America 3000

Released in 1986 Directed by David Engelbach
Starring Chuck Wagner, Laurene Landon, William Wallace.

What do you get when you dump a small budget into the biggest hair and hottest amazon women you can find, and fly them all to an Iraqi desert with some horses, crossbows, a Sasquatch named Arrg the Awful, and a boom box that blasts pure 80s hard rock in a dystopian future? You get America 3000. This movie is gold. This is the kind of trashy drive-in classic I love.

"Nine hundred years after the Great Nuke. The world man created, he destroyed. Out of the darkness and ignorance of the radioactive rubble emerged a new order..." "...and the world was woggos." (in old speak that means - Crazy!)

Humans are back to primitive hunter-gatherer tribes and barely anyone knows how to read. It's come down to men vs women, and the women are in charge. They live in 'coms', and keep men for pets. If a captive man becomes a "macho", his tongue is cut out and he's forced to work, baking bread and doing hair. If there's one thing that a woman will keep alive and well in the future, it's her hair. It's totally believable ya know? Somewhere they keep a great stash of conditioner and mouse and round brushes, but they can't make a decent outfit to save their lives. So in effect they all look like dancers from a Motley Crue music video. Hot. The hunkiest and best hung men are assigned as seeders, and well, you can guess what their job is. This makes for the most awkward sex scene in b-moviedom, as the hunky man-slaves are prepped for seeding by donning a full body rubber suit like some kind of power plant rapist. There are also men called "toys" who have their tongues and balls sliced off to keep around as silent gentle workers.

We meet our two heroes Gruss and Korvis when they're about fourteen, dragged into the com on a chain gang of captured men while the Tiara walks down the line cutting off their pants and assigning their jobs. Korvis may have enjoyed being a seeder, but has no interest in being a slave. Him and Gruss soon escape, vowing to one day return and rescue and free all men.

The future language is sometimes a bit much, but it's not hard to understand. Men are 'Plugots', women are 'Frauls'. If you're good, you're 'hot plastic'. If you're dead you're 'cold'. Crazy is 'Waggos' and 'Watzit' means WTF? No one really knows who the 'prezeedent' is anymore, but everyone's sure that he or she wears a gold suit and a motorcycle helmet. No one knows what a 'Reagan' is. You learn that from the douchebag narrator who pipes in every ten minutes or so to fill in whatever plot-holes had been discovered during post-production.

One of my favorite scenes comes when Korvis discovers a presidential bunker loaded with supplies and brings them back to his man-army. Four cases of grenades, porno mags, shaving cream, lazer rifles, flares, a shiny gold radiation suit, and a giant 80's boom box that's pre-loaded with both extra loud 80s metal(because that's what the prezeedent must've liked), and on side B, 'presidential' entry music! One of the men they rescued, the misplaced wookie Arrg the Awful, finds himself a can of deodorant and couldn't be happier. Neither can his roommates. Of course, old technology was thought to be cursed, perhaps explaining the primitive lifestyle after 900 years. So they don't really figure out how to work the grenades until one guy cleverly pulls the pin and explodes himself. Oh, that's what they do!

Chuck Wagner plays Korvis (Warming him up for his role in The Sisterhood a few years later), leader of the men. He comes face to face with the sexy Laurene Landon, who plays Venu, "Tiara" of the amazon "Frisco Com". They fight it out in surprisingly well-shot and entertaining batle scenes, until Korvis scores an interesting advantage, and that's as much as I'll say without getting past the twenty minute mark. Basically we're talking big, big hair, plenty of wit, and good pacing that avoids getting slow like so many 80s movies. This is definitely recommended.

PS check out the painting below, the hot babe is actually an impression of Nate's wife from Million Monkey Theater! Have a laugh with his review as well.