MOVIES

The Rift a.k.a. Endless Descent (1990) is a fairly entertaining submarine/cavemonster tale.  A submarine is sent to find out what happened to the previous submarine and they discover an underwater cave system with a secret DNA acceleration laboratory cranking out crazy cave monsters.  The submarine crew is a zany agglomeration of cliches - Tightass Commander who forces people to do things which will endanger everyone, because what he says goes; Disgraced Hero with something to prove; a Spaniard, a Frenchman and a German; Happy Swede and Angry Swede, a Woman and an Angry Woman (actually the other woman is also angry but she is only angry at Disgraced Hero), and a streetwise gentleman of African descent whose primary purpose is to occasionally remind everyone that they are all white, and he is black, and to exclaim "Sheeit!" and "Aw, May-un!" with monotonous regularity.  Look, here he is ogling the shapely posterior of Angry Woman:

Isn't he TOO outrageous?  Anyway, the monsters are pretty good, mostly because there are a bunch of different kinds that you only see enough of to be able to say what the hell was that, except for the crazy supermonster in the big cave that sends a giant tentacle mouth out to glom down on you while you stand there shooting at it.  Like any good submarine this one has a self destruct panel with a red LED countdown display but it only gives you two minutes to get into the escape pod which makes it really exciting since of course you have to stand there arguing for about a minute and a half. It mostly looks pretty cheap and it is mostly kind of stupid, the kind of stupid where someone says "Take this and don't lose it because if you do you will be trapped in the monster cave forever," and then they don't clip it to their belt or anything, they just carry it in their hand until they come to the first fuming crevasse and then guess what happens.  And yet it is really not too bad though I can't give it more than a 5/10.  It won't kill you to watch it.

On the other hand, Creature a.k.a Titan Find  (1985) is a shameless, no a shameful ripoff of both Alien and The Thing.  A bunch of people are stuck on a planet with a monster that not only has a drooly-toothed monster part it also has these blood slugs that take over your brain so your friends don't know you are also a monster.  Unless you inexplicably get all zombie looking and start going Graaar! The good thing is the blood slug makes Nude Scene Woman entirely disrobe for no discernable purpose, which is reason enough to root for the monster.  There is lots of '80s hair, over-illuminated plywood sets, and everyone basically seems like next week they will be doing a bit part on The Love Boat.  Except for Klaus Kinski in his "I won't say no to anything" period, the only interesting person in the movie. The print I have is about five minutes shorter than the standard runtime which explains why sometimes a monster scene would end with me not knowing what happened or people would go OH MY GOD and you would never see what was so awful.  They must have cut out some gnawing scenes or something.  You don't really see the monster suit well but that is a good thing because they must have said, "We need a suit just like the one in that Alien movie except our guy is five feet tall and weighs 180 pounds.  Make it so all he can do is shuffle slowly."  So shameful is the ripping-off of The Thing that when they are trying to figure out how to kill the monster suit one of them actually says, "I saw this movie once ... etc."  Shame on you, William Malone and Alan Reed.  Shame on you.  The scene where they finally blow up the monster suit, rather than being the best scene in the movie as it should be, was by far the stupidest and most embarrassing scene, and it has a bomb with a red LED countdown in it too.  For what it is worth the space ship model work, what you get of it, is not bad.  There is only one reason to see this movie, my reason, which is to see every science fiction movie ever made before I die.  I am getting to the dregs.  Deep, deep into the dregs.  Happy Halloween.

MOVIES

I don't even know why I started this postapoc film festival but if I didn't still have another one slowly downloading, this one would bring it to an end.  Warrior of the Lost World (1983), Unlike BATTLETRUCK, is a cheap exploitation spectacle and nothing more.  According to IMDB the director was hired and brought to Italy where he was shown a poster and told to make a film to go with it.  The misspelled and mispunctuated opening narrative crawl (this is the first time I have ever seen misuse of the apostrophe in film credits) says it takes place "generations after the radioactive wars" in a "new age of tyranny."  Luckily there is an anonymous hero on a Supersonic Speedcycle (their term, not mine, but it is a good one) which is named Einstein because like the famous physicist it communicates by repeating brief, slightly sarcastic phrases three times in a grating squeak-doll voice, simultaneously flashing the same words on a little TV screen with a continuous star-zoom screen saver behind them.  This is the most irritating talking motorcycle ever created, and it gives the driver the opportunity to make weak sardonic retorts. The hero is recruited to rescue the female lead's professor father from the fascist overlord but while they rescue the professor the girl gets left behind so they have to rescue her too by gathering a ragtag group of rebels to overthrow the government.  If I were making a movie with Lost World in the title I would try to get some dinosaurs in there.  This movie has much in common with the previously reviewed Endgame, the hero being leatherclad, unshaven and pudgyfaced with no perceptible acting ability, the female lead being a non-actress of swarthy semi-asian extraction - in Endgame it was Laura Gemser of the Emmanuelle movies so at least she got her shirt off once but it was no big deal, and in this it's Persis Khambatta whose big talent was having a shaved head in a Star Trek movie.  Here she lacks even that.  The best thing the two have in common though is this helmet:

I couldn't get a good shot showing the spike on top but it is there.  Note that the W.O.T.L.W. photo is taken in the old quarry. They had a pretty good budget for cars and there are half a dozen of them, some goofy crapped up Volkswagens and a couple of these police cars with big spikes stuck on the front:

When they crash into something the spikes just fall off and scatter all over the road.  There are also a couple of big trucks, one of which gets exploded during the running gun battle down a tree-lined road, mysteriously transported in a flash to the old quarry to crash into an inexplicable pyramid of highly explosive oil drums.  The police cars suffer from a uniquely exploitation-cinematic technical flaw, in that when they start to go over a cliff, even a tiny bit, they explode right away in a huge ball of fire and plunge down into the old quarry in flaming fragments instead of waiting until they hit the bottom like other movie cars do.  In reality cars almost never explode which is why sometimes people just disappear and their car is found a couple of years later at the bottom of a ravine unexploded.  This movie also has a couple of helicopters but there isn't much you can do to crap up a helicopter, except paint it black like they did with everything else that moves.  They actually explode one of the helicopters, and the exploding helicopter is a classic mark of film quality but this one is done so abruptly and briefly it has little impact.  What does have a little impact though, and the high point in the movie for me, is when they encounter a BATTLETRUCK!

It's a costumed dump truck with a flamethrower, but they didn't have enough money to blow it up so it just grinds to a feeble halt, though it does run over that stupid motorcycle, to my extreme delight.  There are lots of good locations in this, the fascist government being ensconced in what looks like an unfinished resort hotel and their science center looks like a brewery.  The cast includes Fred Williamson who doesn't have much to do compared to his role in Warriors of the Wasteland, and Donald Pleasence as the Fascist Overlord, obviously the only actor in the entire production.  This is by far the stupidest entry into this brief festival and unless 2019: After the Fall of New York really pulls something great out of its leopard print helmet I will have to recommend this one as the postapoc film to see.

MOVIES

My post-apocalyptic binge continues with Warlords of the 21st Century, a.k.a. BATTLETRUCK (1982) which was made in New Zealand so it is scenic as hell and it is the story of BATTLETRUCK and its battle against the Renewable Energy Hippies and their champion, Methane Powered Motorcycle Man.  It is set "after the oil wars" when gasoline is nearly unobtainable so the thing to do is drive around in a gigantic armored truck looking for more fuel and enslaving people.  Here's how cool BATTLETRUCK is:

Note that it is being viewed through a Monocular Vision Enhancement Device which inexplicably always indicates N S E and W no matter which direction it is pointing. For technical purposes. Except for the purely irrational conceptual basis this is a creditable effort to create a believable post-industrial scenario, and not a cheap exploitation spectacle, which takes some of the fun out of it.  The geodesically domed hippie commune is convincingly created, like it burst full grown out of a 1968 issue of Mother Earth News or a Dealer McDope comic except unfortunately it  is winter so no naked hippie chicks.  Another strike against it.  Things really pep up though when the hippies pitch in and help their champion and his pal the bespectacled mechanogeek (people who owned television sets in the 1990s will recognize John Ratzenburger from that show about Cheers The Bar) to cobble together out of scrap metal a Super Deadly Machine Gun Volkswagen, seen here amid its Holocaust of Doom:

It's obvious that BATTLETRUCK must necessarily lose because it embodies the Old Paradigm, but at least it dies magnificently.  Even though there are only three vehicles, BATTLETRUCK, Battletruck Junior (for chasing things - it would have been cooler if Battletruck Junior had been carried inside BATTLETRUCK), and Machine Gun Volkswagen, there are also some entertaining Romanian style horse-drawn carriages, and the show opens with a two-horsepower VW Kombi pickup that is quite appealing.  Though this is not as stupid as most of the genre it has its moments, when stuff explodes and cars drive through things, and of course BATTLETRUCK's glorious demise.

MOVIES

Sometimes a guy just needs to see some Post-Road-Warrior crap. Good thing there are so many of them, because they were so easy to make.  You need some old cars with a bunch of funky crap tacked onto them, an abandoned industrial site, an old quarry, and for costumes some leftover Roman stuff mixed up with football shoulder, knee and elbow pads painted black.

 Wheels of Fire (1985) was created by Filipino genre hack Cirio Santiago.  It had a good enough budget to have some decent cars and a couple hundred uniformed extras in the big battle scene at the old gravel pit.  Some of it was filmed in an old fortress of some kind that still has big cannons in it.  It's a cowboy movie where there are these bandits and the good guy has to rescue his sister from them.  The good thing is that the sister is played by Lynda Wiesmeier whose big skill was having her big old tits out flopping around, and she spends most of her screen time doing just that, but unfortunately most of the time she is also tied up or getting slapped around or raped which I am not that big on.  I don't mind a little bondage but beating and raping is where I draw the line.  There is also another female car driver provided for romantic attachment but she only gets her shirt off for the brief love scene. You have to realize that it's the goofy cars and the boobs that make these stupid things watchable.There's lots of chasing around, and they actually crash the cars together real good and blow them up.  There are also some subterranean albino mutants thrown in, and some kind of incoherent aborigine dwarf and a telepathic girl who can communicate with him, and a rocket cult that is supposedly going to blast off into space in their stupid looking hand built rocket if the bandits don't come kill them all and blow it up first, which guess what - they do come kill them all and blow it up.  *Spoiler alert* Sorry.  Lots of bad guys get shot and so do some good guys and the lone stranger drives on. Here are a couple of the pretty decent looking cars driving around the old quarry with a topless babe strapped to the hood of one.  I just thought, "Man that would get really hot being strapped onto the hood half naked like that, not sexy hot but ouch hot."

This Trailer has everything in the entire movie that's worth seeing.

Endgame (1983) is by Italian genre hack Joe D'Amato, and in it the winner of the Running Man game gets recruited to take a telepathic kid across the mutant wasteland, so you get a Running Man ripoff for about half an hour and then the rest of it is Road Warrior with the requisite goofy cars driving around in the old quarry. [Hold on there!  The Running Man wasn't made until 1987!  So this is a Road Warrior style Tenth Victim ripoff, or somebody actually read Robert Sheckley!]  The in-jokey thing about this is that the Italian title was Endgame: Bronx lotto finale (Bronx final fight) which I assume is an attempt to latch onto the brand identification of another, marginally better Post-Road-Warrior movie, 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) which was actually filmed in the pre-apocalyptic Bronx.  Which is kind of interesting that you could do that, film a post-apocalyptic fantasy in the actual location because it is already so broke down and crummy it looks like an atom bomb went off there. This one though is in the future where normal people look like extras from a Flock of Seagulls video or rejects from Purple Rain, and tough guys paint stupid crap around their eyes to look cool.  The cars in this one are incredibly great and had me laughing louder than I have at anything in weeks.  Look at this idiotic thing:

That red dome on the hood is a flamethrower but I think you already guessed that.  There are only three funked up cars in this and they just stripped off most of the body, then tacked some wire mesh and pointy crap and a couple of oil drums on.  Since they didn't have a lot of cars, the wagon train runs into the Mutant Motocross Army, with about a hundred dirt bikes which the mutants customize by putting a ratty animal pelt on the gas tank and seat. The good thing is that even though the mutants only have two cars they put topless slave babes on them.  Nothing says future like topless chicks on a crapped up old junker driven by a fish man.  

They do blow up a couple of the cars but it is the kind of  blowing up where they just cut it together so it is supposed to look like they crashed but you can see the cars are just sitting there when they blow up.  Lots and lots of guys get shot off of motorcycles though so if you like seeing guys fall off motorcycles this is good for that. This movie also has the benefit of a Rhodes Synthesizer soundtrack, one guy at a keyboard going eedle deedle deedle deedle - oodle doodle doodle doodle for an hour and a half, which really adds a lot to a post-apocalyptic fantasy. Of the two I thought this was more hilarious, which is the major value of these.  I know you are wondering so I will tell you that of all the films of this genre which I have seen, and I have seen a lot, many of them when they came out in the theater, my favorite is Warriors of the Wasteland (1983) even though it doesn't have any women with their  shirts off, the cars have plastic domes and duct pipes stuck on them, and there are LOTS of them.  Plus the bad guys are extra ridiculous looking and there is a buttraping Knights Templar angle which you might think goes against what I said about rape and I guess it does.  Buttraping Post-Apocalyptic Knights Templar are, in my opinion, a socially redeeming plot element.