The Viking Queen is a fictional story very very loosely based on real events. It's a Hammer production but this is no horror film but more of a period movie. Movies set in ancient Britain are few and far between, good ones even less so, this one is okay but I wouldn't say it's great. The film follows an ancient British Queen who inherits her kingdom from her father. She forms a romantic attachment to the roman governor but trouble strikes when the druids conspire with a roman traitor and some British merchants to cause trouble.
Getting into the movie I thought some of the costume design for the romans was quite good, just brown leather armour and red cloaks, you can't really go wrong. For the Brits it was a mixed bag, the white clad druids looked interesting, the rags for the ordinary brits and blue war paint worked well, but our Queen at one point seems to be wearing a pair of purple hot pants which didn't feel right at all. The filming locations all looked okay to me, it's shot mostly in the country, and the climate looks right. There's a bit thrown in about some mistletoe and a sort of Stonehenge set to invoke a pagan feeling, they didn't worship Zeus though otherwise the romans and Brits would have been pretty much on the same page. Some of the scenes with chariots are shot quite well, the film also portrays human sacrifice too another unpleasant Celtic custom apparently. I thought the flogging scene was done quite well in some respects, the love story is the cheesiest aspect but the final battle is not bad in terms of the fighting and the number of extras included.
The film's main weaknesses are the love story, some of the obvious budget constraints and some other more fanciful story elements. The strengths are that it competently does give us a story of conflict between the romans and ancient Britain's which is what we'd all probably come into the movie hoping for. As an actual history lesson though there's a lot more invention than fact. The film is also starting to look a bit dated now, very much a 60s movie.
Getting into the movie I thought some of the costume design for the romans was quite good, just brown leather armour and red cloaks, you can't really go wrong. For the Brits it was a mixed bag, the white clad druids looked interesting, the rags for the ordinary brits and blue war paint worked well, but our Queen at one point seems to be wearing a pair of purple hot pants which didn't feel right at all. The filming locations all looked okay to me, it's shot mostly in the country, and the climate looks right. There's a bit thrown in about some mistletoe and a sort of Stonehenge set to invoke a pagan feeling, they didn't worship Zeus though otherwise the romans and Brits would have been pretty much on the same page. Some of the scenes with chariots are shot quite well, the film also portrays human sacrifice too another unpleasant Celtic custom apparently. I thought the flogging scene was done quite well in some respects, the love story is the cheesiest aspect but the final battle is not bad in terms of the fighting and the number of extras included.
The film's main weaknesses are the love story, some of the obvious budget constraints and some other more fanciful story elements. The strengths are that it competently does give us a story of conflict between the romans and ancient Britain's which is what we'd all probably come into the movie hoping for. As an actual history lesson though there's a lot more invention than fact. The film is also starting to look a bit dated now, very much a 60s movie.