2020 Texas Gladiators (1982)

The Rangers (Nisus [pronounced “Nexus,” played by Al Cliver], Halakron [Peter Hooten], Jab [Harrison Muller, Jr], Catch Dog [Daniel Stephen], and Red Wolfe Al Yamanouchi]) wander post-atomic-war Texas with only one mission in mind: kill all the bad people who (we assume) have only just sprung up after the bombs dropped.  In the wake of wasting some savages (and failing to save the priest and nuns they were attacking), they find the lovely, half-naked Maida (Sabrina Siani), whom Catch Dog tries to rape, but winds up getting himself ousted from the group for it instead.  Once Nisus and Maida settle down in a peaceful community, it’s only a question of time until guys like The Black One (Donald O’Brien) show up (Catch Dog in tow) to cause trouble and wreak havoc.

Being set in Texas, it comes as little surprise that Joe D’Amato’s 2020 Texas Gladiators (aka Anno 2020 I Gladiatori Del Futuro, aka 2020 Freedom Fighters) borrows heavily from the Western genre.  It begins with a posse of hardasses cleaning up the territory.  Nisus joins a peaceful community who produce petrol (I’m pretty sure), and come off like agrarian homesteaders (substitute gas for vegetables).  This community is set upon by a ruthless gang, which can be seen as simply desperadoes or (I thought) as Native Americans on the warpath, which was the first thing that sprang to my mind while watching the initial assault.  There are also actual Native Americans (though I’m almost positive that none of them were played by Native Americans) who ride horses, shoot arrows, and live in teepees.  There is a saloon/brothel where men play Russian Roulette for money (the champion of which seems to fail to realize that his winning streak is luck, not skill), and video games and sloppy joes occupy folks’ time and whatever passes for money.  Our heroes are even sentenced to time in a salt mine at one point.    

The Post-Apocalyptic subgenre fits very well with the Western, because they share themes.  They both deal with the struggle against barbarism, but here the external forces of this are not Native Americans, as they typically are in Westerns, but fascists (something with which Italians are very much familiar).  In fact, the Native Americans are good guys, and this is one of those things that Italian films do regularly (with varying degrees of effectiveness): completely subvert generic expectations (I mean, the Native Americans still have a trial by combat of sorts with the Rangers, but still…).  

Likewise, these two genres are about the meaning of civilization itself, often rooted in its creation in the face of lawlessness and savagery.  In Westerns, small towns are built and strive to survive in areas where civilization (as we now think of it) didn’t exist, bringing civilization to the wilderness (for better or worse).  The same applies to Post-Apocalyptic films, where there are frequently collectives endeavoring to rebuild civilization under extremely inhospitable conditions.  In both, the underlying idea remains the same.  The difference lies in the direction from which civilization is coming to the wild.  In Westerns, the land is pre-civilized, and in Post-Apocalyptic stories, it’s post-civilized.  Consequently, both also bear notions that perhaps civilization is more destructive than it is beneficial (although this was certainly not a predominant theme with Westerns up until about the Sixties, it has been a constant theme in them from then on).  The Rangers, after all, are extremely adept at killing people, and they are merciless in what they view as a cleaning up of post-society’s dregs.

2020 also deals with concepts of violence, but the way it does so can be seen as contradictory.  As stated, the Rangers believe in killing all the people they deem bad (Halakron states, “Let’s make sure nobody’s left alive”).  Even after Nisus goes all peacenik, turning away from his violent past, he and his neighbors still have plenty of guns to defend themselves, and there is barbed wire fencing around the perimeter of their town.  For all the preaching about killing that Maida does (“A man who kills a killer is a killer”), she doesn’t shy away from swinging around a shotgun, either.  Nisus intentionally shoots someone in order to piss off one of the marauders.  An old lady begs for her young son (grandson?) to be left alone, but he’s raped in front of her, and later on she takes bloody vengeance.  After Jab wrestles with a Native American and wins, the Native Americans claim that the Rangers’ “cause must be just.”  The film’s surface philosophy is that violence is no good, and yet, it disproves this idea over and over again by having its characters prevail through violence.  Moreover, the film states that a non-violent lifestyle is doomed to failure, and only invites trouble from people for whom violence comes easy.  If Nisus hadn’t given up his life with the Rangers, none of the bad stuff that happens to him would have occurred.  This film posits peace through violence (make no mistake, this as common as air for motifs in this type of film), but the incongruities in its ideologies gives it a rather bleak tone, because violence in this world is ineluctable.  This is (to my mind) reinforced by the cryptic line, “From now on, it’ll be like it was before.”  If “before” is what got them to this point, perhaps alternate paths should be investigated.

The odd grimness of the film is bolstered by D’Amato’s (and possibly uncredited co-director George Eastman’s) connate penchant for nastiness (he did, after all, give us the necrophilic sleazefest Beyond the Darkness amongst others, while Eastman, primarily recognized for his acting, did direct some skanky fare like Dog Lay Afternoon).  In the opening moments, a priest is nailed to a cross, one nun is raped, and another cuts her own throat in despair with a sliver of glass.  Maida is introduced to us with one breast hanging out of her dress, and she makes no effort to cover herself up, though she has terror in her eyes (she knows what Catch Dog is thinking, and the way it’s shot, we’re meant to think the same).  There are at least three rapes (all surprisingly offscreen) and one attempted rape.  There are numerous closeups of gore effects to highlight just how vicious the violence in the film is, they approach Horror film levels of graphic detail.  As with its disparate philosophies, however, these seedier elements work quite well with its more traditional action beats, making 2020 a stand out in the subgenre and certainly a unique viewing experience.

MVT:  There is a great amount of energy in the film, and the pacing never lags, so that even if you notice things that don’t seem to fit, there are already three other things happening that will carry you along and away from the distractions.

Make or Break:  The opening set piece is simultaneously skeevy and satisfying, and it sets the film’s peculiar tone handily.

Score:  6.75/10     

The Final Executioner (1984)

**POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHOY!**

Over a mix of black-and-white and color archival scenes featuring atomic bomb test footage, volcanos erupting, and cities in ruins, we are told that the world has now been divided into two groups: the rich and the contaminated masses (so, not too far off what it was before the nuclear holocaust), and that the contaminated people are regularly hunted and killed to stop the spread of their sickness.  However, we’re also told that one day someone realized that the contamination was finished; all the people were now clean.  Cut to Alan (William Mang) and his wife (Cinzia Bonfantini, and the only reason we know she’s Alan’s wife is because she is credited as such) as they are ousted from the city and reclassified as “hunting material.”  Soon enough (though it doesn’t feel like it), lone hunter Erasmus (Harrison Muller, Jr.) is in competition with Edra (Marina Costa) and her band of scummy hunters to see who can take down the most contaminated people in one day.  Including Alan and his spouse.

Romolo Guerrieri’s The Final Executioner (aka L’ultimo Guerriero, aka The Last Warrior) is yet another in the lengthy heritage of Pasta-pocalypse films that sprang up from Italy in the wake of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.  For as much as it clings to certain motifs of the subgenre, though, it also strays pretty far afield in other, significant ways.  As is customary, there is the critique of society along class lines.  The rich control everything, and the poor are victims forced to behave brutally in order to survive.  By that same token, the elite rich (here embodied by the hunters [since we never see an actual bourgeois rich person outside the hunting reserve], even though they live in the wastelands in rundown manses that look like they could have been used as sets in one of Meatloaf’s music videos) are savages by nature.  They are callous in their disregard for human life, and they think nothing of killing in order to maintain the status quo that they have manufactured (although any context as to why this serves their needs is left shrouded in mystery for the viewer, and it makes no logical sense, so we’re left only with the generality that all rich people are evil people).  Of course, this means that we have to assume that Alan was at one time one of the rich elite (he is a cybernetics specialist), so he should be hardhearted and vicious before he is sent to the hunting reserve, but he’s not (or we’re heavily encouraged to assume he’s not).  It’s only after his encounters with Erasmus and Edra that his bloodlust grows.

As seen in multitudinous films of this ilk (Endgame, Turkey Shoot, The Running Man, et cetera), there is also the recycling of a variation on The Most Dangerous Game afoot herein.  Most succinctly summed up in the scene where Edra’s gang and Erasmus lurk near a pond waiting for the contaminated people to crest the hill like a herd of gazelle approaching a watering hole, they pick the people off one at a time.  They later tally who killed whom like they’re comparing points on stags’ racks.  What’s interesting here is that the prey isn’t really the focus (outside of our man Alan and his wife).  They are literally nothing more than faceless game at a reserve.  It’s odd that our attention should be on the hunters as anything other than antagonists, but it’s their relationship that drives a large portion of the narrative, not Alan’s struggle against them as might be assumed.  The competition angle of the film, normally set up between hunter and prey is instead here predominantly between hunter and hunter.  The tension between these people is strong.  

Even among Edra’s group, which we can surmise are together because they have some kind of bond, there is a wealth of animosity.  Melvin (Stefano Davanzati) is absolutely reprehensible (and that’s saying something).  The first scene he’s in, he points a gun at fellow hunter Louis (himself a decrepit junkie and played by Renato Miracco) and pulls the trigger (it’s empty, of course; and unfortunately).  He soon after remarks about Erasmus’ special rifle, “whoever painted it didn’t know the color of bullshit.”  He spends his downtime admiring his own body in a mirror.  Sex fiend Diane (Margit Evelyn Newton), when not shooting people or doing it with boy toy Phil (Luca Giordana) is spying on her associates and just being generally creepy.  The one hunter character we would expect to sympathize with, Edra’s little brother Evan (Karl Zinny), is arguably the worst of the bunch.  Youth usually comes with a modicum of innocence in cinema (Bad Seed-esque stories excepted), but there is none to be found in this young man.  He carries out one of the worst acts in the film, and later he gleefully relives it via some kind of memory projection (and possibly sexual stimulation) machine.  Was he born bad?  Is this Edra’s influence on him?  We’re never told.  We only know that he’s irredeemable (yet still not moreso than any of the others).

The film diverges from its subgenre in its last third, and I think that this is also where it finally collapses as an entertainment.  It essentially becomes a Revenge film as Alan picks off the hunters one by one at Edra’s compound (come on, you didn’t see this coming?).  The satisfaction in watching these pieces of garbage get their comeuppance is delicious; I won’t deny that.  However, it is completely dissociated from Post-Apocalyptic (not to mention Pasta-pocalyptic) films past, present, and future.  The film’s climactic moment is a total deus ex machina that rings hollow, because it suddenly reminds us that there was supposed to be a theme going on underneath all this action and the filmmakers just didn’t feel like exploring it, but it still needed to have some lip service paid to it in a desperate attempt to try and trick the audience into thinking there was more going on in the film than there actually was.  This irked me quite a bit, because the story is set up with a Science Fiction premise.  Nevertheless, it then unspools itself as a straight ahead Action/Revenge film, and only in its final moments are we reminded that this is all supposed to be set in a post-nuke future (costumes and “fancy” guns, notwithstanding).  Harlan Ellison once said (and I’m paraphrasing; also, it may not have been he who said it, but this is the way I remember it, I think it holds true, regardless) that a good Science Fiction story must have its fantastic ideas be integral to the story itself.  And this is not the case with The Final Executioner.  This film’s Science Fiction elements are little more than window dressing (which I suppose is fine and dandy if you’d rather stare at the curtains that the view through the window).  Now, is that a fair criticism for a film that is purposely trying to cash in on a prevailing trend from a country known for putting out genre material that is imitative at best?  I think in this case, it is.  I felt cheated by this movie.  The film takes the long way around to get to the same point a more direct film could have reached in a more satisfying fashion.  It doesn’t help any that there is almost no life to any of the action scenes, and the whole affair reeks of rote regurgitation from start to end.  If someone who actually gave a shit about the end product had a hand in this film, it could have been a nice little gem.  Unfortunately, such is not the case.

MVT:  I give Erasmus points for having one of the more interesting costumes in Pasta-pocalyptic cinema history.

Make or Break:  The film’s prologue is weak, lazy, and dull.  It bluntly lets us know that there is nothing coming in the next ninety minutes we haven’t seen done before and done better.

Score:  5/10       

Endgame (1983)

I’m not competitive by nature.  I never have been.  Even the times I have played sports, I really couldn’t have given a crap whether or not my team won.  Maybe that’s why we so rarely did.  I always tried to have a sense of good sportsmanship regardless of wins or losses.  I have noticed, however, that this isn’t the predominant disposition (or it is the one given the least attention in the press and so on).  I can’t fathom being reduced to a teeth-gnashing, froth-mouthed ball of rage with regards to overpaid  grown men who are more adept at running, throwing, hitting, kicking, whatever than others.  Am I being a little reductive about this?  Yes, I am, but all I have is my own experiences and observations, so read that however you find comforting. 

I don’t think this applies to all athletes or sports fans, obviously.  Nothing applies across the board when it comes to personalities, and there are people who treat games with the proper level of seriousness they deserve.  But this isn’t what we’re shown on television and in newspapers (what are those?).  We’re shown the absolute worst in human nature with the fans that beat up the fans of the opposing team.  We’re shown the riots that break out after the home team wins or loses a big game.  Naturally, this implicates the media, and they are deserving of some of the blame, no doubt.  It’s only when they have space or need to fill a couple minutes on a slow news night that we hear about the players or fans who do good things like visit children in hospitals, raise money for charities, and so forth.  What was my point again?  Oh, yeah.  I’d have probably been killed in the first episode of the titular Endgame depicted in Joe D’Amato’s film.  Then again, maybe I’d have become as skilled at it as Karnak (George Eastman, whose vest I would like to have).  But it’s doubtful.

In the year 2025, after the big nuclear holocaust everyone expected to happen back in the Eighties actually did, the human population have taken to losing themselves in a television show titled Endgame which depicts people hunting and killing each other and taking Life Plus energy tablets (which have the stench of Soylent Green about them).  Tops in the game is Ron Shannon (Al Cliver), who recently defeated erstwhile buddy and fellow player Karnak.  Shannon is offered lots and lots of gold by Lilith (Laura Gemser) to deliver some mutants (including the young Tommy [Christopher Walsh] who is suggested to be a little more important than the others) to a designated spot in the wastelands by December 25th.  Being the callous, shallow prick he is, Shannon agrees and assembles his team.

The first part of the film (and surprisingly enough, only a short portion of it) is concerned with the games.  Coming four year before The Running Man (the film, not the novella), this blocks out the basics of that film on the budget of a cup of espresso.  You have the colorful characters that have to be defeated, each with a refined skill set (one has swift reflexes, one is George Eastman, and so on).  They are personality-less, but that’s okay, because we only need to deal with them on a very surface/spectacle level.  It mirrors video games, where you battle through each level and have to beat a Level Boss who has unique powers/patterns of behavior.  What is important is that they look visually interesting (and they mostly do here) and that they die well (or are simply defeated).  The same applies to the team Shannon gathers to assist him in his trek, which consists of a strongman, a martial artist, a one-eyed gunslinger, etcetera.  

Of course, also like Paul Michael Glaser’s film, we have the commentary on consumerism and on the television culture which has all but overtaken modern society (and if they had the internet back when this film was produced in 1983, it could have been really interesting).  This isn’t new by any stretch, but I find humanity’s endless capacity to indulge their morbid curiosity to be one of the more fascinating themes in art.  Thus, these aspects appealed to me on a gut level.  We also get the idea of revolutionaries (or in this case, mutants) who are working against their oppressive society to be free, although here, their goal is freedom from persecution rather than the exposure of any of the government’s dirty dealings and such.

This persecution is very clearly delineated in the film as being racial.  The mutants are a stand-in for the Jews, and the military troops are bluntly dressed as Nazi stormtroopers, right down to the “SS” insignia on their uniforms (though here it stands for “Security Services;” oh so clever).  Oddly, Colonel Morgan (Gordon Mitchell) is dressed more like a Soviet Russian officer, so it mixes its tyrants, but I suppose you can’t have it all.  The quest away from discrimination can also be viewed from a biblical perspective, with Shannon playing Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt.  Tommy, then, is an analog for Jesus Christ, though when he uses his powers it is interestingly for mass destruction rather than peace (though you could argue just as hard that this destruction is the only way they can find it).  If you like, you can read that last statement as religion (specifically Christianity) on the whole, but either way, the religious aspects to the film are unmistakable.  

Nonetheless, since this is an Italian genre film, the waters have to be muddied just enough give the viewer pause.  Consequently, we get the other mutants, the ones who have been living in the badlands.  These are physically deformed to look like mermen, apemen, and the like.  They also behave more like Lord Humungus’s raiding hordes from The Road Warrior than they do like the nice mutants here.  This distinction is important, because it draws a line between good mutants and bad, and the line is limned in appearances.  Were the bad mutants not ugly to behold, would they be bad guys?  Most likely not, but you never can tell.  Yet this shows a certain shallowness (yeah, I know) in the story.  We can infer that they have to act this way in order to survive in the hostile environment into which they were born, but that there is no sense that there could ever be solidarity between the ugly and normal mutants struck me as odd.  Like its mutant characters, the film is a hodgepodge, and it meanders about quite a bit, and it is contrived as all hell, but it’s never boring, and, in fact, is a downright blast for much of the runtime.  That goes a long way in smoothing over some of the more painful moments.

MVT:  Eastman commands every scene he’s in, which is half due to his imposing, six-foot, nine-inch presence and half due his acting opposite Cliver, one of the least emotive men in Italian cinema (though he still has a charisma all his own somehow).  And did I mention that I really, really, REALLY want his vest from this movie?

Make Or Break:  The game show opening to the film is everything you could want in a Pasta-pocalypse film and then some.  You have improbable violence.  You have even more improbable, KISS-inspired facial makeup.  You have decimated locales.  You have the greatest leather vest in the history of cinema.  There’s really nothing here about which one can complain.

Score:  7.5/10