman Himmler (any relation?) is the bloated orchestrator of much of these girl-on-girl fisticuffs. He’s a successful entrepreneur in the slave trade, perpetually on the receiving end of exaltations irradiated by the cuddly death squad he keeps around him.