Exterminators Of The Year 3000 (1983)
Only in the world of Italian trash cinema would it be possible for a guy to write two movies in a year, both featuring main characters named Trash wandering around in a world gone mad, but manage to rip off two completely different mainstream movies! And there could only be one screenwriter in all of Italy able to simultaneously rip himself off, but yet be completely original by having one film feature a male Trash and one feature a female Trash! And only this man, Dardano Sacchetti, could also write three other movies in the same year!
All of us recall the original Trash, the dude with awesome hair who owned the Bronx in a pair of movies, Bronx Warriors and Bronx Warriors 2. The Trash of Exterminators of the Year 3000 can't help but suffer by comparison, especially since it's not nearly as cool for a girl to be named Trash as it is for a guy. Dardano though is such a practiced hand at this game, he makes up for that misstep and names the hero of Exterminators of the Year 3000, Alien. But then he also goes and names the pet hamster featured in the flick Jo-Jo. Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you.
It wouldn't be fair though to give all the credit for this slightly inspired madness to Dardano, because he had some help with the story from Elisa Briganti. Elisa worked with Dardano on several projects including the original Bronx Warriors and several Lucio Fulci films (House By The Cemetery, Manhattan Baby , Zombie). They also found time to collaborate on Lamberto Bava's A Blade In The Dark the same year they did Exterminators of the Year 3000. And if that wasn't enough to cement their reputations, they also wrote Sergio Martino's Hands of Steel which is famous for killing star Claudio Cassinelli (The Great Alligator) in a helicopter accident. I'm going to assume that wasn't in their script.
The surprise here is that it's director Giuliano Carnimeo and star Robert Janucci who have the least experience in this game. Carnimeo mainly did a bunch of spaghetti westerns featuring the Sartana character as well as the giallo The Case of the Bloody Iris, but not much else in the horror/sci-fi genre other than Rat Man. And Janucci? His resume shows this movie as the only one he's ever done!
On paper that didn't inspire much confidence, but all my fears were laid to rest once I got a look at his perm, the leather headband he wore and the leather jacket he had on - with no shirt underneath! It's like my big time college football coach told me when we were playing the national championship game back in '36: act like you've been here before, son! And if you didn't know any better, you would've thought you'd seen Janucci in about five or six other movies exactly like this one!
Of course that might be because you probably have seen five or six other movies exactly like this one, just not with Bobby Janucci (or J-Nooch as he was no doubt referred to on set). Whereas Bronx Warriors was a loving homage to John Carpenter's Escape From New York, Exterminators of the Year 3000 owes its existence to Mad Max. Well, actually it owes it existence to Mad Max by way of Enzo Castellari's The New Barbarians, but you know what I mean. The only problem with that is that The New Barbarians was so consistently spectacular, Exterminators of the Year 3000 can't help but come up a little short by comparison.
That doesn't mean that it's without it's own charms though. After all, for everything it had, The New Barbarians didn't have Jo-Jo the Hamster! And it didn't have mutants with melted faces dressed in garbage bags and with what can only be described as foam buckets over their heads! And you're darn tooting that The New Barbarians never had Pag from Yor, The Hunter From The Future! And I know that it never had any kid getting all drunked up on beer while Pag (here called Papillon) tried to repair his bionic arm!
With movies though, context is everything and none of the above would matter a lick if it wasn't serving a story worth those events. The story here is that the "ozone belt" has been blasted away by a nuclear war, leaving the earth a scorched wasteland where nothing grows and water is the most precious commodity of all! Roving gangs of toughs will stop at nothing to attain it, while good citizens have to hide in caves, trying to grow plants and making periodic forays into the teeth of the barbarians to get water to survive!
Okay. Good story? Check! But how is the execution? How is the execution, you ask? When I tell you that the barbarians wear shoulder pads, motorcycle helmets, drive dune buggies and other vehicles with metal grills welded over the tires and windshield, and are led by a bald guy with too much eye shadow on one eye and wearing a fur vest and named Crazy Bull, do you actually need to hear anything more? Heck, one dude is even wearing a catcher's mask! And Crazy Bull is apt to spew forth such venomous threats as "Alien! The Ides of March are upon you, you bastard!"
We first meet Alien when he's involved in a car chase with a pair of cops. Apparently these are the only cops left on the entire planet, because they're driving a piece of crap cop car, the driver is wearing a motorcycle helmet with visor, and his partner is wearing sunglasses with one lens missing! Alien has stolen Crazy Bull's prize vehicle, the Eliminator. It's a big, red two door, 1970s car that sort of looked like a Monte Carlo, but it's tricked out with the Apocalypse Package. You know, metal blinds on the windshield and closed circuit TV inside to see out when the blinds are drawn. This sucker is pimped, 3000 A.D. style!
The desert waste lands being what they are, Alien ends up stealing the cop car to chase after someone who goes and steals the Eliminator that he has stolen from Crazy Bull. During the chase, he wrecks the cop car and is trapped underneath it for the next half hour until Tommy and Jo-Jo the Hamster stumble upon him and rescue him. Tommy is all that is left of an expedition to find water and he and Alien strike up an uneasy alliance to find water (Tommy has a map to it) that sees Alien double cross Tommy and everyone he meets for almost the entire rest of the movie.
After Alien and Tommy are captured by Crazy Bull, Alien leaves Tommy in the lurch by telling Crazy Bull that Tommy knows where water is and then taking off on a motorcycle. Crazy Bull threatens Tommy for the information and to his credit Tommy proves to be a tough little bugger. When they try to break his arm, they find it unbreakable! So they tie him between two motorcycles and proceed to pull him apart! Luckily, it doesn't do him a lot of damage as it only rips off one of his arms! Thankfully, it was his bionic arm. Alien shows back up and rescues him, leading Tommy to utter this memorable bit of dialogue, "my arm! Don't forget my arm!"
Alien doesn't really have the technical know-how to properly repair Tommy's arm, so he duct tapes it up and they go off to find Papillon who is a mechanic and might be able to get it working again. Papillon fixes it and tricks it out just like one of the cars in the movie. Tommy's new arm now can crush anything (like beer cans) and he can throw really far and with great accuracy. This comes in handy later when combined with Papillon's stash of dynamite.
Alien also runs into his old gal pal Trash and the Eliminator. Turns out she stole it from him. Alien spends the rest of the movie complaining about how she's no good thief who can't be trusted while at the same time developing amnesia that he had stolen the car himself in the first place!
The rest of the movie involves Trash and Alien dodging death traps and mutants at this facility where a bunch of water is kept. They also have to fight Crazy Bull and his gang a few times. It all comes to an explosive finale when a mutant sets a self-destruct timer on the facility and we cut to a model of the facility. As soon as I saw that model, I said to myself, "that sumbuck is going blow sky high!" And boy did it ever! Alien, Trash, and Tommy look on in disbelief as their hopes for water disappear in a fiery blast of tiny chunks of balsa wood.
Then Trash notices tears on Alien's face. Could it be? The Alien who lives only for himself and cares nothing about the future has been moved to tears? Hah! It's more likely that the explosion magically recreated the Earth's atmosphere and caused it to start raining! And that's exactly what happened! Once again, the Italians manage to destroy the Earth and save it with equal parts implausibility (why does the end of the world mean metal studs and leather headbands?) and entertainment (you will love the metal studs and leather headbands!). Only down side was the lack of screen time for Jo-Jo the Hamster. The way he crawled all over Tommy when Tommy was passed out drunk was very moving.