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Wednesday, October 08, 2008Warriors of the Apocalypse Release Year: 1985Country: The Philippines and United States Starring: Michael James, Deborah Moore, Ken Metcalfe, Michael Cohen, Robert Marius, David Brass, Charlotte Cain, David Light, Steve Rogers, Franco Guerrero. Writer: Bobby Suarez Director: Bobby Suarez Cinematographer: Jun Pereira Music: Ole Hoyer Producer: Bobby Suarez Alternate Titles: Searchers of the Voodoo Mountain; Time Raiders I think I'm detecting a pattern here. When I first decided to do Project VHS, reviewing a stack of old VHS tapes I have still cluttering up the shelves, I didn't intend for it to also be a celebration of the Filipino film industry, but it seems to be shaping up that way thanks in large part to the number of cheapjack genre films that used The Philippines and local Filipino crews and extras during the 80s and 90s. Need to make a cheap Rambo rip-off? Let the lush jungle landscape of The Philippines stand in for Vietnam. Need to make a crappy movie about a martial arts tournament that features bare-breasted female fighters? Don't worry; The Philippines is the place for you. Want to make a post-apocalyptic adventure film featuring nude Amazons and kabuki midgets? Even then you need not fear, for The Philippines truly is the Promised Land, so long as your vision of Paradise includes nude Amazons, kabuki midgets, topless kickboxing, and lots of slow motion explosions. And that damn well better be your vision of Paradise. The Filipino film industry is one well worth investigating. It's full of completely insane action and adventure movies, usually crudely made but with spirit to spare. Th Philippines produced a pretty huge number of espionage, superhero, horror, and action films for its domestic market throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Then, in the 1970s, American producers looking to save money while still giving their film an air of the exotic headed to The Philippines, producing four, five, sometimes even more movies in a very short amount of time and in conjunction with the locals. More times than not, and as we have learned, the American producer was Roger Corman and the local was Cirio Santiago. Using Santiago as the man on the ground and Corman as the pipeline to U.S. distribution, a lot of these co-productions found purely Filipino films piggybacking on them all the way to America. While it's great that a number of Filipino films took advantage of this partnership to get themselves dubbed and released in the United States, I really wish more of them had been picked up. Like Turkey, The Philippines is probably one of the great, largely untapped goldmines of zany genre films waiting to find some sort of attention in the DVD market. Unfortunately, also like Turkey, there seems to have been little care taken with preserving the movies, and even less care taken not to trample international copyright law. Thus, as much as we'd like to see them get proper treatment, I think we're relegated to the ranks of fuzzy VCDs and bootlegs for the foreseeable future.
Corman was not the only man looking to The Philippines as a home away from home. And just as Corman had Cirio Santiago, others had a man named Bobby Suarez. Suarez' career is so similar to Cirio Santiago's that I sometimes have a hard time believing they're not the same man, or that somewhere in an underground lab beneath Manila there isn't just some big supercomputer named Santiago Suarez. It was a brilliant artificial intelligence at one point, but the constant humidity of the hot Filipino summers eventually drove it mad, causing it to split into two distinct entities that, despite being distinct entities, emerged with the same prime directive: make as many shitty martial arts and post apocalypse action films as possible. Suarez was the storybook kid who came from nothing and made something of his life, even if that something was The One-Armed Executioner. After scoring a job with a film company, which I assume he did while talking all fast style and while wearing a newsie cap like they did in movies from the 1940s, Suarez worked his way up into the sales office, and through the sales office and into an eventual gig as a writer, producer, and director. Though nowhere near as prolific as fellow Filipino b-movie impresario Cirio Santiago, Suarez never the less contributed a number of gems to the world of cult cinema, including The One-Armed Executioner, about an Interpol agent out for revenge either against the men who chopped off his arm and killed his family or against the salon stylist who convinced him to get that horrible punch perm. Suarez also made They Call Her Cleopatra Wong, a low budget martial arts movie that dared ask the question, "What would happen if we took a really hot chick, dressed her up in a nun's outfit, and gave her a bad-ass double barrel sawed-off shotgun?" I think we can all answer that question pretty easily.
If there's anything that sets the films of Bobby Suarez apart from the films of Cirio Santiago, it's that most of them make some sort of sense, at least relative to the universe about which we're talking. But even Suarez was unable to resist the siren song of making a batshit insane post-apocalyptic action movie. And so where Santiago gave the world Future Hunters, which featured a leather-clad future hero, a tribe of midgets, Robert Patrick in his tighty whities, and a lost society of Filipino Amazons, Bobby Suarez gives us Warriors of the Apocalypse, which featured a leather-clad future hero, a tribe of midgets, and a lost society of sexy multi-ethnic Amazons. What it lacks in Robert Patrick buffalo shots, however, it certainly makes up for with what has to be the very final word in post-apocalypse shoulderpad jackets. So you know the score. In the 1980s, the Australians went and made Road Warrior, the wild sequel to a relatively more modest affair called Mad Max, both starring an unknown actor named Mel something (I think he used to be a lounge singer) and made in, according to American distributors who bought the film for the US market and had it redubbed, an unintelligible moon man language spoken only by the Elder Gods, or by people drunk on big-ass cans of Fosters. The unexpected position of Road Warrior as one of the most popular films of the early 1980s meant that it also became one of the most imitated, especially in Italy. Although everyone was busy cranking out post-apocalypse films, no one seized on the Road Warrior aesthetic quite like the Italians. Theoretically, the Italians should have been able to crank out pretty competent Road Warrior rip-offs. The usual excuses -- low budgets, inexperienced actors -- didn't apply. Road Warrior was a low budget film itself, and though star Mel Gibson was on the fast track to a requisite DUI and calling a female cop "sugar tits" whilst driving in the Hollywood Hills, the cast was comprised largely of untested new faces with minimal film acting experience. VErnon Wells had yet to undergo one of the most remarkable transformations of all time, and in this film was still a hot, lean, muscular bad-ass. How, just a couple years later, he turned into a pasty, doughy, Freddie Mercury looking mercenary is a question I don't think any of us can answer. But one thing is for certain. In neither Road Warrior nor Commando does he need the gun, John! He doesn't need the gun!
Of course, the one thing the Australians had over pretty much everyone who came in the wake of Road Warrior was talent. So while Road Warrior remains one of the tensest, most exciting sci-fi films around, the rip-offs were generally plodding, incompetent affairs. There's very little energy in most of them, even when they're good. I don't know what it was about Road Warrior -- maybe it was because the Aussies are more or less the only other people in the world who have the same sort of car culture we Americans have. Maybe they just cared more about the film. Maybe they had more wide-open space and better drivers. I know the Italians have good drivers, but that's a totally different kind of driving. As cool as you may think they are now, no one wants to be saddled with a Ferrari come the apocalypse. You can't even jump that shit over a sand dune, man, and we all know that, one way or another, the apocalypse is going to make the whole world look like the Australian Outback. Speaking of which, one thing the Road Warrior rip-offs seem to miss is that the collapse of society didn't turn the world into a desert. The guys in that movie chose to go out and run wild in a place that was already a desert. However, in defense of the Italian Road Warrior clones, several of them featured Fred Williamson in a variety of silky shirts, so those we can forgive.
So let's assume that as a reader of Teleport City you are at least familiar with Italian Road Warrior knock-offs. Now imagine an even cheaper Filipino knock-off of those knock-offs. Like xeroxing a xerox, the quality plummets precipitously, and when your starting point is something like New Barbarians or Exterminators of the Year 3000, you would assume that you wouldn't have very far to plummet. And yet still it proved possible. And like the copy of a copy, the final product becomes more and more abstract, its original form more and more intangible, until you get to the point where you are staring at a scratchy amorphous blob and trying to make sense of what it might once have been. In the end, though, all you can see is a Rorschach style image of something that might be a midget in a feathered headdress and Kabuki war paint. Bobby Suarez' entry in the post-apocalypse sweepstakes seems to be operating from the standpoint that Road Warrior wasn't nearly incomprehensible enough. Like Cirio Santiago's Future Hunters, Warriors of the Apocalypse has the feel of a movie assembled more or less at random out of several different movies. And to its credit, it's really only a Road Warrior rip-off for the first twenty minutes or so. It then veers off wildly into territory that seems as likely to have been inspired by Beneath the Planet of the Apes as anything else, delving into the combined territory of a cult that draws its power from a lost atomic reactor and movies about any number of lost civilizations. Basically, "lost" is an adjective that applies pretty heavily to this film.
We start off in fairly familiar post-apocalyptic territory: nuclear war has decimated the world and turned it into a sprawling rock quarry inhabited by nomadic bands of violent men who, despite the fact that the world has collapsed, seem to have no problem finding a variety of rich leather outfits. Let me pause right here, before I've hardly even begun, and address the concept of leather. And this applies not just to films like this, but also to modern films, many of which envision a future or alternate world in which the warriors are all clad in skintight PVC and leather. As far movies are concerned, the armies of the future will all be clad in tight fitting leather, with matching leather jackets of varying length, though ankle-length and cinched in tightly at the waist seems to be the dominant trend. So answer me this: in the last, say, hundred years or so, how any armies have marched into combat clad head to toe in leather? And more specifically, how many armies engaged in combat in the desert have decked themselves out in leather? OK, so Gestapo goons wore those long leather trenchcoats, but other than them, the armies of the world decided at some point that lightweight, camouflaged fatigues made of easily repairable material were the way to go. I'm not sure what happens in the future that causes the world's armies to re-evaluate this stance and go for tight, constricting, squeaky leather and PVC, but I'm interested in finding out. So the particular leather-clad band of survivors in which we are interested are lead by Trapper, played by a guy who is apparently the guy you hire when your film is too cheap to shell out for John Saxon. Trapper's crew was lucky enough to raid a West Village leather queen shop before the world ended, and as such they are decked out in a variety of swanky outfits that were acquired, I can only assume, via a montage consisting of scenes of each man emerging from a dressing room wearing a jacket that tries to outdo the last guy's in terms of the size of its shoulderpads, until finally the last guy comes out and his shoulderpads are actually like two yards across, causing everyone else to groan at the overkill while he shrugs and goes, "What? What? What's wrong with this? Ahh, screw you guys."
Of course, there's the non-conformist who puts less effort into his shoulderpads and concentrates instead on reassembling the outfit from some biker film starring Peter Fonda, and then there's the guy who stumbles onto the box of mesh tank tops and thinks to himself, "Oh yeah, I'm having those." And let me ask you this -- what's the point of a shirt that is mesh and open-front? Each of these outfits is also accented by a number of metal studs, because there's nothing you want more when you're a soldier in the desert than to adorn yourself with random bits of shiny metal. Rounding out the crew is a guy who looks like he might have almost sensibly started trying to dress like a Central Asian, figuring that Afghans must have a pretty good idea by this point about how to dress if you live in a place that is mostly a shithole gravel pit. But at some point, he started giving in to peer pressure and was like, "OK, I'll put on, umm, let's say some goggles and tie some bandannas around my thigh, but that's it!" And then there's the old guy, because you need an old guy so people can complain about how he's slowing everyone down. He may look familiar to some of you, and if so, there's a reason. That's Mike Cohen, and you probably saw his ass getting rescued by a three foot tall midget bad-ass in For Y'ur Height Only.
Trapper's gang spends most of their time wandering aimlessly through the desert and fighting with other leather-clad scavengers over food and water. In terms of fighting, Trapper and his men have the decided advantage, armed as they are with guns that cause stuff a couple feet away from the people they're aimed at to blow up, which then causes the target to fall out of a nearby tree or off a boulder. During one such skirmish, the men encounter a mysterious Filipino guy who might also look familiar if you are a connoisseur of Filipino action films. It's the one-armed executioner himself, Franco Guerrero. He tells the men of a fabulous paradise where you can live forever, eat mangos, whatever else it is people do in Paradise. He admits that he himself is over a hundred and fifty years old. The land lies through the jungle on the slopes of a forested mountain. Wait. There's a jungle? What kind of world reduced to a desert wasteland has a jungle? And furthermore, if there's a jungle, all full of fruits and nuts and bubbling streams of crystal clear water, don't you have a better chance of surviving if you live, I don't know, like on its outskirts? I mean, what with the rain and all that must fall to sustain it. And the abundant food and water we see in evidence. I know living in the actual jungle could be dangerous, but loitering around the edge has got to be better than squabbling with a fat guy in bondage clothes over a few drops of water.
Naturally, the interior of the jungle is fraught with peril, mostly in the form of stone-age tribes of natives and, later, stone-age tribes of midget natives who can be resurrected, none the worse for wear aside from the remnant sof a few ultra-bloddy squibs. Braving these terrors means that Trapper and his men can join their new pal in his Utopian society. Oh, and did we mention it's populated almost entirely by hot, topless women? Things look pretty good for Trapper, but some things are simply too good to be true. As the men frolic and prepare for the upcoming fertility rite orgy, the old guy begins to uncover the sinister secret of the society and the apparent immortality of its inhabitants. By the time things are sorted out, there will be a revolt by enslaved blue zombie guys, a war between the queen of the Amazons and her high priest fought with nothing but lasers they shoot out of their eyes with "pew pew pew" laser noises, the inevitable fiery destruction of the Amazon city, a fight between cut-rate John Saxon and the one-armed executioner, and a lot of the cornball philosophizing about the nature of man that makes these films so entertaining. At some point you may wonder why the secret zombie slaves of the Amazons all get to carry laser guns while the Amazons themselves carry spears. You'd think if you had a huge cache of futuristic laser weapons, you'd opt for those instead of bows and arrows. Or at the very least, you'd lock them up so the slaves can't get to them. But then, you probably don't understand about style and achieving a look. If you have a bunch of Amazons in fur bikinis carrying around laser guns -- man, that's like wearing a zoot suit and clipping a Blackberry onto the belt. There's not much point in undertaking the usual points of criticism one might look at in a movie. The dialog is dubbed, after all, and the only guy who really seems to be doing any acting is the dude who wears the yacht captain hat and the flip-up sunglasses. His acting style seems to be to channel the most irritating character from a biker film and combine that with that soldier from Hell of the Living Dead who decided to dress up in a tutu and tapdance even though they were in the middle of raiding a zombie-infested factory. I think this guy is supposed to be "the cool one," but he's about as cool as "the cool guy" in crappy 1980s teen sex comedies always was. However, he does still carry around a bag of pot, so I guess the future isn't all bad.
Suarez' direction is nondescript, but he manages to capture plenty of gratuitous boobies and explosions in the frame, and that's pretty much all I demand from a director. He keeps the movie moving at a decent enough pace for a movie that seems like it has no idea where it's going. And I guess there's a plot twist, sort of, though I think it was more o an oversight than an honest twist. One assumes than a band of scruffy, virile men being lead to a kingdom of sexy nude women with whom they must have sex means that some sinister consequence will occur, like everyone gets flayed alive afterward, or in the middle of sex, all the women reveal that they actually look like Martin Van Buren. But in this movie, the guys have their orgy, and then hey! Everything is cool afterward. Well, except for the zombie revolt and the eye laser battle, but that had nothing to do with the sex. So I guess bravo to Bobby Suarez for daring to posit that in a bleak and hopeless future, there's still a chance for guilt-free orgy sex with a city full of horny Amazon women. Warriors of the Apocalypse manages to be just as weird as Future Hunters, its sort of kindred spirit, but in a very different way. Although it still has the feeling of a film pieced together out of bits of other films, it's not nearly as incoherent or schizophrenic as Future Hunters. Within the context of the film, the plot actually makes some degree of sense, though in the real world, the logic to which Warriors of the Apocalypse adheres to is dubious, at best. I'm not sure what it is about nuclear war that causes, some 150 years later, half the world to become leather-clad extras from a Roger Corman biker film while the other half decide to revert to stone-age tribalism and spears. And the idea that a hidden nuclear reactor has made two people immortal, and they in turn make other people immortal (and would chose for one of those groups to be an army of pygmies in face paint) I think takes certain liberties with nuclear science.
But then, who the heck wants to watch a scientifically or socially accurate post apocalyptic movie when the alternative is full of nude Amazons, immortal kabuki midgets, exploding lost civilizations, and laser beam eye warfare? There's enough idiotic action and bizarre turns of events in this movie to make it one of the more enjoyable post apocalypse films that isn't Road Warrior. And you know it's all quality, because Bobby Suarez has won multiple awards for his work in Filipino cinema. Among those awards? The Cirio Santiago Memorial Award for introducing Filipino-produced movies in the international market.
Labels: Director: Bobby Suarez, Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Series: Project VHS, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 6:19 PM | 1 Comments Tuesday, September 09, 2008Future Hunters Release Year: 1986Country: United States Starring: Robert Patrick, Linda Carol, Ed Crick, Bob Schott, David Light, Paul Holmes, Peter Shilton, Ursula Marquez, Elizabeth Oropesa, Bruce Le, Hwang Jang Lee, Richard Norton. Writer: J. Lee Thompson Director: Cirio Santiago Cinematographer: Ricardo Remias Music: Ron Jones Producer: Anthony Maharaj Alternate Titles: Spear of Destiny; Deadly Quest Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us It can't be! It just can't be! I'm only a couple films into my Project VHS reviews, in which I take a written tour of some of my strangest old VHS tapes, and I'm finding that the common thread running through all the films I've selected for this treatment is that they lead me almost instantly to refer to them as Lovecraftian horrors that cannot be processed by the feeble mind of man, and thus merely witnessing them will destroy you and turn you mad. And it turns out, that comparison can easily be sustained in our next foray into video cassette nostalgia. Although not nearly as batshit bizarre as Roller Blade, Cirio Santiago's Future Hunters still resembles some ancient horror buried for millions of years at the bottom of a pit beneath some black and unnamed ruin of a city comprised primarily of forms and colors that have no corresponding point of reference in our own universe. In fact, when first I purchased this tape, I ended up returning it as defective. I bought it used from a video store that was liquidating its stock back in 1995 or so, and a few days later, I popped it in the VCR and set about watching it while I did some simple household chores. The film started out as a Road Warrior rip-off, with occasional Hong Kong action film villain Richard Norton tearing around the post-apocalyptic wasteland in a muscle car. Familiar enough territory. Then I got distracted, possibly by the discovery that our refrigerator had been leaking, and the leakage had turned into a putrid yellowish goo underneath the crisper drawers (man, talk about unspeakable Lovecraftian horrors). When I finished toweling up the gelatinous gloop and throwing the towel onto the roof of the credit union across the parking lot, I returned to the living room and found that someone had recorded a different movie over the one I'd purchased. Because there on my massive ten-inch screen was a Bruce Le kungfu film, with the famous Bruce Lee imitator locked in mortal kicking combat with Hwang Jang Lee wearing a silver wig.
I took the movie back, told them of the error, and had my $3.00 returned to me. Oddly, a couple weeks later, I found the film for sale again at a different video store, and for some reason or other, I purchased it. It was like unwittingly being saved from purchasing some accursed item only to equally unwittingly acquire the item again. It was destiny. So once again, I went home and popped it in the VCR to watch while taking care of some chores. It was around this time that I discovered some hamsters had escaped their twisting tube universe and had gone feral, living in the walls of our duplex. This revelation came shortly after noticing that the area we used to clean out our various aquariums -- a flower garden owned by the aforementioned credit union -- had been turned by uneaten hamster trail mix into a garden of sunflowers and corn stalks, which we eventually harvested and ate while the poor guy in charge of that small plot of flora was wondering how the hell his flower garden turned into a corn field. Anyway, after I gave up trying to corner one of the wily rodents and resigned myself at last to being the guy who destroyed the north Florida ecosystem by introducing wild hamsters into its delicate balance, I returned to the movie only to find out, son of a bitch! It was that damn Bruce Le movie again! Although I flirted with the idea that somehow the film had been purchased by someone who promptly resold it to a different video store that then put it on sale for me to end up purchasing a second time, the more logical theory emerged that this movie was just really schizophrenic, and what had started out as a Mad Max movie morphed at some point into a film about Bruce Le wearing a modern track suit and fighting a guy who looks to have stepped out of the Chinese middle ages. So I decided that I was going to have to sit down and actually pay attention to this movie if I hoped to ever unravel its tantalizing mysteries. What I discovered was even more bizarre than initially I suspected.
So as I saw the first time around, the movie opens in the near future. Society has crumbled and the earth has been ravaged by nuclear war which, in the 1980s, was as versatile an explanation for pretty much anything as "hacking" is today. Depending on the movie, nuclear war could turn the world into a desert wasteland populated by S&M punks or a lush jungle populated by Amazons, or it could somehow cause dinosaurs to come back. Similarly, if your movie requires someone to get some piece of information or control over some device they couldn't possibly achieve, all you need to do is write the following line of dialogue: "If I can just hack in through the back door...we're in!" then you can do pretty much any damn thing you want. So it's the future. A guy named Matthew (Richard Norton), is speeding around in the desert looking for the fabled Spear of Longinus, the weapon that pierced the side of Christ during his crucifixion. According to this film, the loosely defined good guys of the future need the spear so they can travel back in time and prevent nuclear obliteration from ever having happened. Unfortunately, Matthew is pursued by the bad guys, lead by someone named Zaar (unfortunately not played by Robert Z'Dar), and where as Matthew has a cool car, awesome hair, and the same gun I think Richard Norton had last time he was a post-apocalyptic hero (that being in the film Equalizer 2000), Zaar has tanks and wears a gratuitous cape. They capture Matthew, bring him to within a stone's throw of where he was going anyway, then let him escape. Then they chase Matthew to some crumbling temple where he finds the mythical spear with relative ease, only to have the full brunt of Zaar's armored divisions brought down on his head. Then we cut to 1986, where college student Michelle (Linda Carol) is randomly poking around the ruins of the very same temple of the future with her boyfriend, Terminator 2 (Robert Patrick) because her "big exam is coming up." Once again I have to question the colleges attended by people in B-movies. In what class can you prepare for your test by driving out to an old church frequented, as we will soon learn, by rapist biker gangs, and looking at it with no real defined purpose? And if it's archaeology or art history or something, wouldn't other members of the class be out there as well, or at the very least, shouldn't you be doing something a little more scientific than wandering aimlessly while a Terminator 2 sits on the steps and complains about being bored and needing to get back to town so he can kill John Conner? Or shouldn't the professor at least have warned his female students that the deserted site is routinely patrolled by vicious gangs of rapists? This is as unacademic as the classrooms in movies like Gor where the entire curriculum seems to be based around listening to a professor make random proclamations about some ridiculous pet theory of his, or the grad student in Cannibal Ferox whose thesis was "Cannibals don't exist any more" when everyone else had to write thesis papers like "Aspects on Process Engineering in the Finnish Pulp and Paper Industry."
Michelle's investigative archaeology is accompanied by that 80s direct-to-video action film music that is so hard to explain yet so familiar as soon as you hear it. It's a playful little number, and the sound isn't straight synth nor is it a mimic of the piano, exactly. But in pretty much every 80s direct-to-video action film, they used this style of theme for the "makin' love" scene or the "just horsin' around" scene. I'm a bit surprised that there is no Future Hunters soundtrack on Varese Sarabande, as "Soundtrack on Varese Sarabande" is the single most repeated phrase in the entire Psychotronic Video Guide. The world is a darker place for not having a CD quality recording of "Love Theme from Future Hunters." After this goes on a spell, Michelle and Terminator 2 are randomly attacked by a biker gang who, for some reason or another, like to troll the ruins of out in the middle of nowhere churches looking for loving young college couples to terrorize. I guess they didn't realize they were messing with Terminator 2, who I assumed would instantly turn his pinky finger into a long silver spike and stick it in someone's shoulders (a painful sensation not unlike the one you'll feel watching most of this movie), then follow it up with that very determined "running after the vehicle" shtick all Terminator 2's are wont to do. But then this was 1986, and we were barely done with Terminator 1, so I guess Robert Patrick didn't have his Terminator 2 powers yet (though later in the film he does do a determined run after a jeep in a scene I'm sure he included on his highlight reel to get the T2 job). As a result, he gets his ass kicked and is forced to soothe his bruised ego with the knowledge that it won't be too long before he's strong enough to beat up the gaunt, corpse-like Edward Furlong, who would achieve the dubious honor in his twenties of looking less vital and more deathly than Peter Cushing (whose picture is in the dictionary next to the word "gaunt") did a month after he died.
Michelle is about to be on the bad end of an 80s action film style raping when Richard Norton wanders up out of nowhere and beats the tar out of the bikers before getting shot and handing the Spear of Longinus over to Michelle, stammering that she must use it to prevent the apocalypse. So I guess the time travel thing works, even though they later explain that the spear can't possibly work unless you have both halves of it (the shaft is elsewhere). He also stammers a few names, all of whom, conveniently, are related in some way to the community college (or Touro) Michelle attends. And then Matthew dies and goes off to get more use out of his costume in Equalizer 2000. As is often the case with these types of films, I realize that I'm straying a bit too far into the realm of plot synopsis, but once again I feel it's justified, as there's not much hope otherwise of explaining just how cracked in the head a film like Future Hunters can manage to be. Because before too long, Michelle and T2 are on the run from a secret society of Nazis who want to get the Spear and use it to cause the apocalypse we saw before the credits. Which is kind of odd, as they couldn't possibly have possessed the spear the first time they caused the future apocalypse -- which is the first and only time I'll mention the underlying stupidity of the entire time travel plotline, since for starters is gets dropped almost immediately, but mostly because no one should bend themselves out of shape worrying about shoddy time travel threads in Future Hunters, a movie that, soon enough, will present us with everything from an impromptu kungfu film to an army of stone age midgets to a secret society of sexy Filipina Amazons in the jungles of South Asia.
Also, if Matthew retrieved the Spear from it's ancient resting place half an hour outside of Los Angeles (how the hell did it get there?), then traveled back in time to that same location, isn't the 1986 Spear of Longinus still in the temple? Maybe the Nazi bad guys should just use that one instead of the future Spear of Longinus. Michelle and T2, whose name in this movie is actually Slade (and I mention this only because Robert Patrick and Richard Norton appear together in Equalizer 2000, where Norton's character is named Slade -- Santiago apparently has a fetish for the name) must find the elusive Professor Hightower, and doing so leads them to Hong Kong. I guess her big test wasn't that important after all. Also, I guess she's incredibly rich to be able to close up her crappy desert diner and fly to Hong Kong that same day. But then I expect no less from a naive young college girl who, for some inexplicable reason is able to outdrive, outfox, and outshoot the various trained killers sent after her. Robert Patrick spends most of the movie being believably beaten up, on the other hand. I hope you like the sight of him lying on his back with a dumb look on his face, because you're going to get it a lot. T2 has a friend who is a taxi driver in Hong Kong, but more importantly, he has a friend who is a taxi driver and is also Bruce Le, though as was his lot in life, he's often miscredited as Bruce Li. Because a random taxi driver in Hong Kong will obviously be in tune with rumors surrounding missing anthropology professors from small American colleges, he informs our duo that Hightower's last reported location was at the Forbidden Pagoda, a tourist attraction which no one is allowed to enter lest they incur the wrath of high kicking kungfu warrior Hwang Jang Lee, dressed like he just came from the set of the latest Seasonal Films production, or possibly from a kungfu film themed amusement park. When T2 tries to enter the pagoda, he gets whupped, which leads to a lengthy fight scene between Le and Hwang, complete with the sudden introduction of kungfu film sound effects. When the monk is finally dispatched -- not via the fight, but because a sniper attempts to kill T2 and kills the monk instead -- Le and T2 enter the pagoda, look around for for a few seconds, then testily proclaim, "Nothing!" Then they walk away. Shouldn't they report the murder to the police or something? Worst tourist attraction in Hong Kong!
Oddly, this isn't the first time Bruce Le has found himself randomly inserted into a film for a gratuitous if not unwelcome fight scene. A while back, I was wondering if Bollywood, always quick to exploit a trend, had ever produced any Bruce Lee exploitation films (films that cast someone with a similar name or haircut in an attempt to sucker people into thinking they're going to see the real Bruce Lee). Eventually, I came across Katilon Ke Kaatil starring Dharmendra and featuring a scene were he randomly walks by Bruce Le -- who hasn't been in the film before and won't appear again -- and a fight breaks out. I mean, I assume that if Dharmendra and Bruce Le swagger by each other, a fight is going to break out, but it had nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie. I guess there was a period in the 1980s when directors in need of some extra action and running time could put in an order for Bruce Le, and they'd just ship him from Hong Kong in a wooden crate to wherever they needed him. Today, he remains in a huge warehouse full of crates like the one in Indiana Jones, stored alongside the likes of Sho Kosugi, patiently meditating until the day their services are once more required to save the world from the awakening of Cthulhu. So having now seen exactly how the film suddenly becomes a kungfu film for ten minutes, it still doesn't make any more sense than when I thought someone had mistakenly recorded Eagle vs. Silver Fox over part of Future Hunters. I mean, all that for absolutely no reason? I was about to swear that this whole film was assembled piecemeal out of other equally bad but less nonsensical films, but that isn't the case. I mean, I saw Hwang Jang Lee and Robert Patrick in the same shot together, and this was before the world possessed the technology to digitally insert Robert Patrick into every movie ever made, which I assume we're going to do. And even though I knew it wasn't the case, the rest of the movie caused the same feeling. Things get no less logical when Michelle and T2 follow the trail to South Asia with a band of Nazis hot on their trail. There, in the jungles, they encounter a tribe of stone-age midgets who aid them in their quest to recover the shaft of the spear, which is in a cave guarded by a city of scantily clad Amazons. And when one of these movies ends up in an Amazon city, you know you're going to get at least one really awkwardly staged catfight. In the end, an earthquake happens for no reason, foam rocks bounce harmlessly off people who show up bloody and dead in the next shot, and Michelle randomly holds up the spear, causing all the midgets to cheer and the film to end.
Before we go much further, like talking about how the Spear doesn't even do anything in the end, let's discuss the career of one Cirio Santiago, the Roger Corman of The Philippines -- though I suspect them of actually being the same man. Understanding a film like Future Hunters may be as impossible as understanding the full implications of quantum mechanics, but understanding a little about Santiago might help us at least grasp a film like this on some elementary, superficial level. Future Hunters and the many films like it bearing Santiago's name are lasting monuments to nepotism. Santiago is the son of a studio founder, which might help explain how Santiago got his first jobs. And those jobs were as producer on a film called Cavalry Command in 1963 and as director of 1964's Darna and the Tree Monster, an entry in a popular pulp superheroine adventure series. It was in the 1970s, however, that Santiago really came into his own. Roger Corman, always on the prowl for ways to save money, hit upon The Philippines as the ideal location for many of his productions. The sprawling island-nation has long been and continues to be the stand-in for a variety of places populated by chubby guys with thick mustaches and Hawaiian shirts. It was the go-to place for any film set in Vietnam or Cambodia, at least until Thailand became a more viable option. Future Hunters is one of the few movies to actually attempt -- and fail -- to pass the streets of Manila off as downtown Los Angeles, but hey, you gotta respect the moxie. Corman most famously produced a series of sweaty, lesbian-filled women in prison films in The Philippines, and it's probably around this time that he struck up his relationship with Cirio Santiago. Although he still produced and directed local fare during that time, Santiago became the go-to guy for American co-productions slumming it in Manila. He produced and/or directed a number of blaxploitation films throughout the 70s, and in the 80s he split his time between cheapjack action films -- mostly set in Vietnam -- and cheapjack post apocalypse scifi, almost all of which got distributed by one Roger Corman company or another in the United States, much to the delight and puzzlement of people like me who prowled video store shelves in search of anything with a title like Machete Maidens of Mora Tao.
Future Hunters may be his crowning achievement, a film of such stunning incompetence, with such total disregard for making even the least bit of sense, that one can hardly process it. Seriously, by the time ancient Mongol horsemen attack the 1986 Nazi camp in The Philippines, you're not even going to care any more. This film contains more individual movies and genres than most Bollywood films. All it lacks is a song and dance number, but what it lacks in terms of item numbers by Helen it more than makes up for with shots of young Robert Patrick lying spread eagle on a bed in his tighty whities. By the time we got to the end and realized that the Spear of Longinus serves no purpose whatsoever, all I was capable of doing was lying in the corner, giggling uncontrollably and scrawling esoteric runes from floor to ceiling on every wall in my padded cell. Seriously, what the hell were we thinking in the 1980s? I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm happy that amazingly freakish crap like this got made, but that doesn't mean I don't wonder how the hell it happened. Cirio Santiago has, in his career, flirted with competence; Future Warriors doesn't even flirt with coherence. This film simply shouldn't be, and like I said, even though the footage is original, it feels like the entire movie was pasted together out of other shot-in-The-Philippines movies. Both the Amazons and the midget tribe ideas would return in Warriors of the Apocalypse, directed by Bobby Suarez, who on some days I would swear is just the third part of the unholy trinity formed along with Corman and Santiago. Richard Norton driving around in the post-apocalyptic wasteland would show up again in Santiago's own Equalizer 2000.
But perhaps weirdest of all is that a few years after this, Robert Patrick would appear in another "time travelin' to save the future" movie, albeit one with a considerably larger profile. I can only assume that young James Cameron was sitting around one day and, much like me, popped a copy of Future Hunters into the VCR and, mere minutes later, thought to himself, "I have to get this guy to be the terminator in my next movie!" But as the guy who plays the king of the caveman midgets wasn't available, Cameron did the next best thing and cast the annoying redneck prone to lying around in his man panties as an unstoppable killing machine from the future. Patrick's performance, like that of his co-star Linda Carol, consists entirely of plaintive whining. "We have to protect the spear!" "Aww, dang, Ah don' wanna protect tha spear!" "Oh come on! Help me protect the spear!" After spending a few minutes with them, nuclear apocalypse is suddenly looking like the preferable choice. When watching the endless banter, when watching him get beat up by Hwang Jang Lee, when watching the T2000 buffalo shots, remember that this guy somehow, despite being in Future Hunters, went on to star in not one, but two of the hugest franchises of all time, although one of those came after the characters people actually gave a damn about had already left the show. Still, the rest of the cast wasn't nearly as lucky. Well, except for Hwang and Le, but I'm pretty sure they're only in this movie because Cirio accidentally stumbled onto the set of a film they were already filming and decided to work it into his own movie. I mean, you never really need an excuse to pad your film with a fight scene between Hwang Jang Lee and Bruce Le.
Linda Carol had a smattering of film and television appearances of little consequence, the highest profile of which was the women in prison spoof Reform School Girls. Everyone in that movie had the misfortune of having to compete with half naked Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics as she howled like a banshee and rode a school bus to hell. Everyone else had solid careers in TV shows you only pretend to like but never actually watched (I don't care what they say on VH1 specials or what the camp appeal of William Shatner may be; you did not watch T.J. Hooker) and films like Bloodfist VI, but they must all be watching Robert Patrick in Terminator 2 and thinking, "Holy shit, I once hit that guy with a floor lamp while he was in his underwear." And Aussie ass-kicker Richard Norton, it goes without saying, is awesome, even though almost everything he's ever made stinks to high heaven. Of course, the end of the day means admitting that the individual pieces of this film are far more entertaining than the whole. For every minute we spend with bikini clad Amazons and warrior midgets, we spend twice as much time with Slade and Michelle as they bicker with each other. Still, this movie is just weird enough to make it fascinating so long as you are a viewer possessed of some high degree of constitution. It's no Roller Blade, but where else are you going to get a movie where a guy time travels back to 1986 to give the spear of destiny to Terminator 2 so he can show it to Bruce Le while running from Nazis who get attacked by Genghis Khan's hordes while they are surrounded by caveman midgets and Filipina Amazons? I'm a sucker for movies like this, and Future Hunters won me over. If Fantasy Mission Force has a kindred spirit, this film is it. Oh, and what ever became of ol' Cirio Santiago you may ask? Well, in 1995 he was appointed by none other than Filipino President Fidel Ramos as head of the Philippines Film Development Fund. The Fund's purpose? "To improve the quality of Filipino films."  Labels: Director: Cirio Santiago, Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Series: Project VHS, Year: 1986 posted by Keith at 12:44 AM | 4 Comments Friday, September 05, 2008Roller Blade Release Year: 1986Country: United States Starring: Suzanne Solari, Jeff Hutchinson, Shaun Michelle, Katina Garner, Sam Mann, Robby Taylor, Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray, Erin Michael, Michael Cofield, Pat McClung. Writer: Donald Jackson Director: Donald Jackson Cinematographer: Donald Jackson Music: Robert Garrett Producer: Donald Jackson Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us You know what I love? I love that "post apocalyptic rollerskating movie" isn't a description of a movie, but instead of an entire genre. Granted it's a genre created almost entirely by a single man, but when the man is dedicated and prolific enough, suddenly you have a whole section in the old time video store with sun-bleached VHS boxes on the shelves dedicated to movies where chicks on rollerskates gingerly navigate the rubble-strewn parking lots of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, which is invariably going to be referred to as Lost Angeles, as it has been in so many of the crappy direct to video post-apoc films from the 1980s. That genre-creating, film making machine was Donald G. Jackson, and it is thanks entirely to him that we have the post-apocalypse rollerskating genre comprised of films like Roller Blade, Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force, The Rollerblade 7 and its inexplicably large number of sequels, and something called Rollergator, which is probably a different movie than the one I write in my head when I hear the name Rollergator. Assisting Jackson in fleshing out this strange little genre were Rick King (Prayer of the Rollerboys) and Alan Johnson (Solarbabies), but while their entries are merely stupid, Jackson's first contribution, the film that kicked off the genre, is so mind-bendingly strange and incompetent that it threatens to cease being a movie and become some entirely new and terrifying form of art that man was not meant to behold. Even after more viewings of Roller Blade than a grown man should admit to, the film still has the power to stun me in my tracks and leave me sitting in the corner, twitching uncontrollably and rocking back and forth with a trail of drool dangling from the corner of my mouth.
My inability to be anything other than struck dumb starts at the very first frame. The credits appear over an 80s style lens flare as, slowly, a teased-hair warrior from the future roller skates into view while being mirrored on the other side of the screen. It's at this precise moment that I said to myself, "I wonder what Donald Jackson would have to say about this film." So before I get too far into the film -- remembering that wandering into this film could mean that you will never emerge -- let's travel back in time to the 1980s, a decade many of you are too young to remember as anything but a misrepresented decade on assorted VH1 specials where people born in 1988 reminisce fondly about 1984. While I have memories of the 1970s, my formative years were spent in the neon-drenched, chrome-trimmed decade of the 1980s. One of the most popular ways to pass the time back then, especially in the days before I could drive and do cool punk rock stuff like stand around in a parking lot with a few other people, was to go to skating parties. There, at Champs Rollerdrome in historic Crestwood, Kentucky, you could strap on those tan rental skates with the orange laces and hit the giant wood oval while the DJ ran through a series of 80s skating hits like "Rockit," "Thriller," Van Halen's "Jump," and for the couples only skate, "Hold Me Now" by The Thompson Twins. In between, you could hang in the video arcade and show off your Centipede skills, mack on chicks at the concession stand, or find a carpeted bench in a dark corner of the expansive "drome" and make out with the girl of your choice. You could also purchase from vending machines stickers for your sticker album or a sequined Michael Jackson glove. "No re-entry" meant that would-be hoods couldn't go out to the parking lot and have a smoke without having to pay again if they wanted to come back in.
Into this fray I entered, and while many writers would like to cast their childhood as a dark, abused period full of alcoholic parents, social alienation, and brutal bullies, the fact is I had a lot of fun as a kid, and I loved 7th grade skating parties. Being small in stature and possessed of decent agility honed I assume from years of climbing trees and haystacks, I was pretty good as skating. Not world class, but I could go forward, backward, slow, fast, and do a few tricks, like when you squat down and hold one leg out in front of you. For some reason, we thought that was pretty awesome. I couldn't do the thing where you pulled someone behind you under your legs so they were suddenly in front of you, but no one was really doing that anyway. And in 7th grade, I had decent luck with the ladies, so there were plenty of opportunities for me to put the movies on some young honey, maybe buy her an Orange Whip or some fries at the concession stand, maybe impress her by convincing the DJ to play us a song he was probably going to play anyway. And then you hear the first little bit of "Hold Me Now," ask the girl to skate, take her hand, and for the next three minutes or so yo roll through a swirling snowstorm of colored lights and raging hormones that can only be assuaged by letting go of her hand as the song ends and "Play Guitar" by John Cougar Mellencamp comes on and affords you a chance to fast skate off some of that pent up sexual energy -- especially if the DJ is edgy and doesn't blank out the "Forget all about that macho shit and learn how to play guitar" line. Anyway, point is, I liked roller skating. When I went again in college at the behest of a group of Cuban gang girls from Miami (you do what they say, and you like it), I found that it isn't really a skill you can pick right up again after not doing it for the past ten years. But while I still liked the idea of roller skating (though not as much as I liked Cuba gang girls), even I recognized the fundamental stupidity of using it as a means of locomotion across a post-apocalyptic wasteland (or PAW). Hell, it's not even that convenient now is a world that is only marginally strewn with the rubble of bygone eras. In a future full of ultimate weapon motorcycles and dudes in dune buggies, woe be unto the person that shows up for the fight wearing rollerskates.
Luckily, rollerskating futurist Donald Jackson didn't let my skepticism stand in the way, and so he delivers this tale of a world pushed past the brink, crumbling and decaying, where the only hope for humanity is an order of rollerskating nuns in various combinations of red and blue robes and hoods, black panties, black spandex bodystockings, and nudity. Using the power of a blinking light-up smiley face button, the nuns battle the guy from the cover of Quiet Riot's Metal Health album and his ugly rubber puppet. Oh yeah, the nuns also possess the secret of the future's ultimate weapon: the butterfly knife, known in future parlance as the roller blade. When combined with the skill of rollerskating, the butterfly knife is the deadliest art since gymkata. Let that plot synopsis roll over you for a second. It's a good one, isn't it? And in the hands of someone less committed to the vision of a future in which we all roller skate, even on the beach, even when the streets are choked with rubble and uneven surfaces, this probably would have ended up looking like some jokey, desperate "see, it's bad on purpose!" type of film like you get from Troma. But Jackson handles this insane scenario with all the gravitas of a man making a film about the Iran hostage crisis. At no point does he flirt with self-awareness or irony. At no point is he telling you anything other than the single greatest story ever told. And that is the saving grace of this and all films this terrible. When they try to excuse themselves after the fact by layering on the, "See? We get it! It's bad on purpose!" nonsense, they lose me. I just don't appreciate that sort of lack of commitment, especially since more times than not, it's used to excuse mere laziness. That's why Troma films, though they have their audience, have never worked for me. But Jackson isn't here to joke around or poke fun at himself, and he's nothing if not dedicated to his vision of the film. Jackson wrote, directed, and produced the film. He did the cinematography, the set design, and the costuming. He was involved in the special effects and make-up. If there had been a way for him to be his own second unit director, or if he had even been able to afford a second unit, he probably would have done that, too. What you are seeing when you pop in your ratty old Roller Blade VHS tape is the purest presentation of Donald Jackson's vision of the future as could be achieved. To laugh at it is easy. To understand it is more challenging, perhaps less rewarding, and probably requires that you have been at least a teenager or a half-nude rollerskating nun with a knife during the 1980s.
See, not only did we love rollerskating, but we were also pretty confident that the world was going to get blown up as a result of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. That's what we called Russia before it was called Russia but after it was called Russia. As kids, we knew this destruction was inevitable, and all we could do was rest assured that we, at the very least, would survive the nuclear apocalypse, along with all our friends and whatever girls we might have had crushes on at the time. You know, because we're going to have to repopulate the earth and all. But it would be a savage world into which we would emerge from the protection of our homemade nuclear bomb and fallout shelter -- which for my group of friends was a foot deep hole and a cave we covered with a piece of warped plywood and stocked with a first aid kit and some tins of Dinty Moore beef stew which, to the best of my knowledge, are still stashed in the cave waiting for the day we will need them. Such a world is the one envisioned by Roller Blade. The war has happened. Society has crumbled. Amid the chaos and the mayhem we find the Holy Order of the Roller Blade, a society of sexy nuns who love to wear black panties, bathe each other in the hot tub, and hone their butterfly knife skills with less dedication and fewer results than one might expect from a hood hanging out in the parking lot trying to impress the people who might catch a glimpse of him flippin' around his butterfly knife and thus think him dark and dangerous. The nuns are lorded over by wheelchair bound Mother Speed (Katina Garner, who you probably know from Cannibal Hookers, The Tomb, or A Polish Vampire in Burbank -- right?), and hot Sister Sharon Cross (Suzanne Solari -- a Donald Jackson regular, if you can accept that such a thing exists) seems to be the star nun, or acolyte, or whatever the ranks are in this crazy future. Sharon is plagued by a nightmare about an ugly monster in some goo or bubbling water lit with green neon or something, and this results in her frequently stripping down to just her big red KKK hood and a black thong to pray to their image of God: a light-up smiley face button.
Now the first thing that leaps to mind is that Jackson is making a clever comment on how, in a cultural vacuum and divorced of their original benign and shallow meaning, even the most commonplace of items can be mistakenly infused with some sort of sacred importance and meaning. When I go to the Egyptian wing of The Met and look at all those little figurines accompanied by a placard explaining their religious significance, am I really looking at religious icons, or am I looking at some ancient Egyptian nine-year-old's collection of action figures? When the nuns of this blighted future gather to pray and soap up each other's lithesome, nude bodies in front of the glowing smiley face, is it really any different than praying to any other icon, especially within the reference frame of the 1980s, when consumer culture was elevated to a religion? Well, yes, it is different, because it features naked nuns with gigantic teased hair fondling each other's boobs, and I don't know about you, but I never got to see that in the few times I went to Methodist church. But from what I know about Catholicism -- and what I know I learned from looking at Catholic schoolgirls and sleazy Italian nun sexploitation films, so I know what I'm talking about -- this isn't all that unusual. Although doing it while wearing roller skates might be unique. And it doesn't matter anyway, because the sheer absurdity of this movie undercuts any attempt Jackson might have been making about religion or consumerism. It comes across instead more like the sort of "I'm gonna write an awesome dystopian scifi story" you'd get from a sixteen-year-old who just finished reading Brave New World and wants to basically rip that off while blending it with 80s pop apocalypse and clumsy punk rock references. In other words, it's about as stupid as something I wrote in 1987, only no one gave me $5,000 and actresses willing to do full frontal in order to realize my dream.
But again, I genuinely admire that the film takes itself so seriously, that Jackson was writing this and thinking it was awesome and deep, or so I assume. I also assume that it was written in an acid-induced haze as Jackson drank bottle after bottle of cheap tequila while holed up in a Juarez fleapit hotel room with a plump Mexican whore, doing his best to stay one step ahead of a murderous pimp to whom he owed $5,000 that was stolen to make Roller Blade. Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure. The nuns are aided in whatever their quest is by the roller rangers, or something like that. Basically, it's a black guy and white dude in a cowboy hat who insists on speaking like someone who might have read part of a Shakespeare play at some point, with lots of "thou" and "verily." Oddly, not the first or last time that post-apocalyptic scifi would assume that one of the side-effects of nuclear fallout was that it makes you speak like you're in a high school production of Richard III. Also, these guys use guns, which would seem like a better weapon than a butterfly knife, but what do I know? I don't even understand why you'd keep your skates on while engaging in a fight that involves ladders and narrow catwalks.
Opposing the nuns is Saticoy, a mad warlord accompanied by his rubber hand puppet which may or may not be sentient (was it supposed to be a mutation or something? Or was he just wearing a hand puppet?). They dream of stealing the secret of the roller blade's power and using it to power a rocket car over the wall into Mecca Co., where they will pilfer an armory and...well, I don't know. Kill the nuns or something. I don't think Saticoy thought much about the plan beyond that point. To realize his nefarious scheme, Saticoy employs a legion of end-of-the-world street punks he culled from the local BMX stores and wherever Suicidal Tendencies was playing. Also working for Saticoy is a freelance killer named Hunter, clad in spandex and played by Shaun Michelle. You probably know her as the star of films like Watch My Lips, Erotic Aerobics, and Flesh Pond, among many other titles of an adult nature. Shaun trades her deadly skills with a butterfly knife for batteries to power her cassette tape walkman. Oh, how cheap is life in this hellish future that it can be traded for a handful of AA's? I assume she listens to Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" on a loop, and I know from experience that doing that all day will burn through batteries pretty quickly. Saticoy wants her to infiltrate the Holy Order and steal the power crystal for him. He also arranges to kidnap righteous Marshall Goodman's son, though exactly what the point of this was is never entirely clear. Hunter gets herself beat up a little so the nuns will take her in, but she also gets to kick the asses of some "spikers," which she does with both hands tied behind her back and while wearing roller skates.
Before too long Sister Sharon has taken the young woman under her wing and dubbed her Sister Fortune. Hunter/Fortune accomplishes her mission, but while she was under the protection of the nuns...is it possible...just maybe...that she learned a little something about respect and friendship? Only time and a procession of nude rollerskate catfights can tell. Throw in roller samurai, more nude rituals, and a dude who looks like Ted Nugent after being bitten by a radioactive Alice Cooper, and you have...umm...well, you have Roller Blade. Oh yeah, also, the butterfly knives can heal the sick, wounded, and even the partially beheaded. Wait, did I mention that even though Mother Speed is wheelchair-bound, she still wears roller skates? And did I mention how the awkward fitting costumes look like they were put together by a particularly challenged 6th grade home ec class? No? Well, I probably didn't need to, did I? Oh wait, I never got to the henchman in the checkerboard Cheap Trick painter's cap. Can you believe we made painter's caps a trend in the 80s? That's about as believable as the scene where the ugly rubber puppet fondles a nude woman who has random parts of her body wrapped for some reason in aluminum foil.
Exactly why everyone decided to wear rollerskates all the time is never explained, and I dare say it couldn't be explained. Most of the time, the roller skates are an obvious detriment to the person wearing them. Hey, backwards skating may be fun, but rollerskates are not exactly the world's most versatile form of transportation. A few people switch it up and have skateboards, but no matter what skate punks tell you, that's really not much better, though with all the rubble lying around after the fall of society, I bet there are plenty of places to do some sweet grinds and acid drops. Mostly, though, it's roller skates -- and keep in mind that these are classic 80s style roller skates, and the "roller blade" of the title is not the brand of inline skates that would debut shortly after the release of this film. At some point, Marshall Goodman (played by Jeff Hutchinson, who was almost as involved behind the camera as was Donald Jackson himself), catches his son playing outside and chastises the lad -- not for wandering off into a post-nuke hell populated by sneering, murderous DRI fans, but for wandering off into a post-nuke hell populated by sneering, murderous DRI fans while not wearing his rollerskates. When the central conceit of your film is entirely nonsensical and idiotic, complaining that everything else in the film doesn't make a lick of sense seems petty.
If it sounds like Jackson and his crew were just making shit up as they went along, that's because they were. Jackson and his friends Scott Shaw called what they did Zen Filmmaking, which translates to the Western mind as "making shit up as they went." No scripts, only the vaguest of scenarios, and then off you go. Who can you hire that day? What new idea presents itself? Why tie yourself to the outdated concept of planning everything out on paper ahead of time, man? Why restrict your creativity to such a high degree? Just let it flow, man, and do whatever comes to mind. And what came to Jackson's mind was futuristic sex nuns on rollerskates. I gotta say, as much as I might poke fun at this movie, that's probably not too far off from what I would have come up with. Describing the end result as bizarre hardly does justice to Roller Blade. Believe me when I say I have seen some weird stuff. I don't mean standard, run of the mill weird stuff. I mean "Ho hum, is it Salo: 120 Days of Sodom and Nekromantik again? How dull and mainstream" weird stuff. Although independent filmmakers have always existed, the 80s represent a major boom in the accessibility of filmmaking to any and damn near everyone. And because you didn't have to do something like send reels of film away to be developed by some stranger who would sit in judgment of your amateur super 8 porn, you could be a lot more liberal with what you were willing to shoot. So every bizarre fetish, every dark recess of the mind, every warped idea born from being locked in a closet as a child and force fed LSD and rat droppings became grist for the video mill. And I have seen a lot of them. Hell, I've even seen my fair share of rollerskate-based porno from the 70s (what Donald Jackson is to the post-apocalypse rollerskating movie, Ray Dennis Steckler was to 70s rollerskating themed porn). And even within that larger world of low/no budget madness resembling a Lovecraftian ancient horror, I have to say that Roller Blade is pretty goddamn weird. It's a perfect storm of crackpot ideas, lack of talent, meandering weirdness, strange synthesizer doodling, and chicks willing to get naked and wrestle in their rollerskates. That it is is all presented with such solemn determination makes it beautiful.
Donald, Donald, Donald. Taken too soon from us. How did your career...well, how did it happen? And when it did, how did it go so strange so quickly? For years, Jackson was laboring unsuccessfully in an auto factory, trying to jump start a movie making career. He finally managed to score a couple modestly successful (or infamous, depending on your understanding of the English language) films in Demon Lover and the pro wrestling documentary I Like to Hurt People. He used that money to move to L.A., and the next thing you know, the dude has made Hell Comes to Frogtown and Roller Blade. Have you seen Hell Comes to Frogtown? That's not a bad movie, and he managed to hire Rowdy Roddy Piper when Piper was actually a bankable commodity. How that film was made by the same guy at pretty much the same time as Roller Blade isn't exactly a mystery as much as it is an interesting study in what happens when a man is given free reign over a budget of $5,000 and told "You have Michelle Bauer for an hour; try to make her wrestle nude in rollerskates." Mission accomplished! Hell Comes to Frogtown isn't entirely dissimilar to Roller Blade; it's simply a lot more competent. It still possesses the same fanfic level of post-apocalyptic scenario creation, but because of the humor in the film, it isn't nearly as clumsy. But then, the absolute warped, freeform nature of Roller Blade makes it such a puzzle, such a stunning piece of...is it art?...that in the end, I know a lot more about it than I do Frogtown. Both concepts (post-nuke rollerskating hot chicks and post-nuke wasteland populated by frog guys) pretty much defined the remainder of Jackson's career, though in 1998 he did find time to make a movie called Lingerie Kickboxer, which I probably need to see as part of my quest to become an expert on all movies that feature naked women kickboxing (I already own four). In 2003, Jackson died of Leukemia, leaving behind a legacy of films that can best be described as, "What the fuck was that?" I really would have loved to hear him talk about these movies, but sadly, that will never come to pass. Left to carry on the tradition of zen filmmaking and movies about rollerskating nuns in thongs was Jackson's frequent collaborator, Scott Shaw. The acting in the movie isn't even worth discussing. It was shot without sound anyway, so most of the performances were looped in during post-production, with the voice work being handled by two or three people. Judging from the blank faces on most of the cast, though, it's no stretch to guess the caliber of acting we would have enjoyed had Jackson been able to afford to record sound. Shaun does have a wicked bad girl sneer, though. Billy Idol would be impressed. When your only real actor is Michelle Bauer, you're in trouble. When your only real actor is Michelle Bauer and she's only in one scene and she doesn't speak, you're in even bigger trouble. But when your only real actor is Michelle Bauer and she's only in one scene and she doesn't speak, but she does do nude lesbian wrestling while wearing rollerskates, then there is at least a glimmer of hope that the world is gonna be OK. After Bauer, the next most famous person in this movie is only famous because he's the child of Fred Olen Ray, the infamous producer/director of more direct to video scifi/fantasy tits and ass films than I can count, though I don't seem to have much trouble purchasing them.
In the end, offering up any sort of criticism of this film seems moot. Pointless. Nigh impossible. It's like trying to write sensibly about Alejandro Jodoworsky at his most insane. This is the rare film that is so poorly made, so absolutely weird, that it becomes a form of outsider art. Centuries from now, future generations will discover this VHS tape as they mine old landfills for relics of the past, and they will not need to ask themselves any further why 21st century man faded from this realm. This film has a hypnotic effect on me. Like some ancient Stygian evil, it terrifies me beyond the capacity for rational thought, and in doing so, it makes it impossible for me to turn away. Rest assured that when those future archaeologists excavate Roller Blade, they will find whatever skeletal remnants of my hand that remains still clutching it dearly. Of all the crappy old VHS tapes I own, this is one of my most cherished. As of this writing, this movie and its even more elusive sequel, Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force, remain unrepresented in the DVD market. How is this possible? This movie spawned too many other movies to be so ignored, from Return of the Rollerblade 7 to that scene in Hackers where they all rollerblade around. Where is the justice in this world? Looking back on this film, it's hard to believe just how insanely fucking weird it was. Actually, watching it in 1987 or so when I first saw it, it was just as hard to believe how insanely fucking weird it was. Labels: Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Series: Project VHS, Year: 1986 posted by Keith at 12:43 AM | 5 Comments Monday, September 01, 2008Deathsport Release Year: 1978Country: United States Starring: David Carradine, Claudia Jennings, Richard Lynch, William Smithers, Will Walker, David McLean, Jesse Vint. Writer: Nicholas Niciphor, Donald Stewart Director: Nicholas Niciphor Cinematographer: Gary Graver Music: Andy Stein Producer: Roger Corman Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Sure, I love a challenge. Anyway, that's what I tell myself. Actually, I think I only love challenges that I am pretty sure ahead of time I can conquer. Stuff like, "Well, sir, I believe I can eat half a dozen red velvet cupcake in a single sitting!" And as to that challenge: mission accomplished! There are other challenges, however, that I am more hesitant to accept. When I recently set about the task of converting all my old VHS tapes to DVD-R, I started rediscovering a lot of films I hadn't watched in years, not since first I plucked them out of the dollar bin at whatever video store was trying to get rid of them. It was a big chore, because I had a lot of VHS tapes, and some of them were copyguarded for reasons I will never fathom. Who in the hell copyguards Gor or Jungle Raiders or Archer: Fugitive from the Empire? You should be happy that I watched that crap at all, let alone bought it. I think the least you can do so long after the fact is let me save a little shelf space by copying them to DVD-R. Half those tapes are so old and worn at this point that they could snap at any moment, and what then? Sure, a lot of junk I was copying came out on DVD during the process. In those instances, even when I was reminding myself how much I hated the movie, I still bought the DVD. Because, you know, who doesn't need movies like Kill Zone starring David Carradine or Future Force, also starring David Carradine, on DVD? I spent money on that shit, people. I'm 36 years old, have -$45 to my name right now, and haven't eaten in a day because I have to make it to pay day, but you can bet your ass I own a copy of Future Force on DVD. But what happens when Archer: Fugitive from the Empire finally gets eaten by my aging VCR? What happens when The Barbarians can't be played anymore? You haven't put that stuff out on DVD for me, and you won't let me back up my old VHS. Do you know what the world will lose when a movie in which two twin bodybuilders defend a band of jugglers vanishes from memory? Do you want to shoulder the responsibility? Would anyone even want to live in a world where Jungle Raiders starring Lee Van Cleef is naught but a legend, whispered about by aborigines huddled around a campfire?
Still, there were many more films I was able to copy over for posterity's sake, doing my part to preserve cinematic history in the form of The One-Armed Executioner and Warriors of the Apocalypse. And recently I started watching them all again, enjoying the same crappy VHS quality with tracking problems and picture flaws caused by wrinkles in the tape, but now on DVD, ready to be preserved digitally for future generations who might one day wander up to their parents, provided such primitive family units still exist, and ask them, "Mummy, whatever became of Solar Force starring Michael Pare?" And this future parental units will be able to blow some dust off an old CD/DVD storage album, extract that shining gold disc from its sleeve, and tell your young one, "Luckily, some asshole backed up his VHS copy of it, so here you go." So I decided to take my holy assignment one step forward and make sure I reviewed as many of these films as possible, because the internet is going to last forever, and one day we will create sentient computers by downloading the whole of human knowledge as represented by the contents of the world wide web into it's databases. At that time, the computer will become a living, thinking creature. It will also be an idiot, thanks to the fact that most of what's on the internet is blogs written from the viewpoint of someone's cat or reviews of movies like Solar Force starring Michael Pare. What I wasn't prepared for, but what I was delightful to be reminded of, was just how incredibly bent many of the movies -- most of which come from those heady Reagen years -- ended up being. Writing about some of them was really going to put me to the test. So many of them just don't make a lick of sense. Dare one even wander into the minefield of dissecting a film where nuns in bikinis roller skate across a post-apocalyptic wasteland and fight a rubber puppet? I mean, you can still get stuff like that these days, but it's done with intentional camp and irony. What a difference it makes when you have a movie like the one I just described, but it's totally serious!
Well, I am nothing if not a trooper, willing to bleed for my art. So I assembled what is, to me, an impressive line-up of goofball awesomeness from the late 70s and entire 1980s, maybe with a smattering of the 90s for good measure. Call it Project VHS. Some of these films have indeed come out on DVD since I initially copied my old tapes. Many remain missing in action. Some are more competent than others. A surprisingly large number of them star David Carradine. And while there are some movies that remain absent because I simply didn't have a chance to buy them on discounted VHS and they aren't currently on DVD -- when, O Lord, will I finally own a copy of Rollerblade Warriors: Taken By Force starring Kathleen Kinmont or Ultra Warrior starring Dack Rambo -- I feel that there is more than enough meat here to keep us all happy and reeling about in neon-drenched memories like one of those dogs who decides suddenly for reasons known only unto canines to lie on its back and squirm around in the grass, all the while grunting with some pleasure we humans will never fully comprehend. Sometimes I may be at a loss for words. I may falter and get distracted -- the summer of 2008 has already seen me launch then abruptly abandon plans for another Netflix Diary and a series about movies in which people from the ocean attack us landlubbers. But I shall do my best.
And I can think of no more appropriate a fashion to start things off than with a VHS tape I used to cherish and recently upgraded to the special edition DVD just this week. It has everything you'd want and wouldn't want in a movie of this type. Roger Corman? Check. Claudia Jennings in the nude? Check. Stupid looking futuristic motorcycles? Check. Richard Lynch? Check. Random explosions? Check. David Carradine in a loincloth, frequently shot from a low angle so that his scantily clad crotch fills the whole screen? Check! I bet your 57 inch plasma screen HDTV isn't as cool to you now as it was before David Carradine's crotch was displayed on it, is it? In 1975, exploitation film master Roger Corman produced one of his very best films. Combining a wicked sense of campy humor, a healthy dose of violence, and an angry satirical edge, Death Race 2000, directed by Paul Bartel, was the best things to bear Corman's name (as producer) since Corman himself was directing cool horror films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories for AIP. Always keen to make a buck, Corman immediately set about creating another vehicle-based futuristic fling, albeit one with a lot less of a budget -- even for a Corman flick -- and a much less talented writer and director. Corman would do his best to make people think it was related in some way to Death Race 2000 by calling the new film Deathsport and casting David Carradine in the lead. But the similarities end there, and while Death Race 2000 is a genuinely good, enjoyable, and even smart film, Deathsport is an incompetent piece of junk with almost nothing to offer humanity. Predictably, I do not own Death Race 2000 and have only seen it once. I do, however, own Deathsport in two different formats now and have watched it at least half a dozen times.
We find ourselves in "the future," something like a thousand years from now, after the wars have turned the world into a vast tract of scrubland and desert. The remnants of the human race live in fortress style city-states and are called statesmen, leaving the majority of the blighted world to be the domain of mutant cannibals and a race of mystic wanderers known as range guides. Machines are rare, used only by the "statesmen" -- people who live in the cities. So, wait. Didn't you just tell us that pretty much everyone lives in the city and is a statesman? Now I haven't been good at math or logic since sixth grade, but I'm pretty sure that if almost everyone is a statesmen, and only statesmen use machines, then almost everyone uses machines. So I don't see what's so special about it. The mad leader of Helix City, Lord Zirpola (David McClean), wants to attack a neighboring city for no real reason we can understand other than he is mad and evil. To accomplish this act of war, he has invented the future's ultimate weapon: a motorcycle with some aluminum attached to the front end, and two lasers on the side that are of the same power as lasers people carry and fire by hand, only the lasers on the so-called "death machines" are more awesome because they are a hell of a lot harder to aim. Zirpola wants to prove to his people that the death machines are super bad-ass, so he decides to capture some range guides and showcase their obliteration by death machine in the city's gladiatorial "deathsport." This will convince the population that an unjustified war with the other city will be fun and easy, so long as everyone is riding a death machine.
The future as projected by the cheap sci-fi films of the 70s and 80s is jam packed with incredibly lame ultimate weapons. The death machines are pretty high up on the list, though they will pale in comparison to some of the other ultimate weapons we'll be seeing later in this series of reviews. The death machines may be stupid and unwieldy as weapons, but at least they are still motorcycles. At the very least, you can ride them around and have fun up until Barry Bostwick shows up on his own futuristic motorcycle with crap attached to the front end and brags about how his can also fly. But still, when we first see the death machines in action, a couple female range guides, one of whom is the late Gator Bait herself, Claudia Jennings, take them out with no real problem. Range guide Kaz Oshay (Carradine) will also take a few out all by himself -- and range guides are armed with nothing but clear plastic swords that whistle when you swing them around. I'm pretty sure I had a toy that did the same thing. That's all it takes to make a death machine explode? At no point, though, does the army of Helix City think that the death machines are a stupid idea, let alone an especially stupid idea in a world with lots of tall, steep rock formations people have no problem scurrying up to escape the death machines. Oh if only Lord Zirpola has listened to Barry Bostwick and put rocket wings on the motorcycles! Eventually Carradine's Kaz and Jenning's Deneer are captured, though that has less to do with the death machines than it does sheer force of numbers. They come face to face with the leader of Helix City's army, the black-clad Richard Lynch. Yes, his character has a name (Ankar Moor), but anyone who knows Richard Lynch knows that he plays the same evil guy character in every movie, so we might as well just call him Richard Lynch. I guess the same could be said of David Carradine as well. Lynch has the sinister air of a young Rutger Hauer crossbred with the condescending sneer of William Atherton and the hair of Gladiator Malibu from the 80s version of American Gladiators. Can even David Carradine stand up to such a foe?
It turns out that not only is Richard Lynch evil, but he's also a former range guide who betrayed The Code and killed the most powerful of all range guides, who just happens to be Kaz Oshay's mom. Deneer and Kaz don't take too kindly to being caged like animals. While Kaz kicks the wall a lot and yells "I am my only master," Deneer is made to wander around nude in a room full of neon tubes that shake around, howl, and electrocute people. Don't ask me, man. I didn't write it. Eventually, the two guides are forced to compete against the death machines in deathsport, an event that takes up about ten minutes of the film's running time and has almost no real bearing on the plot, but is never the less the source of the title. Earlier in the film, Zirpola was angry that Ankor Moor lost a couple death machines whilst pursuing Claudia Jennings, yet here he seems unphased by the fact that the two captive rangers take out like a dozen of the infernal contraptions. Maybe if he'd put trained soldiers on the machines instead of chumps he just picked out of jail, his little dog and pony show would have gone better. The two rangers escape along with a couple hangers on, thus ending the deathsport portion of Deathsport. All that's left now is for the bad guys to chase the good guys across the barren wasteland until we get a final showdown between Kaz Oshay and Ankor Moor. All in all, Zirpola's death machine coming out party went over about as well as one of those corporate seminars where the presenter has all his stuff stored online and then can't get an internet connection (possibly because the internet has become sentient and is too preoccupied with cataloging its vast store of Naruto slashfic). To enumerate the various points at which the plot doesn't make any sense would be to wandering into a Minotaur's labyrinth from which there is no real hope of emerging alive. The death machines having already been covered as being idiotic, we could turn to how much is made of Carradine's ability to sense the coming of dangerous weather, which leads to him predicting the coming of dangerous weather, which leads to a scene of people going "The dangerous weather is coming," which then leads immediately to a scene of people coming out of a cave and going, "Whew, I sure am glad that dangerous weather is over." Cannibal mutants kidnap a little girl, and one assumes that the reason cannibal mutants would kidnap a little girl is to eat her. But weeks later, when Kaz and Deneer finally show up to rescue her, she's still there. I guess they wanted to soften up the meat. The cannibal mutants had her in a little cage, after all, so I reckon that the world may have collapsed but our love of veal has not. There are also multiple scenes were someone who is supposed to get killed stands right in front of a death machine, but instead of shooting the person with the lasers, the guy on the death machine just does a little wheelie or jumps over a convenient dirt pile next to the person. And then usually the death machine explodes. You may not have realized that hitting a motorcycle with a clear plastic sword would make it explode, but that's why you're not a range guide.
And then there's the matter of Lord Zirpola's neon tube torture forest. Seriously, just what the hell? I mean, I can understand having a chamber where people dance naked for you. And I can understand that in the future, poledancer poles will need to be more futuristic, and thus making them transparent tubes filled with flashing neon lights is inevitable. But what kind of torture is it to then make them shake all around and howl? That's not torture; that's just ugly windchimes, and you can get those all over the place down South. Still, at least the movie does right by us and has not one but two gratuitous scenes of nude dancing in the neon tube forest, one of which goes on for a while and features a woman (Valerie Rae Clark, star of...ummm...Breast Orgy and Breast Orgy 2) we've never seen before and will never see again but, for some reason, apart from dancing nude, also gets to kill Lord Zirpola by...umm...offering her hand to him while he's busy making the tubes shock her or whatever it is they do. Zirpola also has a torture tunnel where he straps you down and flashes lights at you, causing you to scream. This requires Claudia Jennings to be nude for the torture to work. Luckily, it does not require the same of David Carradine. So let me address this right here. David Carradine in his youth -- not really a bad looking guy. In pretty good shape. But the loincloth simply does not become him. It becomes very few men, especially when they are shot from such awkward angles, like leaping spread legged through the air or rolling around on their back with their legs stuck up. It's just not a good angle. That's why you don't see male strippers constantly jumping all spread eagle off the backs of chairs and stuff. They know that it looks goofy. They'll straddle a chair, but they'll never jump awkwardly off it. And when it comes to rolling around on their backs in a crouching position, they're going to skip that and fill the time with a little trick I like to call "around the world." So while we get to see plenty of David Carradine flesh, most of it is unwelcome because it just ends up looking so goofy. Still, I suppose we should be happy he wasn't forced to do full frontal nude dancing in the forest of shaking, howling neon tubes.
Probably my favorite part of the movie is when Kaz Oshay leads Ankor and his minions on a motorcycle race through a fuel depot which has no reason to exist out in the middle of the desert. The depot is full of gasoline barrels stacked apparently at random throughout the facility, sometimes in front of ramps so that people can jump their motorcycles through flames once the barrels have inevitably exploded. In classic Corman fashion, scenes of jumping motorcycles are recycled a few times to increase the number of times we get to watch a guy jump a motorcycle over some candy cane colored barrels. This fuel depot was apparently built by the same people who were doing the construction on the building where Jackie Chan has his final fight scene in Mr. Nice Guy. If you don't recall or never saw the film, that building features a framed-up but not entirely drywalled floor that was apparently comprised of nothing but hundreds of 5x5 rooms with doors in every wall. It was fun for a fight scene, but really, what the hell were they building? Watching Deathsport is mind-bending enough on its own right, but where the film really shines is in the backstage drama. The movie was written by Nicholas Niciphor. Though he had no experience as a director, Niciphor was also hired to direct -- presumably because the vision for Deathsport was so grand and amazing that only the film's writer could hope to fully realize it, or something. Now, who you believe about what has a lot to do with sorting out what happened, but I'm going mostly with David Carradine's version. According to Carradine, Niciphor was not only inexperienced, he was also unstable. He was so clueless about directing that he didn't even now what it meant to set up a camera. He was prone to freak out, especially at Claudia Jennings or whenever anyone had trouble maneuvering the awkward death machines. According to Niciphor, this was often because the cast was drunk, stoned, and unruly, especially Jennings. I don't really doubt it. Carradine himself admits that there was a bit of partying going on. Former Playboy Playmate Claudia Jennings was well known as a wild child anyway. But then, you're making Deathsport. What the hell is there to be so serious about? Niciphor, however, was deadly serious about his film, and if the cast was clowning around, it only served to push him further over the edge. If things didn't go right on the first take, he would throw a fit and throw out the entire scene and brood about it.
Things came to a head when he tore into Jennings over her inability to effectively handle the clunky death machines. Everyone was having problems with the front-heavy contraptions, but Jennings in particular irked him. It got so heated that Niciphor allegedly struck Jennings, though David Carradine says he can't verify this since he was down at the other end of a gully waiting to do a take. Jennings was ready to quit the movie, and it was only after speaking with the producer who then spoke to Roger Corman that she was convinced to stay on. Niciphor was eventually phased out, spending most of his time skulking in the background, and Alan Arkush was brought in to complete the film -- but not before Niciphor got his nose broken by David Carradine when he walked too close to a fight scene rehearsal in progress. Niciphor claims it might not have been an accident. But that's nothing, since apparently the temperamental (or perhaps just mental) writer-director also berated Jennings and Carradine to the point where David actually just hauled off and kicked the guy's ass. Niciphor refutes many of the claims without actually refuting them. According to his side of things, the altercation between he and Claudia Jennings happened because Jennings was coked out while trying to operate the death machine, and that's why she was having a hard time. I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility. Jenning's cocaine addiction was well known. Niciphor further claims that Carradine was smoking hashish the whole time. Again, I don't think this is outside the realm of believability -- especially when you witness how stoned Carradine looks for most of the movie. But none of this really counters any of what Carradine said, either. The entire thing sounds like a snobs versus slobs teen sex comedy, with Carradine and Jennings cast and the lovable freewheelin' slobs and Niciphor as the stuffy dean who hates fun. Assuming that the truth is to be found in some mix of all sides of the story, the final verdict is that the the making of Deathsport would probably be a much better film than Deathsport itself. Things like that are why I like movies like this so much -- apart from the fact that this movie is just plain weird. It's handled with such seriousness, with such earnestness. You can feel that poor Nicholas Niciphor really believed in every line, really wanted this film to have meaning and depth. Does a film this lousy really deserve that much behind the scenes drama? I would love for the DVD to have had some commentary attached to it, either by Carradine or Niciphor -- or hell, put 'em both in the room and let them duke it out. This was the first and last time poor Nick directed a film, though he did go on to work as a writer for a few more films, including Alejandro Jodorowski's Tusk. Beyond that, he's been relegated to the realm of writing irate letters to Psychotronic magazine, complaining about David Carradine's doobie habits in 1978.
Carradine, of course, needs no real introduction here. A dancer who sprung into the American consciousness courtesy of the show Kung-Fu, Carradine went on to become one of the mainstays of exploitation cinema, especially when it was produced by Roger Corman. Carradine could be quite good in a role, and when he was bad, he mostly seemed harmlessly sleepy and stoned. That's how he plays it here, meandering through Niciphor's ponderous faux-mystic dialogue with the laid back style of a dude who was eating a lot of pot brownies. His fight scenes are awkward, but that's more the fault of the movie itself. What can you do when you're forced to swing around a huge plastic sword? His nemesis in Richard Lynch is...well, Lynch is actually understated compared to some of his other performances, but it's still the exact same performance you expect and always want from Lynch. I can't say much more than that. Claudia Jennings is another well known, albeit far more tragic, figure in B-Movie history. Jennings became one of the most recognizable faces in exploitation cinema when she appeared in the film Gator Bait, which is well known not so much because the movie is worth being well known, but more because every single video store in the universe seemed to have a sun bleached copy of the VHS tape sitting on the shelf. Jennings isn't a great actress, and she has a sort of sleepy eyed beauty that makes her seem like she was stoned the entire time -- which she apparently was. Between her and Carradine, the munchies-related catering bill must have eaten up half the film's budget. She had her moments of glory in film, though. Unholy Rollers, for example, and Moonshine County Express. Deathsport really isn't one of those moments, though she does get to wander naked through that neon tube room. This film comes at the end of her career, when she was heavy into drug and alcohol abuse and had a tumultuous relationship with some real estate guy (though rumors have her connected to Deathsport co-star Jesse Vint, and someone -- Niciphor I think -- also claimed she was attached to David Carradine, a claim that Carradine laughs off as preposterous). She cleaned up her act shortly thereafter, but amid a breakup with the realtor, fell asleep at the wheel of her car and was killed in the ensuing wreck. But even if Jennings and Carradine were whooping it up, smoking pot, drinking whiskey, and arranging huge Deathsport orgies, nothing in their performance can come close to being as awkward or awful as that of young Will Walker, who plays one of the guys who breaks out of the deathsport competition with the range guides. This is one of those performances that is so weird and horrible that it deserves far more attention than it receives. He looks kind of like Miles O'Keefe in Sword of the Valiant, with the blond page boy haircut and the same dazed thousand yard stare. But Miles is a much better actor than Walker, believe it or not. Walker's character of Marcus spends most of his time yelling "Kaz! Help me!" in a bland monotone. If the film has an humor at all, it's to be found in Kaz's flashes of annoyance at having to carry this load around on his awesome adventure with Claudia Jennings. She was totally willing to go all the way, but then Marcus kept showing up and ruining the mood. Post apocalyptic cinema from the 1970s was often slow and ponderous, not to mention incredibly self-important and pretentious. Sometimes the results are pretty great, sometimes they were ridiculous, and often they were just dull. Deathsport is sort of a missing link between the post apocalyptic films of the 70s and those that would come in the wake of Mad Max and, more importantly, its sequel, The Road Warrior. Those films featured much less cornball philosophizing and much more high octane action. Or at least attempts at high octane action. Deathsport has plenty of the corny mysticism and dime store attempts at Zen koans that one expects from 1970s sci-fi, but it also has lots of exploding motorcycles and...well...it has lots of exploding motorcycles. And it is one of the first post-apocalypse films to save itself some cash by predicting that, in the future, the world would mostly look like scrubland dotted with matte paintings of distant cities. It's pretty fair to draw the line from this movie directly to Mad Max, Road Warrior, and from there you quickly find yourself in the domain of Warriors of the Lost World and Warlords of the 21st Century -- movies that, many years after Deathsport, manage to be just as cheap and goofy as it was, but not nearly as much fun. I mean, those later movies have practically no David Carradine crotch at all!
Deathsport presents us with a loopy sort of myticism not unlike The Force as presented in Star Wars and before George Lucas turned it into some sort of genetic disease, but more accurately, it reflects the same sort of New Age filtered half understanding of Buddhism and spirituality that you find in a movie like Circle of Iron (also featuring David Carradine in a loin cloth) or in pretty much any pow wow held by some white dude claiming to be enlightened. Our range guides speak in monotone a lot about consciousness and spiritual union, and we know they are wise because they do not use contractions, but it all sounds pretty much like what a high schooler might come up with. Circle of Iron covers much of the same ground but in a more effective way and with a greater grounding in actual Zen philosophy rather than Zen as filtered through some hippie who read a couple pamphlets and then set himself up with an American ashram. But we'll come to that movie in good time, and if nothing else, it's probably safe to say that as many hashish brownies went into its making as went into the making of Deathsport. Star Wars must also have had some effect on this film, though, because the foley artist thought enough of it to take the TIE fighter sound effect and use them whenever David Carradine drives his motorcycle through a tunnel. Deathsport is a pretty clumsy film, full of bad writing, plot points that make no sense, ominous talk about things that end up never happening, and a titular event that ends up being, at best, a footnote in the film's action. The acting is lazy, the writing is ridiculous, and the props are laughable. And it's all worth seeing, just for the sheer spectacle of it. Ill advised motorcycles as ultimate weapons movies wouldn't have it this good again until Megaforce rolled off the assembly line. The fact that a movie this bad generated so much behind the scenes drama fills me with a sick sense of giddiness, as does the thought that Carradine and Jennings were toking up while an uptight German guy yelled at them to take his film more seriously. I don't even know if Nick was German. I just like imagining him that way, possibly dressed in the monocle and jodhpurs get up all good directors wear. It may not be a shining example of 70s scifi, or even a shining example of a middling roger Corman production, but it is pretty entertaining. Plus, neon disco windchime nude dancing, and so many David Carradine buffalo shots per minute that to merely gaze upon them is enough to drive sane men mad. Perhaps that's what happened to poor old Lord Zirpola. Labels: Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Series: Project VHS, Stars: David Carradine, Year: 1978 posted by Keith at 1:59 AM | 9 Comments Wednesday, January 11, 2006Yor, the Hunter from the Future Release Year: 1983Country: Italy Starring: Reb Brown, Corinne Clery, John Steiner, Carole Andre, Luciano Pigozzi, Ayshe Gul, Aytekin Akkaya, Marina Rocchi, Sergio Nicolai. Writer: Robert Bailey and Antonio Magheriti Director: Antonio Magheriti Cinematographer: Marcello Masciocchi Music: Guido and Maurizio De Angelis Producer: Michele Marsala Original Title: Il Mondo di Yor Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Not too terribly long ago, I wrote a piece on movies dealing with time-traveling barbarians. I went back and read it yesterday, because I like to reel about in my own filth from time to time, and I was shocked by how shoddy the craftsmanship of the article was. Not just the number of typos and sentences where I seem to lose my train of thought half-way through, allowing whatever I was writing to simply trail off into an incomplete and incoherent mess; those things are a given whenever I sit down to bash out a piece on my keyboard. Honestly, you'd be surprised by the accuracy scores I got in typing class back in high school, and you'd be even more shocked by my ability to catch and correct poor grammar and typos in a first draft when I bother to do such things. But like I said, it wasn't just that. The article just wasn't very good. And while there is plenty of stuff that isn't very good on this site, most of what really disappoints me is now seven or eight years old, and I can dismiss its weakness as mere youthful inexperience and put whatever title was subjected to such embarrassing writing onto my lengthy list of things to rewatch and rewrite. Because, with some six-hundred or so titles in my queue waiting to be reviewed, what I really need to be doing right now is taking movies about which I've already written and adding them back into the mob. But this time traveling barbarian movie article was only written a year or two ago, at a time when I thought my game had been somewhat elevated. It was disappointing to me, and I can't help but assume that at the time I wrote it, I must have been sober and possessed of ample free time that would afford me the chance to do a good job. When I find myself under those desirable circumstances, I generally tend to half-ass it. OK, not as if Beastmaster II: Through the Portal of Time or Time Barbarians really deserves anyone's whole ass be put into the effort -- especially considering the fact that it's obvious the people who made the film put, at best, a quarter of their own asses into it. But still, it's my site here, and I should invest a little care in what becomes a part of it, seeing as how the Internet is a record of the sum total of human knowledge that will be preserved for hundreds of thousands of years.
What really bothered me though, and this is where things start to get sad and you should all hang your head in disappointment for me, is that the substandard writing I did for that article means that the movie Yor, The Hunter from the Future didn't get its just dues. Most people in the world will consider the just dues for Yor, The Hunter from the Future to be a swift kick to the groin of anyone involved in the making of the film. Doing a quick survey of Yahoo, Google, and the external reviews linked to from the Internet Movie Database will turn up a body of reviews almost unanimous in their disdain for the movie. Yor, The Hunter from the Future certainly isn't an unknown movie, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a single person out there, even among aficionados of bad movies, who doesn't feel that it probably should be an unknown movie. Sometimes it seems like the lone voice in post-apocalyptic wilderness is the guy who writes for www.antoniomargheriti.com, though even the film's own director has publicly stated that the film is awful. And this is precisely why my moderately positive review of the film is such a tragedy. Given that I am apparently one of the two members of the Yor fanclub, it behooves me to write a better defense and review of this maligned slice of early eighties Italian exploitation. So it is with the soaring heart of an eagle -- but not the soaring heart of Ator, the Fighting Eagle -- that I return to the prehistoric world of Yor to rework, rewrite, and revise my review in the hopes that, if better constructed, it will convince some impressionable and pathetic young person out there to gaze upon the visage of Yor with a glimmer of sympathy and pity for those of us who get all worked up and tingly every time we here that triumphant explosion of synth-rock that is the theme song for Yor, The Hunter from the Future.
The words "favorite" and "Yor" have, to my knowledge, never been uttered together before, not even on the internet where all things perverse and profane flourish. In a medium where you can probably find a website with pictures of people masturbating with donkey hoofs while a Nazi shoves live eels up their butt, you can't find many people who will say anything positive about Yor, The Hunter from the Future. But unlike almost every other critic and film fan in the world, I come not to bury Yor, but to praise him -- at least mildly. My initiation into the strange and exclusive cult of Yor came in the eighties, when a film like this would actually get released to theaters with a considerable degree of fanfare. Conan the Barbarian had just stormed on to screens, and the Italians apparently possess a magical ability to forecast which movies will ignite remarkable trends, then rush out scores of imitations mere days after the original inspiration is released. I suppose it has a little something to do with business acumen, and a lot to do with the fact that most of these movies had production schedules that closely resembled the gestation period of a fruit fly. These were heady days for young men with very little sense of decency in their cinematic taste. In a drunken run that began more or less with the release of The Black Hole and TRON, youngsters of the era were subjected to a seemingly endless parade of generally delightful bad films that was only made all the more intoxicating the day a friend got cable television. Whenever people bemoan the sad state of modern movies and complain about how much junk is getting dumped on the market, I feel I should recommend they take a step back and re-examine previous years. The problem with movie hindsight is that it is terribly myopic. Decades removed from any given year, we tend to only remember the exceptionally good (and in a few rare instances, exceptionally atrocious) films, thus giving that year an inflated position. Living in a year, however, we're exposed to every piece of crap that rolls out of the factory, and so the poor quality of our current time is much fresher and more evident than that of years past. It's the same phenomenon that makes it look like foreign countries make better movies than we do. Since we're only exposed to a select, hand-chosen few foreign films every year, we tend to get the cream of the crop. But as anyone who lives in one of these countries can tell you, they manage to make just as many wretched offerings as we do. We just get filtered content.
The big difference between now and then is the budget. It used to be that rotten films were confined to the ghetto of low-budget quickie productions, while films with a larger budget invested in them had shown some degree of merit. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, and just because a studio and critics thought a big-budget film might be good doesn't mean it actually was. Things reversed sometime in the nineties though, and most of the good films had smaller budgets while the big-budget movies reeked of bloat, excess, and slapdash craftsmanship. Now we live in an era where people dump millions into films that previously would have been made on a shoestring. To tie this all together into a poorly wrapped package, the grandfather of providing A-list financing for B-list concepts was Dino De Laurentiis. It started for him in the sixties, working as a producer for cheap "sword and sandal" peplum films. Although Dino's films probably weren't budgeted any higher than their contemporaries, most of the ones that bear his name look and play much better than the rest of the pack. In 1968, he lavished French director Roger Vadim with a sizeable budget for the piece of psychedelic cheesecake sci-fi pop art known as Barbarella, and thus began the producer's long love affair with throwing tons of money at silly concepts. Now, what ties this in with Yor, The Hunter from the Future is the fact that De Laurentiis produced Conan the Barbarian. So yes, Italian moviemakers have a knack for latching onto a big trend and draining it mercilessly of its precious lifeblood. At the same time, most of the trends upon which they hop -- Westerns, peplum, zombies -- also have significant ties to Italy in the first place. A Fistful of Dollars may have starred Clint Eastwood, but it was an Italian film. Ditto Steve Reeves and Hercules. George Romero's Dawn of the Dead sparked the glut of Italian zombie films that shambled through the eighties, but it was made possible by the financial graces of Italian director/producer Dario Argento. And Conan was the fevered brainchild of Oliver Stone, John Milius, and a whole bunch of pot (one assumes), but an Italian made it happen. So in some twisted way, the Italians deserve to be able to rip these films off. Or, you know, something like that.
Anyway, none of us kids got to see Conan in the theaters, though there were few who didn't catch it on cable in between showings of Beastmaster. But we did get to see various, more family-friendly knock-offs, back in a time when family-friendly films didn't have to include spunky children but could include cannibalistic mummies and loincloth-clad women. Among those was Yor, The Hunter from the Future. Undoubtedly still reeling from the time she took us to the drive-in to see Treasure of the Four Crowns, my mom wasn't up for the challenge of taking a carload of kids to see Yor. I don't remember whose mom got suckered into Yor duty, but I'm sure she curses us to this day, assuming she hasn't completely blocked the memory. You know what, though? We loved it. We loved it more than modern kids love Harry Potter and Catch that Kid. You may have those movies, but we got to watch shit like Yor and Treasure of the Four Crowns, where people flew around on giant bats and had melting faces. Of course, we also had to endure our parents taking us to more acceptable kid-friendly movies, like that one where the kid from E.T. uses his BMX bike to evade trained KBG agents while soliciting cloak and dagger advice from Dabny Coleman. What was that movie called? Oh yeah, Cloak and Dagger. Yor, the Hunter from the Future is by far the most ambitious, and thus goofy, of all the Conan knock-offs. It's the only one with the audacity to rip off its shock revelation from Planet of the Apes while also ripping off the inferior Apes sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes, with just as dash of Conquerors of Atlantis and Star Wars thrown in for good measure. You got a hero in a loin cloth, some technologically advanced mutant humans hiding away from the primitives, and a surprise ending (well, midway point anyway) in which we learn that the ancient land of cavemen and dinosaurs we're seeing is not the ancient past or another planet, but is in fact a post-nuke Earth. Not surprisingly, star Reb Brown is no Charlton Heston and Yor, The Hunter from the Future is no Planet of the Apes. It's barely even Goin' Ape. Yor begins as every movie should begin: with a peroxide blonde caveman bounding across a rocky terrain while synth-heavy prog rock screams madly in the background. Imagine how much better every movie would be with this opening. Kate and Leopold? Why not start it with a barbarian and thunderous prog rock, then move into the thing about the guy from Napoleonic times romancing Meg Ryan on the eve of her officially becoming a has-been? All those Mandy Moore films? Sure she's cute, but who can argue the fact that her sugary coming-of-age soap operas would be more palatable to everyone if they included a couple shots of a oily barbarian with Flash Gordon hair fighting dinosaurs while unintelligible prog-rock anthems roared on gloriously in the background? The whole movie doesn't have to be about that, because we already have that movie and it's called Yor, the Hunter from the Future. But maybe they could do something where, say, Mandy Moore is sitting in a malt shop (kids still go to malt shops, right?) or Meg Ryan is in a quaint upper west side coffee shop talking about relationships, and then they go, "Well, will you look at that?" And then we cut to a few minutes of a caveman using a giant bat as a hang glider or something, and then we can go back to the plot about finding romance and meaning in today's hurried modern world. I think it would fit thematically, because it illustrates how in earlier, more barbarous times, life had so much more significance because times were so tough. We had to live full and hearty lives filled with adventure and passion and synth-rock orchestration, because we never knew when a monkey-man mummy was going to leap down from a perch in the woods and hit us in the face with a rough-hewn stone axe. Removed from that sort of immediacy, Meg Ryan's life is less vital, less passionate, and thus she has a hard time forging a meaningful relationship with modern men who are too wrapped up in banking or computer programming to ever take time out of their busy schedule to love a woman right or shoot arrows into a rampaging dinosaur's eye. But as the cavewoman Ka-Laa notices as she watches Yor bound mightily from boulder to boulder one fine, sunny day, Yor is not like other men. Yes, Meg Ryan, now more than ever, as you see the roles you used to play being filled by younger actresses despite the fact that you are still "cute as a button," I think you have a little something to learn from the man called Yor.
Yor lives in "Barbarian Times," and comes from "the high mountains." I have a feeling Antonio Margheriti was pretty high in the mountains himself when he co-wrote this script. Yor spends his days scrambling over rocks and saving some cockeyed Jack Elam looking guy named Pag (Luciano Pigozii) and sexy cavewoman Ka-Laa from screaming, roaring, huffing, house-size dinosaurs that somehow manage to sneak up behind people in the woods. Most people can't sneak up behind other people in the woods without at least stepping on a twig, but what do I know? I've never been stalked by a dinosaur. Thankful for blond, loincloth-clad Yor's randomly showing up and saving them from a dinosaur (shades of Fire Monster Against the Son of Hercules), Pag and Ka-Laa invite Yor back to their village to eat "the choice meats" and watch women drape themselves in cargo nets and spin around. The difference between Yor and the rest of the inhabitants of this primal world is immediately evident. He has mastered hair bleaching and body-waxing; they possess tangled brown hair. He is clean-shaven while the rest of the men sport scraggly Mujahadeen beards. Only Ka-Laa's grooming prowess and hair teasing ability rivals Yor's. It is obvious he is "not like the others." Unfortunately for Yor's new friends, everyone is a musical theater critic, and a neighboring, even more primitive tribe of hairy blue cavemen pillage the village and put an end to the twilrling rope dress dance, fulfilling the basic requirement of any sword and sorcery film that someone's village get pillaged, preferably fairly early in the film. It's likely that Pag's tribe was slaughtered on account of their phenomenally stupid "twirling rope dress" dance, but even if not, there's no arguing with the notion that the world was better off minus a tribe full of people who were continuously sneaked up on by snorting, stomping, bellowing dinosaurs. Only Yor, Pag, and Ka-Laa survive the slaughter. Yor decides he wants to find out the origin of the strange metal medallion he wears, and thus discover the mystery of his own past. Pag and his big-haired daughter, Ka-Laa, join Yor on his quest. What else are they going to do? Their village was just destroyed. Along the way, they'll fight more dinosaurs, some monkey men, and Yor will grab a giant hairy bat-monster and use it to hang glide through a cave while the prog rock music screams out in joyous ovation to his heroics. Whenever Yor does something especially heroic, like hang onto a giant bat, we're treated to a thunderous explosion of prog rock glory that would be very much at home on Rick Wakeman's "Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table," the ice ballet for which was considerably less corny than Yor.
Yor eventually discovers a blonde woman living amongst the diseased primitives of the wasteland, and he is shocked to see that she possesses the same funky medallion as him. In her cave are other people, frozen in ice, and more clues to Yor's origins. As they quest about the prehistoric future, they slowly unravel the mystery of the disco medallion Yor wears, and they discover a group of advanced humans living in a space-age facility on an island. What mystery is this? As Yor draws closer to the truth, your mouth will be agape at the final, shocking revelation. These aren't prehistoric times at all! This is...the future! But who are these strange men in Ming the Merciless cloaks, and what manner of magic weapon do they possess that can issue forth a slow-moving neon pink dollop of light that kills a man? Gods, such sorcery! It turns out these are the last remaining survivors of a once-proud and technologically advanced civilization that was destroyed by nuclear war. All the pieces fall into place when Yor's medallion is revealed to be a recording of his family history. Why is Yor not like the other men? Because he is the child of one of the advanced survivors, a group of rebels who sought to overthrow the "Overlord" and were victims of a spaceship crash that left young Yor and that other blonde chick stranded in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. But Yor survived yet, and grew strong and heroic, and where his father failed, Yor shall lead another band of advanced survivor rebels in another bid to overthrow the Darth Vaderish Overlord, who seeks to obliterate all life and replace it with a new race, half-android, half-Yor. If you think a mad scheme like that is going to cause Yor to have to do all sorts of crazy shit that demands prog-rock synth ovations, then you've been paying closer attention to this movie than most people. Amid it all, various people get on the space-age facilitiy's loudspeaker and wax philosophic at great lengths on assorted points pertaining to topics such as the folly of man, the worth of man, the future of man, and overloading the atomic reactor. Yor's "message" is, needless to say, half-baked and completely ludicrous, but heck. How many other sword and sorcery movies from the time even made an attempt at having a message, however cliche it may have been? You know, I was all for nuclear proliferation, brinksmanship, and the whole arms race until Yor, The Hunter from the Future opened my eyes and really made me think about how man harbors a tendency to abuse power he doesn't fully comprehend.
Athough Yor isn't a time-traveling barbarian movie in the strictest sense of how the intellectuals and academics of the world define "time-traveling barbarian," it's close enough to lump it in with the little sub-genre that erupted in its wake. Hard to believe that Yor could start a trend within a trend, but as one of the early entries in the sword and sorcery genre, it gets the dubious credit of having inspired the other time-warp barbarians like Beastmaster II and the dreary Time Barbarians. Ancient warriors traversing the fold of the space-time continuum in much the same way Conan trod the sands of the earth beneath his sandaled feet may be historically questionable (it's more historically viable to have barbarians traveling into space, like in the Gor movies or the second Lou Ferrigno Hercules movie. Or was it the first one? Whichever one where he goes to the moon), but it made good financial sense. Most of the cheap barbarian movies that came out in the 1980s required little more than some fake swords, fake armor, and only a couple locations: usually, a forest, a rocky desert, and at least one castle chamber that could probably be rented cheap from Roger Corman. But you could save even more money by sending your barbarian forward in time, almost exclusively to modern-day Los Angeles. Then you only needed a few barbarian outfits and probably only one or two forest shots before you could throw a goofy "time portal" effect up on screen and spend the remainder of the film simply following your muscleman around the parking garages of LA. And there in lies the truly admirable - and I use that term loosely - thing about Yor. It isn't happy living within its means. Time Barbarians was cheap, and they knew better than to do much other than have some barbarians in the woods and then stage a fight in a rented warehouse. Yor, on the other hand, has dinosaurs, monkey monsters, bat hang-gliding, a city of tomorrow, mutants, messages about the folly of man, the twirling rope dress dance, laser battles, a robot army -- basically, enough stuff for the entire Star Wars series, all crammed into one cut-rate Italian fantasy/sci-fi action film. Almost none of these things are realized well. The dinosaurs are OK so long as they don't have to do much beyond swing their head back and forth. The fight choreography is sluggish and seems designed to maximize the number of times Reb Brown is shot from a low angle, jumping through the air to allow his loincloth to flap up and give the world a cheeky show. The city of the future (actually the past, I suppose) is about on par with the cut-rate "future city of the past" from the cheapskate Battle for the Planet of the Apes, which means there's some matte paintings, and then the whole thing was filmed in a pump factory somewhere, with some red and blue blinking lights attached to the pipes and metal railing. And don't even mention the laser effects, which result in an animated beam that moves about as fast as someone walking across a room. But that doesn't stop Yor, which was based on a comic strip I assume looked a lot like a comic out of Heavy Metal magazine, from pulling out all stops and attempting to serve up a visual extravaganza that is far beyond its hope of ever successfully achieving. It's a naive movie on many levels. Though Margheriti obviously knew he was making something bad (the original version of Yor is a four-part mini-series that rarely, if ever, aired), the film itself doesn't seem aware of this, and it never seems to think it's doing anything other than telling one of the most important stories of all time. The lack of wink-and-nudge self-awareness is refreshing from today's standpoint, seeing as how we're buried under an avalanche of self-referential "ironic" movies that think they're the first ones to ever be so clever. But Yor plods along with a blissful earnestness that makes it charming in a weird way. It's also naive in that it really is fairly kid-friendly. There is no nudity, unless you count the disturbingly frequent Reb Brown buffalo shots (I am not a man who is afraid of male nudity, but that angle just isn't appealing no matter how buff you are). There's a lot of killing but very little bloodshed. And Yor is a decidedly classical hero -- well, respective to the standards set by this film. Let's just say he's a nice guy who does the right thing, as opposed to the grittier, lustier anti-heroes that populated saltier barbarian fare. The acting is pretty bad, and there's a reason that Reb Brown never became a household name like Sam Jones. Still, it's not as if Reb is a total unknown, at least among the sorts of people who who would refer to Sam Jones as a household name. I mean, Reb Brown may not be Sam Jones, but at least he's not Dack Rambo. Reb starred in such direct-to-the-bargain-bin favorites as Strike Commando (yes, I own it), Roboforce (yes, I own it), and Space Mutiny (yes, I...oh, never mind). He appeared in another perennial sword and sorcery hit, Sword and the Sorcerer, though not in the lead. His brush with respectability came with an appearance in the film Uncommon Valor. He's probably "best known" for his turns in a couple abysmal made-for-TV Captain America movies and the film Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, which, oddly enough, I don't own even though it's one of my favorite awful movies. And just to ensure that no women ever want to talk to me again, his first film was, I believe, Sssss (give or take an "s"), and to tie this all in with Conan once again, he was in Conan director John Milius' 1970s surfing movie, Big Wednesday. What's really scary is that I am writing all this from memory, with no help from the imdb or any other source. So yes, with that amount of information, I believe I qualify as a Reb Brown biographer.
Reb has the sort of good looks you expect from a guy who isn't too bright (whether or not he's actually bright, I don't know, but he has managed to sustain a career). He's the good-hearted football player who falls for the cute, brainy girl with glasses and tries to impress her by making an earnest attempt to understand poetry (also an apt description of Yor the movie). He might never understand Longfellow, but he'll valiantly defend the brainy girl's honor against her nemesis, the mean football player with the catty cheerleader girlfriend. Since I mentioned the movie earlier, allow to once again make a connection only I would make: he's a lot like fellow bleach-blond superior caveman Reg Lewis, star of the sixties caveman/Hercules peplum adventure Fire Monster Against the Son of Hercules. There's a good-natured, everyman goofiness about him that takes the edge off the muscles. Still, he's not an especially good actor, but he's not required to do much more here than look muscular (but not bodybuilder muscular) and hang-glide on a giant bat, so that's fine. His main squeeze Ka-Laa is played by one-time Bond girl Corrine Clery, who has a massive list of Italian film and television credits to her name (those, unlike Reb's, I had to look up) but is best-known for her turn in Moonraker as "that chick who flies James Bond around in a helicopter then gets killed." "Artful erotica" fans might remember seeing her naked in the title role of The Story of O, and less artful erotica fans might remember her from Lucio Fulci's Devil's Honey. It's hard to judge her acting here since she's dubbed, but she goes through most of the movie with a slightly dazed look, for which you can't really blame her. Completing the core cast is Luciano Pigozzi as Pag. For years, I thought this role was played by Jack Elam. Looking back, I realize that Pigozzi is more like Jack Elam crossed with Lucio Fulci. Whatever, he has more Italian genre credits than a sane man can count, including countless appearances in many of Margheriti's other films, often under his Americanized name Alan Collins. Margheriti himself was rechristened Anthony Dawson whenever his films came to America. As if anyone cared whether or not the director of Yor was Italian. Pigozzi has his "stooped old man" bit down pretty good, but like everyone else, he's dubbed and has pretty inane lines anyway, so judging acting is moot. At least he has more facial expressions than Reb and Corinne. Everyone else in the movie is either a caveman or a future man, and they're primarily there to die, be menaced by dinosaurs, get shot by slow lasers, or make monotone speeches about the aforementioned folly of man. The movie was made on location in Turkey, so there are quite a few Turkish performers sprinkled into the mix, including recognizable names like Aytekin Akkaya, who appeared in the beloved Turkish sci-fi kungfu extravaganza The Man Who Saved the World (aka "The Turkish Star Wars") alongside Turkish matinee superstar Cuynet Arkin, as well as playing Captain America (just like Reb Brown!) in the curious 3 Dev Adam, in which Captain America and Santo the masked Mexican wrestler team up to defeat the murderous, chain-smoking Spider-Man, who likes to shove women's faces into outboard boat motors (which is much better than what happened in Reb Brown's own Captain America movies). Akkaya also worked with Margheriti again on the decent Indiana Jones cash-in Ark of the Sun God, starring David Warbeck. So really, when you think about it, Yor is an amazing multi-national nexus point of exploitation movie talent.
Margheriti was one of the most prolific directors working in the Italian exploitation genres, and amid all the movies made so he could pay his bills, there are actually quite a few gems. Some are simply delightfully bad, while others are genuinely good. And his moody, atmospheric Gothic horror film Castle of Terror is a bona fide horror classic. His specialty eventually ended up being action, though like any Italian exploitation director, he's worked in pretty much every genre and scored a memorable (if not always good) film in each one, including science fiction (Wild Wild Planet), peplum (Hercules, Prisoner of Evil), Eurospy (Lightning Bolt), western (And God Said to Cain), and giallo ( Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye), but his specialty became cheap action films in the 1980s, often working with David Warbeck to knock off Vietnam war movies or Indiana Jones adventures. Even in his worst films, Margheriti infuses the proceedings with energy, and while his statements betray the fact that he really has no love for Yor (I think "No Love for Yor" might be the title of his autobiography), the movie still benefits from his touch. Special effects are bad, acting is bad, and the script is daft, but Margheriti is still professional enough to make sure he turns in a technically competent directorial job (decent lighting, no boom mics in the shot, etc). As for that theme song -- I loved it when I was young, and I think it's still thoroughly rousing and utterly absurd, boasting all the theatrical bombast of Queen's work for Sam Jones' Flash Gordon movie (a Dino De Laurentiis production!), but relying less on guitars and more on synthesizers. Years later and farther down the road of no return, I'm a little more familiar with the stable of guys who wrote music for Italian genre films. My first guess, given the vocals and the over-the-top synths, was that this was probably the work of Guido and Maurizio DeAngelis, one of the most prolific score writing teams in the Italian film industry. They always relied pretty heavily on synths. A quick check of the credits revealed that, yes indeed, the DeAngelis duo was responsible. This correct guess coupled with my disturbingly exhaustive knowledge of Reb Brown's filmography should really make me worry. Anyway, beyond the theme song, the rest of the score is pretty standard "future synth" stuff. They didn't have the money to try and mimic Conan's even more bombastic "barbarian brass" orchestration. Guido and Maurizio DeAngelis have written some spectacular scores for some spectacular films. This isn't one of them, but man! I wish I had a recording of that theme song. Most people list Yor among the worst movies of all time. It may have even won some awards to that effect. All I can say is that if this is the worst movie you've ever seen, then you haven't seen enough movies. I admit I have a soft spot for the hunk of junk, the same "saw it in the theaters" soft spot that makes me crack a warm smile even for a film like Treasure of the Four Crowns, and I still find myself enjoying Yor far more than I should. The revelation about the past being the future is not exactly as stunning as that first time you see Chuck Heston stumble upon the Statue of Liberty, but I don't figure anyone goes into Yor expecting stunning revelations. You go in because you want to watch cavemen do somersaults and have laser battles with robots. Just remember, next time some half-crazed man in a leather cape stops you on the streets and demands, "WHO is the hunter from the future?" you just crack a smirk, take a swig of tequila, and say, "YOR the hunter from the future." Labels: Director: Antonio Margheriti, Fantasy: Sword and Sorcery, Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Year: 1983 posted by Keith at 2:36 PM | 6 Comments Friday, May 03, 2002New Barbarians Release Year: 1982Country: Italy Starring: Giancarlo Prete, Fred Williamson, George Eastman, Venantino Venantini, Massimo Vanni, Anna Kanakis, Giovanni Frezza, Enzo G. Castellari, Iris Peynado, Andrea Coppola, Vito Fornari, Ennio Girolami, Stefania Girolami, Zora Kerova, Fulvio Mingozzi. Writer: Tito Carpi and Enzo Castellari Director: Enzo Castellari Cinematographer: Fausto Zuccoli Music: Claudio Simonetti Producer: Fabrizio De Angelis Alternate Titles: Warriors of the Wasteland; Metropolis 2000 Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us 1982 was a busy year for the world of exploitation cinema. Conan the Barbarian was released and initiated a deluge of imitators, birthing the sword and sorcery genre that gave me and so many others much joy throughout the 1980s. Italy, in particular, was quick to cash in on the trend, socking us in the gut with gory barbarian epics like The Barbarians, Conquest, and far more Ator films than should ever have been made. At the same time, or rather slightly before, in 1981, a wild bunch of Australians released a little film called Road Warrior, a sequel to a rather good, intense "society on the edge" film called Mad Max. Both the original and its sequel (let's all pretend there was never a third movie made, and the world will be a happier place) starred a handsome up-and-comer named Mel Gibson, and I feel safe in saying I expect big things from him at some point in his career. In much the same was as Conan, Road Warrior become a phenomenon and sparked an entire genre of post-apocalyptic movies features guys in shoulderpads driving around in the desert and shooting each other with crossbows. Of course, most of these films lacked a few key elements that made Road Warrior such a hit. For one, Road Warrior was exciting and action-packed. Most of the imitators were not. For another thing, Road Warrior had good writing, good acting, good music, and a wild cast of characters. Max, our hero, was the classic spaghetti western antihero. And then you have the hooting feral kid with the razor blade boomerang, the goofy guy in the gyrocopter, the stunning female warrior with the Kim Novak eyebrow action going on, the little weasely guy who gets his fingers cut off, Vernon Wells with a pink mohawk and assless leather pants, that guy who went on to be in Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn, and of course, a bodybuilder in an iron Quiet Riot mask who carries his own set of loudspeakers around and calls himself The Humongous. And need I even mention that this is the movie that gave us the phrase, "Ayatollah of Rock and Roll-a!" Even if the movie hadn't been good, that alone justifies its existence. The legion of imitators, on the other hand, tended to lack these key components and were, instead, ninety or so minutes of sullen guys trying to pass bad acting off as end-of-the-world angst. You got cheap sets, lame stunts -- especially compared to the spectacular stunts in both Mad Max and Road Warrior -- and bland as dry white toast characters. And worst of all, in order to mimic Road Warrior as best they could, almost all of them are set in the desert, barring the offshoot genre where some muscular guy is in the Bronx (which shifted the rip-off material from Road Warrior to Escape from New York). It made sense for Road Warrior to be in the desert. After all, Australia has a lot of desert, and in the context of the film, we can assume that only a few people even bothered to brave the outback. It wasn't like the entire country moved into the desert. But if the film is set in America, why would everyone live in the desert? We have nice countryside, and last I checked, one of the many affects of a nuclear war was not changing everything into the Sahara Desert. More than likely, they were just aping Road Warrior and also discovered it's a lot easier and cheaper to have your post-apocalypse in a desert than in a city. Sort of like one of those sci-fi films set a hundred years in the future but all the action takes place in "an amusement park designed to look exactly like a small American town in 1985." Still, as stupid and cheap as many of these knock-offs were, which again seemed to come primarily from Italy, a lot of them were also tremendous amounts of fun. Their shoestring budgets and slapdash structure often resulted in some entertaining stuff, though not always entertaining in the way the makers might have intended. New Barbarians, despite everything that is wrong with it, is one of these entertaining films. I've noticed that you can trace b-movie trends through the years simply by looking at an Italian director's filmography. Enzo Castellari started his career in spaghetti westerns, then in the 1970s moved on to low-budget black action films (with a couple really blatant Jaws rip-offs thrown in for good measure), and then into the exploding post-apocalypse film, where he actually made many of the genres more amusing and entertaining entries, including 1990: Bronx Warriors, Desert Warrior, Escape from the Bronx, and the movie we're here to discuss, New Barbarians. Giancarlo Prete stars as Scorpio, since all post-apocalypse type guys have to have cool names like that. You don't ever hear about a guy named Mike saving a tribe from marauders. Prete worked with director Castellari on several films, and even managed to score a part in cult fave Ladyhawke. Scorpio is your typical wasteland wanderer. He has a suped-up car, though to be honest, most of the suping-up seems to consist of randomly attaching fins and little sticky-out bits of chrome to your car. However, we can tell Scorpio is a cut above some mullet working on his Camero in the front yard, because Scorpio had the good sense to install a keen green-tinted plastic observation bubble in his car. This, of course, serves no purpose whatsoever. In one of those boss custom vans with the Yaz artwork airbrushed on the side, you can use an observation bubble because the back of the van can get dark, and sometimes when your laying back there, sparking one up with your baby as you listen to Toto, you want to be able to stare up at the stars and talk about your dreams. Sure, we've all been there, right? But this is a car. There are windows all round you. Why do you need an observation bubble? Well, I guess because it looks cool and he can turn the light on and get the slick green glowing effect. Who am I to question Scorpio? It's not like I've survived the end of the world or anything, though I did survive seeing Cats. At this point, I need to get a little something off my chest. Like many of you, I was a child of the 1970s, and I cling to that notion and that decade as my heritage, primarily because I really hate that 1980s synth rock crap. Gary Numan my ass. Having been squeezed out in 1972, I feel I have enough conscious years during the 1970s under my belt to claim it as my fatherland. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying disco was good, because we all know disco was a fart straight from the sour bowels of Satan himself, and I'm not a big fan of feathered hair. But the 1970s gave us many wonderful things as I've discussed multiple times in other reviews and need not retread here. With that established, I have to confess that as much as I may make fun of them, I sometimes really wish I had been one of those 1970s van guys. You know, I could drive my Chevy custom with a wizard brushed on the side out into the desert to just think and look at the stars. I could cruise around town listening to Skynard and James Taylor and Golden Earring, who I once saw play live at the Louisville Riverfront Festival along with Foghat. I could put the moves on my baby in the back, which would of course be done up with some boss, red shag carpet. I could wear tight jeans and smoke pot with friends while saying, "Dude, they are so right. We really are just dust in the wind." I could take my baby by the hand in the back of my Chevy van after making clumsy but sweet love to her, and give her the whole "Freebird" speech about how I'm a wandering spirit who can't be held down to any one place. She would understand, because she's cool that way, and one day she would stand on the edge of town, a lonely tear rolling down her cheek, as I kissed her good-bye, climbed into my van, and rambled on to the next town. "See ya around, Keith Allison," she'd say to herself as I disappeared into the setting sun. Yes, the van guy -- philosopher morons. A dying breed in today's world of high tech computers, electronic music, and these Limp Bizkit fans with their piercing and their loud rudeness. In this modern age, there seems scarce little room for a lazy, introspective dreamer downing a Coors in the back of his van and really empathizing with the melancholy lyrics of "Beth." And I sit here, surrounded by mountains of steel and concrete, awash in a sea of technology that accomplishes nothing, drowning in a deluge of boundless information and no wisdom. I sit here, and I pine for the simpler days that passed me by. I sit here and I shed a solitary tear for the last of a dying breed, the van guy. To you I raise my glass and say, "carry on, my wayward son." Scorpio is a van guy, or he would have been a van guy if the world hadn't ended. You can see it in his eyes. As things stand, however, he spends most of his time driving around aimlessly in the desert, making one wonder where he gets his gas (I get mine at the taco stand -- thank you and good night! You're a wonderful crowd! I'm here all week). There's this bunch of goofball survivors who have a caravan of crappy "future" cars going through the desert. Then there are these guys called the Templars who, just like the actual Templars did when they started getting insane and corrupt, go around hassling people. The movie opens with the caravan under siege, and mere minutes into the film we get brutal yet incredibly fake looking decapitations and mass slaughter. That's a good way to open any film, and I wish more films opened with gory mayhem, especially films that deal with Meg Ryan and her struggle to find a meaningful relationship in this crazy modern world of ours (hint for Meg: look for a van guy). Now if You've Got Mail or Hanging Up started off with a scene of nomads being slaughtered, then maybe I'd be interested. The Templars kill people in a variety of ways. Sure, there's the simple killing and stabbing and shooting, but why do just that when you can mount a razor blade fan on your running board and drive around chopping people in half with it? Sure, being able to use some of your weapons requires an amazingly coincidental set-up, but you know how people are. If you are trying to run them over with your razor blade fan dune buggy, they will oblige you by running slowly directly to the left of your car and will even stumble when you need them to so you get that good cleaver to the head effect. So we can deduce that the Templars are not the nicest of fellows, but to be honest, how would you feel if you had to wear all white padded outfits with oversized shoulderpads? Scorpio has a couple run-ins with these guys, more by accident than as a result of him trying to help anyone out. We get the less-than-shocking realization that, at one time, Scorpio was a Templar himself, but turned his back on their cruel ways so he could drive around in the desert causing them grief. Along the way he picks up a sexy lady and Fred Williamson. Of course, if you have Fred Williamson, a sexy lady can't be far behind. Fred, who had also worked with the director before on GI Bro (oh brother), plays Nadir, and obviously he's a total bad-ass in a casual way. When I think of all the action stars who I would not want to cross, Fred Williamson tops the list. The man is simply the paramount of outdated cool and tough. How can you not love a guy who, in the late 1990s answers the question "Have you ever thought of marketing and selling your trademark cigars?" with the reply (paraphrased from memory) "Hell no! What would I do if I saw some punk walking down the street smoking one of my cigars and looking like some sort of faggot?" Williamson represents one of the film's key cool aspects. Usually, when a white hero has a black sidekick, the black guy is comic relief or, despite being better than the white guy, ends up captured and having to be rescued. Look at The Matrix. Does anyone honestly believe Lawrence Fishbourne needs Keaneu Reeves' help in a fight? I didn't think so. In New Barbarians however, Williamson kicks ass from start to finish and never once makes a mistake. He's the one who has to bail the white guy out, not the other way around. He's the one who doesn't need help, even though he's smart enough to take it when it's offered. And he shoots dynamite bow and arrows like Bo and Luke Duke! All hail Fred Williamson! I can't remember a damn thing about the woman except Scorpio beds her at some point and she probably does get captured. She's not a very interesting part of the story. Scorpio is also friends with a wily little juvenile mechanic played by Giovanni Frezza, known to cult film fans the world over as "Little Bob" from Lucio Fulci's House by the Cemetery. At least this time around he hasn't been dubbed with the most annoying voice ever in the whole universe, so you can actually get to like him. He is the ace repairman who customizes Scorpio's car. Like Nadir, he's far more competent than Scorpio at pretty much everything you can think of. I started wondering why Scorpio was even the hero of the movie, since he's easily the least memorable of all the guys. Eventually, Scorpio bungles his way into getting captured by the Templars, and the main Templar gets to give the whole, "Join us, and together we could rule the land!" speech, though you have to wonder why they are so intent on ruling a patch of very dead and worthless desert. When Scorpio refuses they tie him up and shock the whole audience by raping him. Yep, you heard right. Most sleazy action films, especially ones set after the fall of civilization, feature at least one woman getting raped, but how many have the bravado to leave the women alone and simply rape the male lead? Not too many, as I can recall, and while it's not "good," it was certainly unexpected and daring. Back in college, I took a course on literature and war. In it, we read a short story in which the narrator was a member of a tribe of gorillas who descend into madness and warfare. Quite a good story, really, and an interesting study of how animals behave when faced with impossible odds. One of the many things the dominant male gorillas did as the violence progressed was to begin mounting lesser males. The same thing happens in prisons, of course. More times than not, it is not a sexual act, let alone a homosexual act. It's simply a desperate display of power. It's a way to showcase your dominance over weaker members of the tribe. I'm not saying that New Barbarians is by any stretch of the imagination dipping its toes into the pool of analyzing the human psyche and what happens to it when its plunged into an environment of progressively more violent decay. More than likely, they just thought it would be shocking and unusual to victimize the male hero for a change. But if I was backed into a corner and was unable to escape the question by flashing my eye spots, at least I have ammunition for the argument, though quite frankly, I can't imagine any instance where I'd be backed into a corner and forced to debate the social and psychological implications of Scorpio getting sodomized by a Templar. Anyway, this gets Scorpio fired up for taking out the Templars once and for all. After escaping their evil clutches when they all take off to do a little massacring, Scorpio commissions Little Bob (okay, so that's not his name in this movie, but still...) to make him a see-thru bulbous plastic suit of armor. This is easily the most disturbing thing ever. Imagine, if you can, if you dare, a vaguely out of shape David Hasslehoff (more out shape than Hasslehoff himself) squeezing his hairy, oiled-up beefiness into a clear plastic container, then running around wearing nothing but a pair of bikini briefs underneath as he blows things up. That's pretty damn frightening, and I'm sorry for even planting the image in your head. Scorpio gets help from Nadir and Little Bob, who actually do just about all the work and killing. Nadir has the explosive-tipped arrows, but rather than firing them, he just takes off the arrowheads and throws them at people. It seems a bit of overkill to use an entire stick of dynamite's worth of explosives for individual guys, but the end result is lots of exploding people, or rather, lot's of exploding mannequins. We're not talking high tech here. While Little Bob and Nadir single-handedly take out the entire Templar army and save the caravan people, Scorpio lumbers about awkwardly in his little plastic outfit until the head Templar finally stumbles across him for the final showdown. Does Scorpio end the reign of terror, kill the Templar leader, then wander back off into the wasteland? Well, what do you think? There are a lot of adjectives one could apply to this film, but the most appropriate seems to be "absurd." Scorpio is obviously a loser. Everyone in the whole world is more competent than he is. But hey, all he wants to do is drive his car, baby! For a post-apocalyptic world, things sure are easy to obtain. Williamson has an expensive patent leather outfit that looks shiny and new. No one seems to have any trouble finding endless amounts of ammunition for their exploding arrows and bullets, and no one is hurting for gasoline. And these are cool explosives people have. Sometimes they will blow up entire compounds, while other times they will just blow up a barrel. The head Templar's gun seems particularly versatile with the level of explosive action it can generate. And I have to pull Road Warrior into the fray one more time. Max: dusty, torn-up leather outfit. Scorpio: trousers, a fuzzy Sonny Bono sheepskin vest, and then that frightful naked bubbleman outfit. And you wonder why not as many people remember Scorpio. Of course it's the absolute absurdity of this film that keeps it entertaining, though the awkward but frequent violence and action certainly help out. I mean, the film makers really tried to have a lot of cool brutality and car stunts; it's just that they failed miserably every single chance they got, and that in itself is worth enjoying to no end. The acting is on par with what you'll see on display at your local community theater, and the Templars in particular are positively Renaissance Faire-esque in their talent. Fred Williamson is, as you would suspect, Fred Williamson. Who would tell him to do anything differently? And why would they want to in the first place? You cast Fred Williamson because you want Fred Williamson. When you want a bad-ass who never shows weakness and never makes a mistake, you cast Fred. When you want a spastic nerd, you cast Eddie Deezen. If you put them in the same movie, that's money in the bank. Unfortunately, Eddie Deezen is not in this film. New Barbarians is bad. It's really bad. It's also amazingly entertaining and full of energy. Despite the cheapness on display and the ludicrous scenario, there's no denying that the film delivers plenty of action and violence, and the whole thing is tremendously fun. If you are looking to explore the polluted waters of post-apocalypse films, then the work of Enzo G. Castellari are the perfect place to start, and this is one of his wildest, most enjoyable films. Labels: Director: Enzo Castellari, Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Year: 1982 posted by Keith at 6:10 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, January 20, 2001Escape from the Bronx Release Year: 1984Country: Italy Starring: Mark Gregory, Henry Silva, Valeria D'Obici, Giancarlo Prete, Paolo Malco, Ennio Girolami, Antonio Sabato, Andrea Coppola, Massimo Vanni, Moana Pozzi, Romano Puppo, Alessandro Prete, Eva Czemerys. Writer: Tito Carpi, Enzo Castellari Director: Enzo Castellari Cinematographer: Blasco Giurato Music: Francesco De Masi Producer: Fabrizio De Angelis Original Title: Fuga del Bronx Alternate Titles: Bronx Warriors II, Escape 2000 Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us "In the near future." More times than not, it's a euphemistic way for a science fiction film to say, "We were too broke to afford interesting sets." Setting a film in "the near future" is a great way to get around a variety of stumbling blocks, not the least of which is a low budget. The near future allows you, as I said, to pretty much make up all sorts of new technology, situations, and laws while not having to fork over any money to build futuristic sets. It allows you to mold modern society to your whims without having to recreate it as something new. The alternate to this solution is to have a guy from the future travel back in time to the 20th century to save us or kill some other time traveling villain or some such nonsense. Once again, unless you are James Cameron, this allows you to throw some scifi stuff the way of the audience while not having to think too much about the look of the film. My favorite solution to making a sci-fi film with a low budget came in one of those Full Moon productions about guy sin giant robots hitting each other. I can't remember which one, and I'm not currently committed to my craft enough to expend the thirty seconds it would take me to go to the Internet Movie Database and look it up. Anyway, the vast majority of the movie is set in "a futuristic theme park made to look exactly like a 20th century town," which means they can have their scifi cake while filming the entire thing at an abandoned strip mall. Setting your film in "the near future" allows you to do something else as well. It allows you to "predict the future" with surprising accuracy, something that always seems to impress people. Frankly, if your movie made in 1980 predicts with any degree of accuracy events that will occur in the far-flung year of 1986, I'm not entirely prepared to call at your feet and call you the Amazing Creskin. What's far more interesting is when a film maker sets their film a few years in the future and yet is so wildly off-base in their interpretation of current events that their film just makes them look like a bunch of buffoons. Strange Days and pretty much any movie that based it self on the virtual reality revolution that was going to sweep the 1990s into an era of digital masturbation fall into this category. Sure, we all started masturbating while using computers, but it was only because we were looking at porn pictures, not because we had donned a full-body tactile stimulator suit and downloaded a Catherine Zeta-Jones avatar into our VR machine. The vast bulk of 1980s post-apocalyptic scifi actioners that flooded the market during the waning yet intense final days of the Cold War also fall into this category. The precedent for these films was set by the spectacular Mad Max, a near-future film that was smart enough to stay just grounded enough in current reality to remain completely believable. While this movie may have set the stage, it was the sequel, Road Warrior that everyone clambered to rip off. Mad Max was cool and all, but it's story of society teetering on the edge of collapse wasn't as financially compelling as Road Warrior's vision of a future gone insane and full of wild bikers and people in big chicken wire shoulder pads. Of course, the big difference between Road Warrior and the endless parade of imitators is that Road Warrior was a great movie, while most of the others sucked. When Italian exploitation director Enzo G. Castellari decided to try his hand at post-apocalyptic films, he tried a couple different recipes. He churned out the requisite "wandering around the wasteland" Road Warrior rip-off in the form of New Barbarians, a fairly average but ultimately enjoyable film. It pales however, to the bizarre blend of Escape from New York and Warriors that was 1990 Bronx Warriors, a wild tale of near-future gangs in the no-man's-land of The Bronx. Alternately accurate and ridiculous, the movie featured gangs of pimps, Broadway tap dancers, roller skaters, and of course, bikers lead by the young and charismatic Trash. When a movie is as big, as powerful, as awe-inspiring as 1990 Bronx Warriors, the people want, nay, demand a sequel. Or maybe the don't. It doesn't really matter, because want it or not, they made a follow-up to that "in the not too distant future" reworking of Walter Hill's classic street gang epic The Warriors. Since I actually quite enjoyed 1990 Bronx Warriors, I really have no complaints about a second film in the ongoing saga of heavy metal biker hero Trash and his never-ending struggle against the forces of greedy Manhattan fat cats. Set a few years after 1990 Bronx Warriors, this movie continues the tradition of being dead on in some of it's not-too-difficult predictions, while being laughably off-base in others. As in the first film, the most accurate prediction is that, unlike what we saw in Escape from New York, Manhattan does not become a criminal wasteland but instead becomes so fabulously expensive that only the very rich can afford to live there while the poor and freakish are pushed further and further into the margins of the city map. By Escape from the Bronx, the trendy and the rich have outgrown the confines of Manhattan and are looking to take over the other burroughs as well. Anyone currently living in New York can attest to the accuracy of this as what were once affordable neighborhoods in Brooklyn other burroughs are suddenly tripling their rents and pushing the poor, and even just the middle class (who might as well be poor relative to New York's outrageous cost of living), find themselves getting forced further and further away from the city. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at things, that's about where this film's accuracy in predicting the events of distant 1996 come to an abrupt halt. You should be thankful, because an action film about the rise and fall of spoiled Ivy League millionaire twenty-somethings building Silicon Alley with mom and dad's money, then proving they didn't know what the hell they were doing, thus taking the whole greed-crazed American economy down with them, might be good drama but hardly makes for scintillating action cinema. And let's face it, the world needs another expose of the vapidness and superficiality of cokehead yuppies like it needs another Hitler. Do you want to watch a movie about some rich kid drinking too much and screwing the marketing girl, or do you want to watch a movie where bikers and tap dancers throw grenades at Henry Silva and his army of cops in silver jumpsuits? Speaking of which, given that they are marching very slowly down the middle of the street, these cops might have been better off in body armor, flak vests, things like that. But I guess that doesn't look as cool as foil jumpsuits. After the gangs who kept the order were destroyed in the first film, The Bronx has become even worse than it was before, and a Manhattan company has big plans to demolish every single building and turn it into a rich man's paradise. The movie opens with legions of the aforementioned cops parading through the crumbling wasteland of The Bronx, droning on and on about how everyone is ordered to leave The Bronx and report for relocation to clean, modern housing somewhere in New Mexico. Why they want to ship a bunch of New Yorkers, and a bunch of New Yorkers from The Bronx, to New Mexico is beyond me. I guess there's room for everyone there, but its not like there is a striking resemblance between New Mexico and The Bronx. Needless to say, a lot of people aren't all that excited about being forcibly located to New Mexico. They might be persuaded to leave a crime-ridden hellhole like The Bronx if they got to go somewhere besides a desolate hellholle out in the middle of nowhere. Not to insult New Mexico, or The Bronx for that matter. In order to deal with the people who refuse to leave of their own free will, the corporation has employed "disinfestation" squads, paramilitary units in silver jumpsuits and motorcycle helmets who walk around The Bronx frying everyone with flame throwers. As I mentioned in the review of the previous film, I can think of about a hundred weapons that would be more effective in close-quarter urban combat than a flame thrower, but I guess none of them make for as dramatic a visual. Oh well, at least some of the cops carry machine guns too. It seems a bit odd, even if the world has gone to hell in a hand basket, that some real estate company would be allowed to stomp about The Bronx incinerating and shooting people left and right, including many unarmed and innocent people. Even within the context of the film it is established that while The Bronx may be a modern day Casbah without that infamous region's decorating sense, the rest of the country is still more or less law-abiding. Sending in legions of shock troops who kill mass number of people at random seems to be the sort of thing people tend to notice. Even if we discount that and agree that, for the purposes of this film, the government is willing to turn a blind eye to the mass extermination of countless men, women, and children, we still have to deal with the fact that, contrary to promises made by the corporation, the people aren't being relocated at all. They are being exterminated. Now this is the sort of thing that people really notice. A street war with armed thugs and homeless guys is one thing, but murdering what has to be tens of thousands of people with no repercussions is hard to swallow, even within the relatively goofball world of post-apocalyptic urban horror stories. Even the creators of this film must have realized this, because they at least pay some lip service to "dealing with the U.N. Human Rights Committee." But come on! How can this company keep the mass slaughter of thousands upon thousands of people a secret? All any reporter had to do was go down to New Mexico and see that there weren't any idyllic relocation homesteads there, and presto! The story is broken. Unfortunately, the journalists in the movie are too damn lazy to make a single phone call to check this claim, and instead get all their news directly from the corporate spokesman. This is sort of like how the government can investigate corruption within the government and conclude that it's not too bad. Are we suppose to believe them? Actually, when you look at what a bunch of lazy asses the modern crop of journalists are, these suck-ups who report press releases and marketing copy as if it is cold, hard fact rather than doing any actual work or research, I have to conclude that, albeit unintentional no doubt, Escape From the Bronx pretty much nailed modern journalism right on the head of the nail. Of course, instead of worrying about all this, you could say to me, "Hey, you dipshit, this is an Italian scifi film about bikers and show tune gangs fighting Henry Silva. Don't spend so much time analyzing the logic gaps of a movie aimed at subliterate 15-year-old Manowar fans," and I would have to hang my head in shame at your wisdom. Not that there is anything wrong with Manowar. Also among those refusing to vacate The Bronx are Trash's parents. It's sort of a weird twist to imagine Trash having parents, even weirder to imagine him still living with them, though not entirely unrealistic. I just have to get used to thinking about Trash leading a street gang revolution with Fred Williamson, then going home at the end of the day to tack posters up to his wall and have his mom cook him up a Hot Pocket. Since Trash has become something of a street legend after leading the spectacular but brutally unsuccessful street gang revolt against the cops in the first film, the disinfestation squad, lead of course by my main man Henry Silva, figure they can murder his parents, and that oughta smoke the little fella out. While Trash's dad busts some skulls with a baseball bat, Trash himself is busy collecting ammo to sell to the underground resistance, so named because they all live underground and don't put up much resistance. However, they are lead by a positively Ricardo Montalbon-esque Antonia Sabata, Sr., complete with bandanna, cool accent, and keen pirate earring. A shame, then, that he would go through all that trouble to create a cool swashbuckling rebel persona for himself then get saddled with the name Toblerone. That may mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but to me it just means expensive but delicious chocolate bars. Toblerone's merry band of freedom fighters is comprised primarily of the remnants from the defeated gangs, now united by a single cause. Viewers of the previous film will recognize members of the Zombies, Fred Williamson's silky pimp gang, and weirdly enough the leader of the tap dancing show tune gang. All in all, it's a fairly cool thread of continuity in a type of film that usually garners several sequels that have nothing at all to do with one another. Toblerone urges Trash to join their cause, which seems to be the cause of hanging out underground and drinking coffee, but Trash says he's more interested in fighting in the streets and continuing the struggle than hiding out like a rat. When Trash returns home, he finds his parents have been the victims of a grisly flame thrower attack, which annoys him to no end. I should mention that when Trash leaves and comes home, he rides his motorcycle up and down the stairs. Given the narrow and winding nature of the staircase, it might make more sense to just park the motorcycle and walk up, but whatever. Who am I to tell a heavy metal biker and freedom fighter Trash how to conduct himself in his own apartment building? While Trash vents his anger by leading a bunch of homeless guys in various guerrilla attacks against Henry Silva's men, a nosy reporter with a shrill voice and atrocious make-up sneaks into The Bronx with her photographer to get first-hand proof of the atrocities being committed there. Needless to say, she gets caught in the crossfire and ends up tagging along with Trash to see Toblerone. While Trash urges the underground resistance to quit collecting weapons and start using them, the reporter has a different approach: kidnap the president of the corporation responsible for the slaughter and use that as leverage for focusing attention on the horrors being perpetrated upon the rag-clad inhabitants of The Bronx. In order to pull off their little scheme, they enlist the aid of former bank robber extraordinare Strike and his bomb-making little kid. The quartet make their way through the sewers and abandoned subway tunnels into Manhattan, emerging just in time for a big shoot-out in a riverside park. In the ensuing violence, they manage to nab the president but lose the reporter. Trust me, you won't miss her. She delivered her lines with the grating style of Fran Drescher minus the incredible beauty. Upon hearing about the kidnapping, Silva is delighted. Now he finally has ammunition he can use to turn public opinion in his favor, allowing him to murder even more people. I'm not exactly sure I follow his line of thinking, as kidnapping the man who has slaughtered countless thousands hardly seems like a heinous act. Luckily for Silva, the vice president of the company is also overjoyed, and he manufactures a story about the kidnappers expressing a total lack of interest in politics. They only want money, and lots of it. While better thought out, this still seems like a flimsy excuse to invade The Bronx and kill everyone in sight, but then since that's what they were doing to begin with, I'm not sure what the problem ever was. The vice president also has another job he wants Silva to carry out: making sure the president is murdered by the rebels in The Bronx, even if that means Silva has to kill the guy himself. After being promised freedom to kill even more people, Silva enthusiastically agrees. Before too long, war breaks out between his men and Trash's and Toblerone's band of flamboyantly dressed warriors over ownership of a bunch of crumbling buildings and trash heaps. As you may very well have guessed, this is a pretty goofy movie. It's also quite entertaining. There is a ton of action, most of it well-choreographed. Like Peckinpah and Walter Hill, Enzo Castellari loves to use slow-motion, so you get lots of slow-mo shots of guys getting shot, bashed in the head, fried with flamethrowers, or just punching people. I think this movie is more violent than the first one as well as being more action-packed. As far as the acting goes, it's better than you might think. While the reporter woman is awful, the rest of the cast is actually pretty solid. Antonio Sabato brings a dashing sense of cool to what would have been a fruitcake of a character handled by a less manly gent, and of course Henry Silva is a dependable workhorse who brings his usual malicious charm to his character. You can always count on Henry to deliver a slightly over-the-top, always entertaining performance. Strike is played by Giancarlo Prete, who also played the fairly unheroic hero, Scorpio, from another Castellari-helmed post-apocalypse movie, New Barbarians. He's much better here as the grisled thief turned freedom fighter. His son in the movie is played by his real-life son, and since the kid's primary function is to hang around in the background and blow things up, he's neither intrusive nor annoying, which is all you can ask of any child in a movie, or life in general for that matter. Mark Gregory returning as Trash is also charismatic, though he's not given much more to do than kick ass and look like a member of Saxon. That's fine. As I said when I reviewed the previous film, I much prefer the tough-ass heavy metal hero to the namby pamby goth rocker heroes we seem saddled with now. You know, putting on a long black PVC trenchcoat doesn't make you look like an ass-kicking hero of the future. It makes you look like a member of The Damned, and while I have my share of Damned songs I enjoyed, I'd much rather have Manowar on my side during a fight. When it comes to predicting the future, of course, we can all look back from our vantage point here in glorious 2001, aka the future, and have a good laugh at the expense of the vision of those who came before us and tried to guess what things would be like, or at least what would make a fast buck at the time. Given the state of New York City in the early 1980s, coming out of one the most violent and terrible phases in its history, conceiving of parts of it as a vast wasteland run by criminals was easy, and that's what John carpenter served to us in Escape from New York. However, Castellari's concept of the city as a giant playground for the rich, where big corporations call all the shots and local politicians are little more than figureheads, was slightly ahead of its time and a lot more accurate. Still, we wouldn't love these movies as much if they'd gotten everything right, as I said earlier, and this one is pretty ludicrous even without the requisite bikers in assless leather pants riding aimlessly around in a desert. The problem is that Escape from the Bronx envisions a near future where kicking ass is par for the course when out for a night on the town. Trash is a bad-ass, through and through, as are most of his friends. Who would have thought that instead of that, the future would see us all become the biggest bunch of pansies and mindless consumers in the history of the world. Okay, maybe we're less pansy than the French aristocracy just before the French revolution, but that's not saying much. You can't ride into battle listening to Willa Ford, and you can't have your scene where you stare out at the water and think about all the pain and suffering set to Jennifer Lopez shaking her ass and letting her producer and back-up singers do all the work. Say what you will about macho metal and the heroes it inspired, at least they were believable in their roles as ass-kickers. The plot also has more work put into it than your standard "urban hell of the future" movie. Sure, there are holes large enough to drive entire biker gangs through, or even gangs dressed like the cast of Cabaret, but all in all, it works well enough. It was fun to see the corporation turn the kidnapping around to use to their benefit. I also think the movie has a great ending. The first movie ended, of course, with all our favorites getting their asses kicked by the cops. This time around, the gangs manage to get the better of the cops, at least for a while, and Trash of course gets the better of Silva's brutal character. The final shot is of Strike emerging victoriously from the rubble to meet with Trash, who is surveying the flaming wreckage from his latest handiwork. Strike smiles and nods to Trash, who returns the gesture with a world-weary shake of his head as if he knows the fighting has all been for nothing. They've gained nothing but a hellhole, and it's more than likely even more cops will show up soon to put an end to the uprising. It's the sort of gloriously downbeat ending you don't see too much of in these happy times. So this look at the future is an interesting look at the past and how we all thought society was going to fall apart and we would become an endless stream of victims for big business. It's too bad that during the dotcom craze, when America idiotically bet its retirement fund on the ego trips of a bunch of spoiled brats with no concept at all of how to run a business, much less a whole economy, that we didn't have men like Toblerone to laugh in our faces and blow shit up. Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Director: Enzo Castellari, Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Year: 1984 posted by Keith at 12:11 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, January 14, 20011990 Bronx Warriors Release Year: 1982Country: Italy Starring: Mark Gregory, Stefania Girolami, Fred Williamson, Vic Morrow, John Sinclair, Christopher Connelly, George Eastman, Ennio Girolami, Massimo Vanni, Betty Dessy. Writer: Elisa Briganti and Enzo Castellari Director: Enzo Castellari Cinematographer: Sergio Salvati Music: Walter Rizzati Producer: Fabrizio De Angelis Original Title: 1990: I guerrieri del Bronx Availability: Buy it from Amazon  It's been a long time since the world ended. Oh sure, the latter portion of the 1990s were filled with movies where the world almost ended, but as they say in the Pentagon, "almost" only counts in horseshoes and atom bombs. Yeah, we might have used a giant asteroid to destroy Paris just for kicks, but when it comes down to ending the world, we pretty much became wimps. The end of the Cold War seems to have dashed our post-apocalyptic fantasies, and an upturn in the economy and a brainwashing of people into thinking that increased credit lines and frivolous spending to support an economy built entirely upon the ego trips and wet dreams of moronic dotcom CEOs who aren't fit to be managing a Burger King, let alone a money-losing company inexplicably valued at a kajillion dollars is somehow synonymous with stability, prosperity, and intelligence, resulted in an era of unbridled optimism. Gone were the days of trickle-down economics. Gone were the days of an Evil Empire and a Red Scare. Gone were the days when middle school youths would organize themselves out in the woods to build a bomb shelter that would eventually evolve to resemble a foot deep hole covered by a sheet of warped plywood. It wasn't that we solved all our problems so much as we just got really good at ignoring them. Kids getting dumber and dumber each year? No problem! Everyone getting meaner and more prone to fatal acts of mindless violence? Hey, that's cool. Everyone refusing to take responsibility for absolutely anything that happens to them or those around them? Okay by me, because I work for a pre-IPO company that granted me eight trillion billion dollars in potential options once the deal goes through. The country is perfect, so there's no need to end the world on our movie screens. Why, if we all pull together behind the President and stare up in awe at the sky as moving string music plays in the background, we can overcome anything! In the words of Jim Kelly laying down the law in Enter the Dragon, "Bullshit, Mr. Han Man!" Call me a pessimist, but our house of cards so irresponsibly built on a fault line underneath an active volcano in the path of stampeding elephants is going to collapse, and when it does, you can bet your sweet fannie that all of a sudden, people will be making end-of-the-world movies again. If this means finally putting an end to the "heist movies for film students" genre that was spawned by the success of Quentin Tarantino, than perhaps economic collapse is not such a high price to pay. Say what you will, but we've all been a bunch of morons these past few years with our dotcom start-ups, brain-dead venture capitalists, day trading, and the general idea that being stupid as a log is okay so long as you have a high credit limit and one of those hands-free cell phone units. When it hits, all we'll need back are some Commies, and we'll be right back where we were for the first two great ages of apocalypse films that came at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s. Having spent most of my teen years in the 1980s, I am fairly familiar with what went on then. The Reagan years. Ahh, the Reagan years. We were so young, so naive, so willing to be lead by a total and complete nutcase. The post-apocalyptic movie kicked off in a big way with the release of the Australian film Mad Max, but really exploded like a neutron bomb upon the release of the film's sequel, The Road Warrior. Dozens upon dozens of fly-by-night trend-hoppers clamored over one another to get out to the desert and film a movie about guys in big shoulderpads driving around aimlessly. For the most part, there was never any real reason to put them out in the desert other than the facts that The Road Warrior did it, and it was generally pretty cheap to film in a desert. Stack some styrofoam packing crates up, string up a little bubble wrap, and you have an instant "desert town of the future." A few films decided to stick to the cities however, most notably John Carpenter's wonderful Escape From New York, which depicted a New York City so overrun with crime that the whole of Manhattan was simply shut down and turned into a giant prison. Who would have thought that the opposite would be true, that it would become so expensive to live in the city that most of the bad elements would be forced out, leaving room only for yuppies and dotcom CEOs? Well, weirdly enough, Italian director Enzo G. Castellari thought that, and the result is one of the more outlandish yet eerily accurate predictions of the near future, 1990 Bronx Warriors. It's easy to dismiss his film as a rip-off of Escape From New York mixed with The Warriors, but doing so would be short-sighted. Although it's obvious even from the title of the film that Enzo, who also directed Road Warrior inspired post-apocalyptic films like New Barbarians, is taking elements from The Warriors and Escape From New York, it should also be noted that these films owe a debt of gratitude to Italian spaghetti westerns, which in turn owe a debt to Japanese samurai films, so on and so forth. It's best not to worry about these sorts of things. Besides, there are enough weird original ideas in 1990 Bronx Warriors to keep it from being classifiable as a rip-off by any but the laziest film critics. There's also a lot about this film to set it apart from the slew of other early 1980s end-of-the-world films. For one, the world hasn't so much ended as it's simply falling apart, not unlike the sort of entropic future we glimpse in Mad Max. There's been no nuclear holocaust, giant asteroid, war, or much of anything other than a widening of the economic gap between rich and poor resulting in much of the country simply breaking down. This was (and is) not an unrealistic view of things, especially in the era of Reaganomics, skyrocketing inflation and unemployment, and a growing American Rustbelt. Okay, so Reagan inherited most of those problems from the wonderfully inept Jimmy Carter, but it's our God-given American right to blame the guy who gets stuck with the mess, not the guy who caused it. The ranks of the impoverished and disillusioned were growing at a dizzying rate, and it seemed the rich overlords sitting at the top of the heap were less and less concerned with those beneath them. Thank God we solved that problem. Amid this climate of social and economic breakdown, New York City saw itself fragment into two parts. There was Manhattan, which had become so amazingly expensive that only the fabulously rich could afford to live there, and then there were the outer boroughs (primarily The Bronx), where the poor and undesirable elements of society had been pushed out and forgotten. That's pretty much how New York City is, except that even the outer boroughs are becoming too expensive for the lower and middle class. Granted it wasn't a Criswell-like feat of prediction for Enzo to craft this future for New York since it was pretty much on the road there even during the 1980s as it struggled to recover from the devastating 1970s that saw much of the city, especially The Bronx, become a violent no-man's-land. The Bronx of this film are not at all unlike what The Bronx actually became at the time. You really have to feel bad for The Bronx. I mean, it's not a bad place. Sure, you got some bad parts of town that you don't want to visit, and you have some stinking cesspools, but all of New York has that. It's funny how the problems faced by The Bronx in the 1970s continue to define that borough in popular media. Some of it's actually quite nice. Having been there several times, I can say I have never once been assaulted by an AC Turnbull. Hell, just last week I saw Moon Runner right by a Van Cortland Ranger. Can you dig it? In the world of 1990 Bronx Warriors, the police are more or less owned by a giant corporation, and they've decided that The Bronx isn't worth saving. As long as the gangs that control the borough stay in their own turf, The Man is happy to just let them wallow in their own filth. It's not really exactly a good idea, as one has to drive through The Bronx to get to much of New England and other northern states. Given that Manhattan is a tiny little island, alienating the boroughs with all the bridges and interstates probably isn't good business. But what the hell? Our movie opens with a young woman, Ann, fleeing Manhattan with a slew of not terribly high-tech looking security forces hot on her heels. She escapes into The Bronx, which is a anarchic pile of urban desolation controlled by crazy-ass gangs, populated by the poor, the drunk, the criminal, and the insane. Ann is quickly set upon by a rather silly gang of roller skating hockey goons known as The Zombies. Given that much of The Bronx is crumbling and broken up and littered with great piles of junk, roller skates don't seem to be the best way to get around. There's a reason why you don't do things like hike and climb fences and fight in roller skates. Sure, it would hurt if you kicked someone in the face while wearing skates, but unless you're Jackie Chan, there's a good chance you'll just end up flat on your ass getting the crap kicked out of you by some guy who had enough sense to wear a pair of steel-toed boots to the fight. Sure enough, guys in boots show up and beat the holy hell out of The Zombies. These guys, The Riders, not only wear boots, they also ride motorcycles, which is generally an all-around better set-up for cruising the urban decay of tomorrow. The Riders are basically an early 1980s muscle-metal band the likes of which would no doubt please even Jon Mikl-thor himself. Their leader is Trash, a buff young dude who just missed out on being Jon Bon Jovi. Trash may be named Trash and lead one of the toughest gangs in The Bronx, but he also has the heart of a hero. He takes Ann under his wing and teaches her how to survive in the wasteland they call home. At some point, they also fall in love, which means she'll probably die before this whole thing is over. The Riders are obviously metal through and through. Not the spandex and lipstick metal of glam, but the tougher leather wearing metal. About all that's missing is a motorcycle riding montage set to "Steel Tormentor" by Helloween. The heavy metal hero is another oddity of the '80s. You don't see him too often these days, but back when Tipper was trying to slap parental warning labels on our music, the heavy metal hero was popping up all over the place. Lots of post-apocalypse movies had them, and there were plenty of metal heroes in action as well. These days, we get stupid goth heroes. Now, I don't mean to come down on goth rockers. Some of it is just fine, and the old school goths are pretty keen folk. But there's something about the make-up and frailty that really holds them back from being convincing bad-ass action stars. Imagine how much cooler if, instead of gothy looking skinny people fighting to lame techno music, The Matrix had contained a lot of buff warrior metal types kicking ass to epic anthems from Blind Guardian or Manowar. There are no heroic goth fight themes like there are heroic metal anthems of power. You can't tame a land listening to Bauhaus, but you can weild a mighty battle ax if you're blasting some Hammerfall. You can also have "the sensitive moment," in a tough way. Heroes these days are pretty boring and one-dimensional. The heavy metal heroes, ont he other hand, were characters of depth and complexity. Sure, they're tough as nails and curse a lot. Sure, they wear leather and those rawhide Geronimo boots. But they also have moments of great introspection and thought, like Conan. They're just as likely to stare out at the ocean and contemplate the vileness of the world while "Heart of Steel" plays int he background as they are to just kick ass with a barbed wire baseball bat while blasting "Gates of Valhalla." They are warrior-poets, baby! And if you don't buy that, then ask yourself this: in a fight, would you rather be on the team of Robert Smith and Peter Murphy, or would you rather be on the team with Lemmy and Jon Mikl-thor? You'll also notice that today's industrial/goth/techno hero relies pretty heavily on fire power and technology. Even in The Matrix, they could only fight because the computer told them they could, and most of the time they just relied on automatic weapons. The heavy metal hero, however, favors the intimacy of hand-to-hand combat. He'd rather test his steel against you mano-y-mano than shoot at you from afar. He has burning in his heart the spirit of the ancient samurai or kungfu hero who considers guns beneath him. Given the choice, he'd rather look you in the eye, twist the knife in your belly, and say something wise like, "You piece of shit!" This is partly because of honor, and mostly because Boris Valjello fantasy art looks cooler if it's a dude with a sword. I'd like to see the return of the heavy metal hero, but then, I'd also like to see the return of those heavy metal videos that feature an outraged Board of Censors screaming at the band in exaggerated pantomime, or even better, videos where a disillusioned youth from a bad home is lead on a mystical journey by his heavy metal mentors, who would no doubt step out of a poster or something. Of course, best of all would be a return to the days of videos that featured and uptight school marm with tight pulled-back hair and horn-rimmed glasses getting blasted by a dose of metal energy and instantly turning into a gyrating metal slut in fishnets and a torn-up t-shirt. The Riders may be tough and all, but the biggest, most powerful gang in the borough is a multi-ethnic gang run by a guy called The Ogre. His gang tools around in hot rods with flame paint jobs, lowriders, and other cool-ass cars. They all dress like something between a Renaissance Festival harlequin and a 1970s pimp. But just when you thought the gang couldn't get any weirder, out steps The Ogre, and it's Fred Williamson, possibly the baddest ass man on the planet. Fred can kick someone's ass just by blowing smoke in their face, and even though he's wearing some silly red silk shirt, who the hell is going to walk up to Fred Williamson and go, "Hey man, that's a poofy shirt you're wearing." Ogre and Trash have a truce going on, though it's strained when Trash finds a member of The Riders impaled on some flotsam down by the river. The Ogre shows up to explain to Trash that the guy was an informant working the Manhattan Corporation, the multinational company that owns most of Manhattan, the police force, and various other things. Why they would want to be spying on The Riders is unknown, at least until Ann confesses to her man that she is the daughter of the current Manhattan Corporation president and will one day inherit the company and become a pawn for the Board of Directors. That's why she fled Manhattan, though I can think of better places to flee than The Bronx. She could try, say, Maine or maybe Florida, somewhere that isn't a crumbling cesspool of criminals, violence, and danger. Meanwhile, a mercenary named Hammer enters The Bronx to retrieve the wayward girl and make trouble for the locals. Hammer should not be confused with Fred Williamson, who played a guy named Hammer in a different movie, called Hammer. Whatever the case may be, you can bet Fred Williamson won't be too pleased when he learns someone else is calling themselves Hammer. Hammer enlists the aide of a grumpy truck driver who doesn't really drive his truck anywhere. He just sort of tools around the block. Together, they tempt a member of The Riders to help them get Ann. In return, Hammer will make sure he offs Trash, leaving this other guy in control. It's all so Shakespearean! Ann, distressed that her presence is causing so much trouble for everyone, decides to run away, completely forgetting the moving speech Trash gave her earlier as he stood atop a heap of garbage, staring at the river. After Hammer raids The Riders headquarters and murders a couple people, Ann takes off, hoping trouble will follow her instead of stick around to harass Trash and his gang. Unfortunately, she takes the exact same route she took the first time she entered The Bronx, and is soon set upon by The Zombies again. This time they capture her and send word to Hammer that they are willing to deal. Trash is no dummy, and suspects there is a Judas among them. When he learns that The Hammer is about to lead an all-out police assault on The Bronx, he knows the only thing that will save them all is if The Riders and The Ogre fight together. If that happens, all the other gangs will fall in line. To get to The Ogre, though, The Riders have to fight their way across The Bronx and through the turf of several other outlandish gangs. That's The Warriors rip-off, but it doesn't last too long. Imagine, if you can, gangs that are like ten times wackier than the ones in The Warriors, even the Baseball Furies. Trash takes a couple loyal soldiers with him and sets off to find The Ogre. The first gang they have to face is the Dancin' Show Tune gang. Oh yeah, you read that correctly. They all dress like the cast from Cabaret and use a fighting style involving lots of Broadway dance steps and the use of razor sharp canes. You may think that a gang of overly made-up drama club people in gold sequined waist coats and fishnets is not very scary, but try to imagine if you were walking down a desolate city street late one night and saw that coming at you. That's pretty fucked up, right there. Trash and his boys are hopelessly outnumbered by the toe-tappin' musical theater boppers, but luck holds out as the leader of the gang is a cool lady who has a crush on Trash. When she hears of his mission, she agrees to let him pass provided he gives her a little play some time in the near future. Weirdly enough, when I've been cornered by angry sword-wielding actresses dressed like Little Nell, my plea of "let me go and you can have sex with me" never seems to work out, but maybe that's because I'm not wearing a leather vest and adorned with a head full of luscious auburn locks. The next encounter isn't so easy, as it's with a bunch of crazies who dress like future gangs called The Crazies or The Scavengers always dress: lots of rags and robes and cloaks and hunched over walking. The battle is rough, but Trash manages to survive, finally making it to The Ogre's turf. Okay, so he didn't have to fight his way across the entire Bronx, just a little bit, but you get the general idea. Of course, nothing is easy, and the rat fink Rider has already lead Hammer to Ogre's lair, where they intend to frame Trash for the murder of one of The Ogre's men. The Ogre himself is busy organizing a food and clothing drive for the poor and homeless of The Bronx (which is just about everyone), making you realize that Fred Williamson is just as likely to save your ass as he is to kick it. The Ogre falls for Hammer's trick for about ten seconds before he slaps Trash on the shoulder and agrees to go kick some serious ass. However, rather than leading a force of united gangs against The Man, The Ogre thinks it would be better to just rescue Ann. Okay, whatever. It's not like they aren't going to have to fight Hammer and the cops eventually. Maybe Fred just figured it wasn't all that useful to have allies like that show tune gang. Trash, The Ogre, and Ogre's woman -- a whip-wielding bad-ass named Poison or Witch or something -- set off to save Ann from The Zombies before Hammer gets to her. It's got to really ruin your day if someone comes up to you and tells you a group of people named Trash, The Ogre, and Witch are after your ass. It gets even worse if they explain that The Ogre is actually Fred Williamson. Pissing off Fred Williamson is probably one of the stupidest things anyone could do, way up there with things like challenging a Shaolin monk to a duel or killing a vengeful ninja's only son. There are certain things in this life you just don't do unless you want to end it real quick. Of course our mini-gang is successful in their bid to free Ann, mostly because The Zombies suck, but just when the party starts and Ogre and The Riders get together for some drinkin', here comes Hammer with a full battalion of future cops, all of whom where silver jumpsuits and helmets and are armed not with guns, but with flame throwers! I don't know what the tactical advantage of a flame thrower is other than it looks cool. Sure, a flame thrower is pretty handy if your opponent is a few feet away menacing you with a stone club, but it's not exactly the most practical urban assault weapon. For one, they're heavy and awkward, what with the giant tank of flammable liquid you have to strap to your back. Two, that tank of liquid makes a great a target. But more than any of that, you'd think the big failure of the flame thrower in a scenario such as storming the turf of The Ogre and The Riders in a future Bronx gone mad is that people could just sit up in the third or fourth story of their buildings and shoot at you or throw rocks at your head. When it comes down to a guy with a flame thrower marching down the middle of the street versus a guy with a gun hiding inside a building at the end of the block and shooting at you through a hole in the wall, I know who my money is on. I guess the cops were depending pretty heavily on that whole "code of the heavy metal hero" thing that requires them to fight you face-to-face, but still, not everyone is a heavy metal hero with a heart of steel. There are cops a plenty to be killed, and they barbecue more than a few gang members in the completely wild finale that features The Hammer just sort of standing around and hooting, just waiting for someone to ram something through his gut. Since this is a downbeat future, you know just about everyone is going to die. Fred Williamson gets to go out like a bad-ass, of course, after killing about a bajillion people, and Trash manages to survive the police advance, though there's not much left for him to go home to. The police, annoyed by just about everything, pretty much shatter the gang system that was holding The Bronx together, sending the entire thing crashing down in a ball of flame. The common man falls at the feet of the corporate goons, but not before spearing a few people. It's easy to dismiss films like this, but truth be told, I love 1990 Bronx Warriors. It's action-packed, over-the-top, and violent, but it also maintains some sense of realism. The film was shot on location in Brooklyn and The Bronx, so the total urban decay you see onscreen is the real thing. Kinda makes you realize what a shithole most of New York City is. I walked through my own neighborhood after watching this movie and realized that it was pretty rotten. Every vacant lot is nothing but a bunch of weeds and heaps of rotting garbage. People throw any old shit on the street and leave it to decay. There are tons and tons of worthless, crumbling buildings that aren't fit to be inhabited by rats yet are lived in by humans paying outrageous rent. The water in our rivers is disgusting, and we're surrounded on all sides by landfills, junkyards, filthy factories, and burnt-out neighborhoods. Given the actual appearance of much of outer New York City, it wasn't so difficult for Enzo to create a thoroughly believable future full of decay. It was already there for him. As a New Yorker, I've never understood why so many other New Yorkers just leave shit around to rot. I mean, we have to live here, people! Clean the damn place up! It baffles me to watch someone, often some well-dressed business type, stand on the street right next to a garbage can (there are several on every block) and throw his nasty-ass half-eaten McDonalds or candy wrapper on the ground. If The Ogre caught you doing that, he'd pound you good! Enzo uses the blighted New York cityscape to great effect, exploiting a limited number of locations to create the image of a sprawling urban hell. The gangs, of course, are mostly ludicrous, but at least they aren't as ludicrous as some New York City gangs that have made it onto the big screen. The Broadway musical gang is actually more believable than the utterly ridiculous gang from Rumble in the Bronx that rode around on Yamaha dirt bikes and neon dune buggies covered in Christmas lights. The Riders are actually fairly believable and look like people you might encounter -- at least at a Krokus or Dokken concert (okay, maybe these days you wouldn't encounter anybody at a Krokus concert...). Since I don't really look for realism in the end of the world, I'm not complaining. They gave us realism in The Day After, and you know what we learned? That the end of the world was going to be really boring and full of farmers going, "We need to figure out what's going on." Give me tap-dancing vaudeville gangs any day! The acting is okay. Typically dry and over-the-top with the usual ridiculously vulgar cursing that makes precious little sense. You may find this difficult to believe, but I am no opponent of salty language. Sometimes, however, it's just silly, and whoever dubbed this tends to just string eight or nine dirty words together for no real reason. Instead of saying, "He might be lying," characters in this movie say stuff like "Maybe it's a stinking pile of shit from his asshole." Vic Morrow as Hammer is hilariously gruff and hateful of everything. Trash, played by then seventeen-year-old Mark Gregory, is a pretty cool anti-hero, and of course, Fred Williamson shines as always. Williamson worked with director Enzo Castellari several times, including New Barbarians, and was no stranger to on-the-cheap Italian sci-fi productions, having also appeared in Lucio Fulci's Rome 2072 AD, among others. Of course, it's the action that we came to see, and this movie is much more of an urban action film than it is a science fiction film. About the only sci-fi is that it's set in what was then the future and the cops wear shiny jumpsuits. The action is plentiful and brutal, just the way it should be. Castellari uses lots of Sam Peckinpah-ish slow motion, and there's plenty of punching and kung-fuing. In many ways, this film actually reminds me of the low-budget action wonder Deadbeat at Dawn both in look and feel. The big difference is that while Deadbeat at Dawn is relentlessly grim in its depiction of ultra-violent dead-end gangs, 1990 Bronx Warriors is much more comic bookish, which has to be expected when one of your gangs is the tap dancin' sequin crew. The promos for this movie called it "A HEAVY METAL JOURNEY INTO AN URBAN HELL WHERE EVERYTHING HAS GONE WRONG!" and that pretty much sums it up. This movie is like listening to a Manowar song about warriors and struggles and strength. When the end of the world comes, we're going to have guys like Trash and The Riders on our side while you are stuck with the show tune gang. My favorite thing about 1990 Bronx Warriors besides all the violence and gangs of Broadway actors, is that it's a difficult film to classify. It's got sci-fi elements, what with being set in what was, at the time, the near future, and features some sci-fi elements like the evil corporation that controls the city, but it takes those elements and grounds them in a very 1970s action film sort of world. In many ways, 1990 Bronx Warriors is far less of a rip-off than it is a futuristic sequel (albeit unofficial) to The Warriors. It shares some ideas and situations, but it also has quite a few original ideas. The Riders are very much like an updated version of The Warriors, and the New York of the future is not much different from the New York of the 1970s The Warriors fought their way through. It gives the whole thing a really weird feel, but I like it. Partly due to budget, Enzo Castellari doesn't go over the top with future crap, and the result was that he crafted one of the more accurate visions of the near future. No flying cars or shiny disco jumpsuits. No space stations or aliens from outer space. No nuclear war. Just regular people, not much different from how they were decades before, wallowing in the filth they created. 1990 Bronx Warriors conjures up every sci-fi fan's greatest fear: the future will basically be the same -- but at least it will have Fred Williamson in it. Of the many post-apocalypse films to come out during the 1980s, this is one of the most enjoyable. It's part Mad Max, part The Warriors, but with a lot of very original ideas and blending of genres. That makes it difficult to classify, and that's always a bonus. It barely even fits into the post-apocalypse genre since the world hasn't actually ended so much as parts of it have just broken. A cool but simple plot, tons of violent action, and more creativity than most people will give it credit for make 1990 Bronx Warriors one hell of a good time. Labels: Director: Enzo Castellari, Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Stars: Fred Williamson, Stars: George Eastman, Stars: Mark Gregory, Year: 1982 posted by Keith at 12:36 AM | 0 Comments |
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