Thanks to the Mad Max movies in the early 80s there were plenty of crappy dystopian movies trying to replicate its success.
Warrior of the Lost World: This 1983 movie was so bad that it was available to MST3K in the early 90s. Robert Ginty (referred to only as "the Paper Chase Guy") plays the unnamed, eponymous warrior who rides around on a souped-up motorcycle that talks like Siri on helium runs into Persis Khambatta (the bald lady from Star Trek I) who asks him to rescue her father from the evil Prossor (Donald Pleasence reheating his Blofeld). Paper Chase Guy rescues the father but the daughter is captured instead. So he winds up raising an army from a nearby freak show to overthrow Prossor. Besides the motorcycle it features a souped-up dump truck known as "Megaweapon" that Joel and bots take a shine to and even call in one of the intermission skits. Another skit imagines a young Paper Chase Guy taking a driving test. Former NFL player Fred Williamson plays a double agent who secretly works for Prossor. In a big twist at the end it's revealed the Prossor Paper Chase Guy kills is just an android and that the real one is still alive for the nonexistent sequel.
Warriors of the Wasteland: Also in 1983 was this Italian production featured on Rifftrax. In 2019 nuclear war has devastated the world. A roving band of religious nuts with bad 80s hair and souped-up go-carts kill those pockets of humanity left. But a guy called Scorpion who has a muscle car with a clear plastic bubble glued on the roof and some vacuum hoses attached leads the resistance to them and gets captured and it's implied that he was sexually abused by his captors. Ironically Fred Williamson is also in this very similar movie, only this time he dresses up in a lot of gold and black and shoots explosive arrows. Scorpion and Fred Williamson are joined by a little boy who is an expert mechanic. It's a really cheap ripoff of Mad Max that's hilariously bad. The guy who plays Scorpion was also in The Last Shark of the T entry but since both movies are dubbed he sounds completely different.
City Limits: A year later in 1984 came this movie about rival gangs of teenagers with motorbikes who fight each other in the ruins of a city. A young Kim Cattrall plays a girl who at first is on the bad side but who joins the good guys. For some reason James Earl Jones also appears in this as a guy living out of the city who helps the good kids with their revenge. It's pretty cheesy and like Warrior of the Lost World was so bad that MST3K snagged it in the early 90s back when they were mostly showing sci-fi and kaiju movies from the 50s and early 60s. In one of the intermission skits Crow sings a love song to Kim Cattrall.
Absolution: The Journey: Unlike the other three this comes from the late 90s. It was featured on Rifftrax and starred Mario Lopez as a guy who goes to a military academy in the Arctic or Antarctica or somewhere really cold and snowy after something has happened to the world. It's not really clear what happened or what state the rest of the world is in. The academy is led by a brutal sergeant played by Richard Grieco. Mario Lopez tries to unravel the secrets of the place and rescue his black friend who was put in the brig for some reason. In the end it's revealed there's some kind of alien invasion thing going on. Most of the plot doesn't make much sense and the effects aren't great. But there's plenty of homo-eroticism with mostly naked, buff young guys. If that's your thing.
The Apple: Technically it's not really a wasteland, just a really shitty dystopia. This 1980-ish movie from shlock producers Golan-Globus takes place in "1994" where everything revolves around an American Idol-type show controlled by literally the devil. This musical features a lot of really annoying songs with hammy acting and ridiculously overly flamboyant costumes even a drag queen might find too much. Like Warriors of the Wasteland the "futuristic" cars are normal station wagons with crap glued on them. And to cap it off it ends with a literal deus ex machina. This was a Rifftrax they showed for a while on Pluto TV but wasn't on Amazon and then mercifully even Pluto TV stopped showing it. Hooray!
No comments:
Post a Comment