 |
 In the year 2019 the world has been nuked and an "army of carnivorous escaped
military prisoners threaten a fragile sliver of civilization." That does sound
cool, doesn't it? Too bad there ain't any "carnivorous escaped military
prisoners" in this one. You do get George Eastman as the gay leader of a gang
of thugs in silver dune buggies though. 1982, 87 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
You can tell a lot about a society by how it wears its cups. Just by
checking out the crotch of a guy running around shooting and/or stabbing
people, you can instantly tell whether your world has slipped into barbarism or
not. If he's just got some jeans on then you're okay. He's probably just some
disenfranchised loner who hates women and is going to take it out on every
goober who
decided to go down to Hardee's to try out their new Thickburgers. If he's
wearing a military uniform, you're okay because he is clearly an American hero
of some sort. But if he's wearing leather pants or worse, spandex drawers, with
a codpiece attached to the outside of them, then you've gone and slipped into a
world gone mad where the most prized possession is a fertile woman and the only
rule is survival! That's only one of the lessons you'll learn from The New
Barbarians, an Italian (did I even have to tell you that?) post-apocalyptic
movie from Enzo G. Castellari. Enzo, who is renowned for his series of Bronx
Warriors films (well, he's probably renowned by Mark Gregory who starred as
Trash in both of them) and the Jaws ripoff The Last Shark, shows us just what a
creative genius Sergio Martino was in his own post-apocalyptic stab at
immortality, 2019: After The Fall Of New York. You see, Enzo's movie also
takes place in the year 2019! Even though Enzo beat Sergio to the punch by
about a year, his movie suffers by comparison mainly because it looks like it
was filmed at the same dirt pile that was featured so prominently in Ark Of The Sun God. Sergio's movie took place in Alaska, Nevada, the Big Apple, caves,
tunnels, secret labs, and even a station wagon! Enzo does address one of the
beefs I had with Sergio's movie and gives us a healthy dose of dune buggy
action, but you'll quickly tire of the dubbed-in weed eater whine these things
make along with the motor bikes that accompany them and pine for the relatively
good muffler that Sergio's Family Roadster had.  Even though both of these movies begin from the exact same idea (world
devastated by nuclear holocaust - Italian actors in 2019 try to survive all the
cheesy explosions - you know - the kind with lots of sparks and smoke) the
beauty of the creative process is that what you do with that germ of an idea
and where it takes us is where art is born. Whereas Sergio attempted (and
failed
repeatedly I think it's fair to say) to fashion a "hero saves mankind's last
hope for survival" epic with an ugly guy running around in his beaded jeans
looking for a woman to bear fruit for all the horny guys that survived WW III,
Enzo decides to go with a more "slice of life" take on things. And "slice of
life" is really code for "no story other than guys running around shooting at
each other". There's this guy named One who is the leader of a group of bad
guys called the Templars. One is characterized (as are many of the actors in
this film) by his really bad wig (a lifeless, zebra striped thing) and
his insane desire to wipe everyone who isn't in his gang off the face of the
earth. He's prone to making strange comments after battles such as "the earth
raped itself" in a clumsy way to explain his philosophy of life. Sharp-eyed
and no-life viewers will remember One from when he didn't appear in a hideous
hairpiece but sported abominable ape make up as Big Ape in
Sergio's 2019 fable. I guess this just goes to show us that in any future,
there will always be a George Eastman paying the rent by lumbering around
poverty row Italian cinema. One has an arch rival or ex-boyfriend or something
called Scorpion. Scorpion is a middle aged guy with a greying perm (think game
show host Bert Convy, but beefier and with more miles on him) who drives around
the dirt piles in his souped-up black Dodge Charger and he explains his
motivations to the Templars by saying that even though he drives around in a
way cool car blowing stuff up and killing people, he's different than them,
because he wants to live! Then he drives off with some broad he picked up and
actually puts in some cruddy looking microchip thing that must have been the
2019 equivalent of an eight track tape of Bread.  This brings to mind another lesson I learned along with the codpiece thing
about life in the radioactive wasteland: it's a car customizer's dream! Most
of us might assume that getting by after the bombs fall would involve finding
food and uncontaminated water and securing your safety from the mutants the
would be milling around the shopping malls and Target stores you'd be living
in, but as Scorpion and his personal mechanic would tell you, "t'aint so!"
Throughout the movie, you'd see Scoprion cruising around, spinning out and
hitting some button or other on his car's control panel causing something
exciting to happen. There was the way he could open his doors for the ladies
with just a touch of one of the studs (not to be confused with when Scoprion
was getting touched by the studs in the Templars, but we'll deal with that
sweaty detour momentarily), the way he could send the door flying off in the
direction of the bad guys when the same bad guys attach a mine to it, to the
obligatory trunk rocket launcher that every seven year old boy always draws on
his dream car. There was also the drill he had had mounted on the front of the
car that ended up impaling One during the climatic car chase and considering
the indignity that One had visited upon Scorpion earlier it was probably
supposed to be poetic justice, but came off as just the overreaction of a
psycho ex-boyfriend. (Who knew that Scorpion didn't want to be sodomized in
front of the rest of the Templars?) Huh? One's driving his dune buggy down
Scorpion's Hershey Highway? Hey, don't kill the messenger, I'm just like Fox
News - "I report what you should believe. You decide." Or is it, "fair and
balanced news for conservative whiners"? No matter, because though this whole
all-barbarian rape scene sounds tasteless, Enzo edits it so that it is
tastelessly hilarious! When One gets behind Scorpion there's a bunch of quick
cuts to different people's faces, flashing lights, trains going into tunnels
and volcanoes erupting. (Okay, so maybe those last two didn't make this cut,
but I was waiting for the quick reaction shot of Scorpion's eye's bugging out
and his mouth forming an "oh" like that little freak from the Home Alone movies.  Speaking of blonde kids that you can't stand, there was a moment in this movie
where even I, the jaded Italian-post-nuke-movies-that-take-place-in-2019 film
critic, actually got out of my chair and let loose with a whoop worthy of Ric
Flair himself. It all happened when Scorpion's car was in need of repair and
he took it to his personal mechanic and who should come out of his trailer shop
but Giovanni Frezza. Perhaps his secret identity name doesn't mean anything to
you, but you'll instantly recognize his flowing blonde locks, pouty lips, and
his general Village Of The Damned countenance from his role as Bobby, the
femme-voiced kid in House By The Cemetery. He also turned up to save A Blade In The Dark and tried to resuscitate the brain-dead Manhattan Baby Demonstrating what a great actor he is, Bobby (I always call him Bobby) shows
us his incredible range by displaying a completely different voice than what he
used in House By The Cemetery. Obviously recognizing that a ten year-old
mechanic in a barbaric wasteland is going to have seen a lot of stuff a punk
kid that lives by some cruddy cemetery could never imagine (like Fred "The
Hammer" Williamson in codpiece), Bobby adopts a deeper, gruffer sounding
inflection that really gets his character over as the handy man all of us would
like detailing our rigs and outfitting our sleds for 21st century vehicle
combat. Bobby isn't just an ace mechanic though, he's also an expert marksman
with a slingshot! I wasn't sure what he was slinging at the Templars, but he
managed to take several of them out during the final battle when he, Bert
Convy's ragged brother, and the Hammer all teamed up to wipe them out once and
for all. Since I mentioned the Hammer's cod piece I feel obliged to mention
that he plays a guy who runs around hooking up with hookers and bailing
Scorpion out with his upgradable bow and arrow (you Dungeons & Dragons geeks
know what I'm talking about). Scorpion and I were wondering just
where the heck he was when One was jumping Scorp into the Templars, but knowing
Hammer like I do, it's a safe bet that he wasn't out getting sodomized by some
gang of wig-wearing goofs. (He probably wore a codpiece on his bum just to
be on the safe side though.) Where you could recommend 2019: After The Fall Of New York for its kaleidoscope
of rapidly shifting stupid ideas, you can't really advise anyone you care about
to run out and grab this Region 2 Pal disc. There is a nice opening shot of
some skeletons in military outfits and helmets laying on a hill top and you
pull back to see a vast panorama of wilderness that actually gives you the
eerie sense of emptiness such a disaster would surely evoke. Unfortunately, the
silence is soon shattered by the revving of dune buggies and dirt bikes, all
painted a cheap looking silver and the Templars roll up on some civilians and
engage them in a ten minute long battle that involves a record-setting amount of
guys flying through the air in slow motion following explosions of varying
degrees. There's also a ramp inexplicably located in the area so that the
Templars can fly through the air in slow motion on their bikes and dune
buggies, too.
You're assuming that they're just setting the scene for us as to who the bad
guys are, what type of societal structure now exists and that a hero will be
introduced with a mission of some sort. Well, Scorpion shows up, but there is
no real explanation of what he is doing there or why he continues to hang
around the area with the Templars. There is some brief mention of how he beat
One once in the past, but that's never fleshed out and the remainder of the
film is just a series of encounters (some of them probably a little too fleshed
out for Scorpion's liking!) between Scorpion and the Templars with no real
point to any of them
except that they are trying to blow each other up. There's also nothing
letting us know what the deal is between Scorpion and his pals, Bobby and the
Hammer. They just seem to show up whenever needed, though Hammer takes his
sweet time in one scene saving Scorpion when Scorpion is being dragged behind a
vehicle and Hammer takes out the two guys following him first, letting Scorpion
get dragged an extra mile or two. Enzo also tries to recreate his spaghetti
western days in a few scenes like when Scorpion appears through the licking
flames for his final encounter with One and has somehow acquired a brown poncho
instead of the ugly winter coat he had been sporting. The scene would be
laughable, but the real laughs are yet to come when Scorpion throws off his
poncho to reveal the see-through fiberglass and bulletproof armor he is wearing
over his bare chest! Top it off with leather pants and you can't help but
assume that One thought he was doing Scorpion a favor when he rode him like a
hillbilly on Ned Beatty. Three or four big laughs, but the poor and repetitive
stunt work coupled with the poor and repetitive synthesizer score by Claudio
Simonetti (aka Goblin) and the pointless antics of all involved make this one
to avoid like a horny biker in a two-toned wig with a penchant for
public loving.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
