Released in 2003, directed by David DeBartolomé (as David Barto)
Starring Christopher Lambert, Kelly Brook, Lou Diamond Phillips
I love most movies with lou Diamond Philipps. He's a great actor with a really intense presence. He was one of my favorite actors in the Young Guns series. I guess he was low on work when he took this job. It's a Matrix rip, as most 80's PA films ripped off Mad Max, the Matrix was the pole to dance on after 1999.
In 2010, the population has been torn apart by a virus, and a megalo-giant corporation has an antidote, a drug called Absolon, that will keep you alive, but you must pay them, and buy it, forever. So it's not that far off from many of today's pharma-scams. like any good Hollywood trash, only one man can hope to save the world from ultimate destruction. Actually it's more like the megalo-corp kills one of it's scientists, and then gets a hair across it's ass when a cop starts to investigate (the nerve!) so they send out a bunch of hoodlums in expensive black clothes to take him down.
If you're into the 'chase me till I get to where I need to get to without getting killed by assassins or sidetracked by a stupid broad so I can save humanity', with plenty of guns and Matrix-like graphics, then by all means, jump in!
Images are snagged from Cyberpunk.com, check out their review and more on this sweet sexy website: CyberpunkReview
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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.
Join Nate at his much older and more refined theater of bad movies, bad actors, bad plots, and bad cats. And worry neggie, the monkeys are locked out.
Nate was kind enough to inform me of the bitterly small fonts throughout my reviews, and as much as I find your pain to be totally hot-plastic, I forget sometimes that i have the eyes of a radioactive hawk (I can read a street sign four blocks away), so I've upped the sizes for all you lazy eyes so you no longer have to click CTRL + to read the damn things. My apologies. I'm also taking submissions for banners and backgrounds, pleasant to the eyes and appealing to the wasteland aesthetics, they can reference the namesake film "Empire of Ash" or my favorite "Hell Comes to Frogtown"(Both of which should be posted by Sun-Drop), but neither are totally necessary. If a really hot one comes my way I may happily supply the artist with a film from the site of your own choosing. Incentives, yes, aren't they wonderful?
So here's to a new friend, and another week of delicious chemtrails and sabertooth-weasel pancakes. Stay sharp my friends.
Released in 1975 Directed by L.Q. Jones
Starring Don Johnson, Jason Robards, Susanne Benton.
Considered one of the essential movies of the PA genre, A Boy and His Dog features one of the greatest challenges in filmmaking, or acting. That is, a lone character must carry most of the movie by himself. Fortunately it doesn't put you to sleep the way Will Smith did forty years later.
Based on the novel "A Walk in the Sun", Vic and his dog wander about a post-nuclear wasteland scrounging up whatever food they can find, and Vic being about seventeen or so, looking for any sexual relief he can get (with a human, not the dog). He seems to be psychically linked to the dog, providing some great comic relief, and the pacing is well played enough that it doesn't get too boring. The two have a deal for survival. Vic finds the dog food, and the dog finds vic some pussy. it's like Fin and Jake without the subtlety.
Eventually Vic comes across a girl who spreads out for him and brings him to a random door in the desert, you know, the kind that someone was nice enough to pop up in the middle of nowhere with nothing around it. What could be behind the door? It could be dangerous and full of giant rats, it could be a new car! No, it's stairs. Stairs that lead down, way down underground to a community of painfully old-fashioned white people who have locked themselves under the Earth with lotsa of makeup in a sort of creepy uber-religious 1950s existence and having never allowed themselves above ground, have become sterile. Well the men have. So Vic is offered the chance of a lifetime. Stay with the freaky deakies and fuck all their girls to continue the human population. At least, they assume they're the only ones left, by the arrogance of most religious fanatics they're convinced they must be right. Vic accepts, but it's not quite what it seems.
Definitely a classic of sci-fi movies, and apparently the biggest influence of Mad Max, the crown jewel of all PA films. So if you're a fan of the genre, you kind of have to see this before you can claim the title.
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 1994 Directed by Philip J roth
Starring Richard Keats, Mitchell Cox, Lisa Ann Russell.
In 2073 a hot shot time-travel scientist sends a probe back to 1973 only to alter the Earth's history which suddenly becomes ravaged by killer robots that look way cool but can't aim for shit. Now Sinclair and his gang of tuff guys have to fight the robots and somehow prevent the rampaging apocalypse they've brought upon themselves.
This straight-to-video schlock flick is often called a Terminator ripoff, with less plot and more guns. Yea, more guns than Terminator. More fire, more explosions, more robots. If you can find it, it'll probably only be on VHS.
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