The True Story of 'Barb Wire', Pamela Anderson's Box Office Bomb

This article contains Pam & Tommy spoilers

Sometimes a film comes along which is so truly, cataclysmically rubbish that the sheer density of its badness bends an entire career around it, sending a star who had been on a promising parabola out into the icy depths of deep space. Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire is that kind of bad film.

In Pam & Tommy, Disney+'s new eight-part series, we see her telling a Hollywood publicist that she wanted to become a Jane Fonda figure; someone who made good films and stood for something too. Barb Wire was supposed to be the first step on that road.

"When [Jane Fonda] first started out she was just this girl next door," Pamela says in episode three, talking about how much she admires the actor. "Then she did Barbarella and she became this huge sex symbol. And then she turned around and she started doing all these serious Oscar roles.

"Then also the activism! She was going to protests, she was getting arrested. And then in the 80s she just turns around, she just builds this whole fitness empire [...] She was all these totally opposite things all at once."

Long before this, back in the real world, Pamela Anderson's manager had mentioned to her that he’d had something sent in based on a comic series, but that she wouldn’t be playing a cartoon character herself.

“Then some time later I was asking about it, 'Who's that character she rides a motorcycle, shoots guns and is an action hero? I want to do it.' I got the comics and said this is me,” she told Premiere magazine in May 1996. “Nobody else can play this – this has everything that I want to do.”

The Barb Wire of Barb Wire is a woman who owns a bar in a dystopian 2017. The Second American Civil War has torn the country apart, leaving the populace violent and the government corrupt and dictatorial. Everything’s on fire. Canada means freedom and safety.

Barb’s Hammerhead bar is in Steel City, though, the “last free city” of the republic still standing against tyranny. When she’s not a running the bar, Barb’s a bounty hunter and mercenary. She doesn’t take sides in this crazy world; she’s just out for herself. But an old lover reappears and ignites a righteous flame. If that sounds a lot like Casablanca, that’s because it’s a lot like Casablanca.

Anderson was so into playing the character that rather than having the make-up department paint Barb’s barbed wire tattoo onto her left bicep every day, she decided to just get the tattoo done for real. The shooting was fraught, though.

Original director Adam Rifkin was dumped shortly before filming in favour of Batman Forever second unit director David Hogan. Nonetheless, Anderson remained upbeat.

“There was the first director, then the second director, then I had some medical problems on the set and I got married just before the movie, which is probably really bad timing,” Anderson told Premiere. “I said, 'Well, I hope this chaos adds to the whole vibe of the movie' because this movie is chaos and I think that in the end it will be great.”

The health difficulties Anderson suffered turned out to be the early stages of a pregnancy which ended soon after in a miscarriage. The magazine’s preview piece ended with a shrugging rejoinder.

“Whether or not the ‘chaos’ was a good thing remains to be seen, but when you've got Pamela Anderson in tighter than you can imagine leather pants, made up to look like a cross between a hooker and a hitman, at the end of the day, it just might not matter.”

It did, in fact, matter. Barb Wire did trade heavily on Anderson’s status as a sex symbol, particularly an opening scene in which Anderson’s Barb, undercover as a stripper, writhes around while being sprayed with a hose and flashing some nipple.

But no amount of flaccid innuendo could save a script in which characters describe Barb as being “as tender as Tuscan veal,” and gave her zingers including “Relax, Schmitz, you only die once!” Barb’s catchphrase, “Don’t call me babe,” usually heralds death for whoever’s babed her. One guy takes a stiletto to the forehead; another gets a blow dart after trying to light her cigarette.

When Barb Wire opened on 3 May 1996 (you can watch it here), the reviews were less than kind.

“Ms. Lee's makeup is painted on so heavily that she may not even be able to change expression,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times. “On the other hand, there's not much about Barb Wire to make her want to.”

Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly was even blunter. “Now that we’re seeing her under the hot voyeuristic glare of the movie camera, it’s more apparent than ever that Pamela Anderson Lee is a constructed goddess, a creature of synthetic hair, synthetic attitude, synthetic God knows what else – cheesecake served up straight from the lab.”

Anderson’s film career never recovered. Through the Noughties she turned up playing herself in Scooby-Doo and Borat, but the closest she got to a Jane Fonda-esque breakout role was the briefest of cameos at the beginning of Scary Movie 3.

Her character in that film is mostly concerned with a “cursed” tape, assumed to be a sex tape. It was obviously a riff on the viral sex tape of herself and Tommy Lee which Pam & Tommy focuses on, but Barb Wire was another, far more potent hex.