Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that Barbarella is a 1968 French-Italian sci-fi cult flick (based on a French comic of the same name) featuring Jane Fonda, lots of nudity, sensuality, absurdity, and the generally wacky irreverence of 1960s cinema. Because of its mature themes, bare breasts, frequent sensuality, and direct discussions of intercourse, as well as a plot development that includes a woman being given a fatal orgasm, this is a movie best reserved for very mature teens or adults.
Sexual
Content
Multiple scenes with bare breasts, naked silhouettes, implied intercourse, discussion of intercourse, and sensuality and suggestiveness. In the opening scene, a woman's space suit is slowly removed to reveal nothing underneath, with shots of breasts from multiple angles throughout the introduction. Elsewhere, the film figures heavily on a variety of women wearing various items of see-through clothing, wrapped in cellophane, or lounging about half-naked and beckoning. In multiple scenes, a man offers to make love to a woman or a woman offers a man sex as a reward, which is indicated by the characters beginning to undress and then the scene cutting away to a bed. Several instances of shirtless men, as well as a labyrinth of naked people in sheer clothes. In one scene, several women are hanging from a ceiling in cellophane, writhing.
Violence
The film contains multiple, pervasive scenes of cartoonish violence played for humor or humorous peril, and there is a consistent use of space-age rockets, lasers, and guns. In one scene, a woman is hit in the face with a rock. In others, magnetic disturbances toss her about a spaceship. There are creepy porcelain dolls with razor teeth that surround a woman and administer bite-size wounds, with blood shown. A man whips a group of feral children (with the whipping motion shown; contact with the children is not shown, but their screams are audible). Space-age creatures are blown up with space rockets. A man lies on the ground dead, covered in blood. An angel is shown strung up crucifixion-style by his bloodied wings. A woman is placed in a cage and then attacked by birds and shown bleeding. A woman writhes and sweats when hooked up to a machine meant to make her orgasm to death.
Language
Only very mild language, mostly for its sensuality involving the frank discussion of intercourse and how it should be performed.
Social
Behavior
Barbarella is a sci-fi send-up meant to spoof more than inspire, but it does offer positive messages about communing with other humans.
Consumerism
Not applicable
Drugs / Tobacco /
Alcohol
Only minor references to drug-like substances, such as a scene in which people drink out of goblets that appear to have something alcohol-like in them. Discussions of intercourse involve taking exaltation-transference pellets. In one scene, a group of women smokes a hookah described to contain "essence of man."
