Released in 1985, Directed by Albert Pyun
Starring John Stockwell, Michael Dudikoff, Michele Little
Well this wasn't what I expected! Given that I hadn't seen any trailers, because I couldn't find any in English, I went into this movie on the title alone. And I'm glad I did. I like surprises.
What we've got here is a mid-eighties Post-Apocalypse Hell meets 1940's private eye noir, or more acurately, imagine the Blues Brothers bumbling their way through the streets of L.A. in the mid eighties, after everything's been bombed and there's no law. Sound fun? It is.
"Make sure you get my good side"
John Stockwell (Top Gun) and Michael Dudikoff (Bloody Birthday, Enter the Ninja) play Phillip and Marlow, who have been holed up in a bomb shelter for the last fifteen years after a nuclear war led to every nuke in the world being set off, except one. Left alone to raise each other while their father's vanished, their only entertainment was a stash of 1940s mystery novels and detective movies, from which they taught themselves how to dance and shoot and talk fast like a couple of real swell Dicks. I'm guessing Dick meant something different in the forties. Lord only knows what Hell it must be for two boys to go through puberty in a bomb shelter with nothing but magazines, books, and each other. But that's a movie none of us want to see. What we do see is the day they pack up what gasoline they have onto their pops old car, grab some cigarettes and sunglasses, dress up in sharp suits like a couple of Joe Fridays, and go out to see what's become of the world.
What they find is Edge City, a swarming metropolis of big hair, sweaty babes with bigger tits, and radioactive nightclubs with bigerer attitude. It's good to know that in the Post-apocalypse future everyone will still be talking like it's 1986, I just hope the girls are still that hot! The costumes are well done, but it's so dark in most scenes that it's hard to get a good look at everybody.
A couple of Edge City's best and brightest with costume designer Joseph Porro
So our boys wander in after rescuing a girl from certain doom at the hands of a couple of radiated freaks, none of them realizing that she accidentally dropped a pair of keys in Marlow's lap while using her tongue to steal the gun from his belt. You just have to see it to get it. It turns out these are the two keys needed to launch the one and only remaining nuke, and whoever possesses them is sure to be the most powerful person in the now truly free world. How she got the keys in the first place, and what she's doing running around with them by herself getting raped by the Toxic Avenger, who the hell knows. But now that our boys have them, they instantly become the man with the ball, and naive and gullible as they are, it takes about seven women jamming their tongues down their throat before they realize these chicks aren't after them for their boyish good looks.
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Whassa matter kid, Can't you Kiss and drive?
I wont give away the rest, but the whole thing is an hour and a half of hairspray, gun toting kids, and heroes that always enter with an eighties power-rock backup band and a fog machine. My one gripe with a movie of this mid-range quality is they hired about three too many smoke wizards, and sometimes it's hard to tell what's going on through all the fog. Man it must've been a good living to run a fog machine in the eighties.
There's also the more serious aspect of the two facing their coming of age and reconciling their loss of innocence in a cold and bitter world where they have to kill to live, and women, like in their books, can't always be trusted. As Phillip says to one girl who crossed them, "We used to be a couple of real swell and decent guys, ya know? Now we're not much better than you." The girl in this case, Rusty, is played by a beautiful young thing named Michelle Little, and it's hard not to feel bad for her. She just seems too damn cute to leave.
I give this one three mutated Joey Ramones out of five, it's fun, funny, cheesy in all the right ways, and there's tits, which is always nice. The soundtrack is great and I've left a link below, it's often cited as a favorite part of the movie. The main characters seemed a bit annoying at first, but their development from bumbling wannabe gumshoes to sharp dressed men in hats is done wonderfully, and the mix of fast-talking-high-pants-wearing private eyes in the middle of a PA wasteland is truly original and refreshing.
Radioactive Dreams! See it. Share it. Love it!
Check out the soundtrack here
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AKA "Maniac Warriors" Released in 1988, Directed by Michael Mazo, Lloyd A. Simandl
Starring Melanie Kilgour, Thom Schioler, Frank Wilson
The namesake film of this site is incredibly hard to find. I've yet to see a copy on Amazon and it only occasionally pops up on Ebay. Thank the dustbowl gods for our friends at www.cultaction.com for providing a high quality DVD you can buy reliably, 24 hours a day.
I've linked one VHS on Ebay under the alternate title "Maniac Warriors", but this is only available until March 1st and frankly I can't afford it.
This is the synopsis from CultAction.com:
"In a post-apocalyptic future, cities have been destroyed and the survivors roam the remaining forests. An aggressive, traveling gang of "maniac warriors", named LARD, which stands for 'Leukocytes Acquisitors for Remission of Disease' go around terrorizing and killing people. Who they don't kill, they kidnap and steal their blood so they can continue to survive. Naturally they are led by an insane, shroud-wearing preacher, and when they kidnap the wrong girl, her sister and a defector from LARD who is now a good guy team up to try and rescue her. Who will prevail - the survivors pure of blood or the MANIAC WARRIORS?"
So there it is. Not quite vampires, just big baired broads with really nice asses who love to swallow. This movie has one point of brilliance in it's production, in that they re-released the film a year later as Empire of Ash 2! I mean, why spend thousands of dollars filming a sequel when you can just release the same fucking movie all over again!? Brilliant!! There is a legitimate sequel, which of course is called Empire of Ash III: Last of the Warriors, with the fancy Roman Numerals because that looks smarter than a big 3 on the box. If your head doesn't hurt after reading this, go hunt it down for your collection. You'll curse me later. You're welcome.
www.cultaction.com
Released in 1988 Directed by Donald G. Jackson, R.J. Kizer
Starring Julius LeFlore, William Smith, Roddy Piper.
Possibly my favorite PA flick is the ridiculous and shamelessly cheesy Hell Comes To Frogtown. It's got everything I love. A dirty, late 80's drive-in vibe, the Kurt Russel-esque anti hero, low budget gunfights with bad guys who can't aim for shit, samurai swords because 'Fuck, why not?', sex scenes with a punchline, and giant mutated frogmen with chainsaws. There's even character development. Holy nukes.
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After the third world war lays waste to everything, of the survivors, 60% of the male population succumbs to radiation poisoning, and most of the rest (men and women) are mutated to the point of being so undesirable they're all quarantined into run down factory cities, or what's left of them. One of these is called, rightly enough, Frogtown. What's been rebuilt of the government is run by women. Obviously, when all the still human men are reduced to radioactive eunuchs, women inevitably take the alpha role. It's not an uncommon concept in PA movies, perhaps because the idea of a world run by women was enough to scare the shit out of any Wonder Bread loving American male in the 1980s.
Sam Hell is the main man. In fact, Sam Hell is none other than super-bad-guy Roddy Piper from the WWF, the same one who went to the mat with Hulk Hogan in Wrestlemania I, smashed Superfly over the head with a handy coconut, and "beat and shaved the late Adrian Adonis" during Wrestlemania III. Not that I would know anything about wrestling. He's a fun guy to watch, even if he seems a bit dry and restrained during this movie compared to the wild man of 80s man-dancing.
As Sam Hell, it turns out he's bad enough to be arrested by the women-force in charge of seemingly everything, and for what he's arrested doesn't matter. What matters is, Sam Hell has got the strongest active sperm count in the country. He's not only immune to the radioactive fallout, he's got the biggest balls of them all. His balls are bursting, his balls are full, and well, it's enough to be offered a full pardon if he'll do one small service to the nation: Rescue the beautiful innocent women who somehow ended up in Frogtown from the nasty lizard men, and fill them up with beautiful babies. "We're gonna get them out and your gonna get them pregnant". It's like A Boy and His Dog but without the creepy underground Christians. The only catch, he's got to wear a friggin electronic garter belt that shocks his prize jewels anytime he gets too far away from his sexy, er, 'probation ladies'. And they are sexy. If you don't think this movie sounds funny yet, I'm sorry to hear about your balls. You obviously don't have any.
So off he goes on a great adventure to serve his country as only a great bell-swinger like him can. From here it's frog-men playing electric guitars, frog-women on stripper poles, and some old guy that Hell remembers from way-back-when who shows up at just the right time.
I don't want to say too much more, because I promised no spoilers and I feel like long reviews give away too much. See the movie, buy the movie, turn it on at parties when you need to embarrass a stuffy host, show it to your friends when your bong is full, and welcome to the club. As far as post-apocalypse movies go, you're frog deep in the thick of it now, baby.
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.
Released in 1982 Directed by Joe Diamato
Starring Al Cliver and Harrison Muller Jr.
This movie is even harder to find than 2019. In fact, it doesn't even have a page on IMDB under it's proper name, you've got to look under "2020 Freedom Fighters". So it must be good old fashioned eye candy of the Mad Max/Road Warrior aesthetic and a real bragger for collector's of drive-in schlock. Here's the lowdown: The world has been ripped apart by nuclear war and everyone basically survives in roving bands of scavenging gangs. Not just road scavenger gangs either, but a shmorgashborg of fights between kung-fu cowboys, hi-tech NWO soldiers, and horse-riding indians! The ultimate prize, control of super-fuel refinery filled to the brim with gasoline. Expect tricked out buggies, snarling fascists, bad hair, big guns, and bigger tits.
buy it at cultaction.com
Released in 1983 Directed by Sergio Martino
Starring Michael Sopkiw, Valentine Monnier, and George Eastman.
A guilty pleasure of 80s action movies, and hard to find. The year is 2019 and apparently there's only one fertile woman left on the planet, and of course she's in New York City (Where else would she be?). A mercenary is hired by the 'Rebel Federation' to bust into New York, fend off the evil 'Euraks', and rescue the last good pussy on Earth. In other words, it's a movie that any self-respecting apocalypse fan should want in their collection.
Just don't expect an epic. In the beginning, there's a road war battle that has some pretty cool moments, but don't ask yourself why no one in the crowd got shot from all the random gunfire flying in every direction. Smoke a bowl and suspend your disbelief.
The rest of the movie goes by pretty quick, only 90 minutes, There's some good shots of old beat up Bronx but overall it's a movie that seems to have been a bit rushed by it's own meager budget and ends up rather forgettable.
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