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.