“Books! That's what started this whole apocalypse!”

Oh Italy. Italy, Italy, Italy. Home of so many low-budget B-movie knock-offs of popular genre films. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior came out in 1981, and I nuovi barari AKA The New Barbarians AKA Warriors of the Wasteland followed soon after in 1983.

Plot

So there's this murderous gang of dudes driving around in dune buggies and bikes rampaging across the wasteland. They have big hair, even bigger shoulder pads, and follow a madman who blames humanity for bringing about the apocalypse. For that, their leader, the unimaginatively named One (George Eastman), has decided that Mankind must die. He's assisted by Shadow (Ennio Giorlami as “Thomas Moore”) who has a silly blonde mohawk wig, and Mako (Massimo Vanni), who has an even larger black mohawk wig. And the whole death cult wear white jumpsuits with HUGE shoulder pads.

Standing (well, driving) in their way is Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete as “Timothy Brent”), a wanderer and scavenger, he's also not interested in killing all of humanity. He is interested in killing One's Templars, so he's our hero. He's got a tricked out car with a giant plastic bubble installed on the roof. I don't know why. He rescues Alma (Anna Kanakis) a random wastelander, from the Templars, and looks for medical attention to her. They're rescued from Templars by Nadir, who is easily the best character in the movie. Nadir is ex-football star and B-movie star extraordinaire Fred Williamson, armed with a bow, gold armor, a gold circlet, and a shit-eating grin. He's not a great actor, but he's an enthusiastic one, and seems to be aware of exactly the kind of movie he's in and is happy to cash the paycheck.

The three find a community of peaceful not-Quakers who are led by Father Moses (Nenantino Venantini) and believe in something called god. They also believe in the Signal, which is some kind of radio transmission coming from somewhere in the wasteland and indicates hope that there might be someplace in the world that isn't a rocky quarry.

Visuals

Directed by Enzo G. Castellari, the movie is obviously a low budget cheapie. Filmed primarily in a gravel pit and a country road. There is one car, a handful of motorcycles and a couple dune buggies with ridiculous metal plates bolted on. A lot of mannequins get shot and blown up. Scorpion and Alma make love in a transparent inflatable tent. As I mentioned, the Templars have absurd costumes with giant shoulder pads and giant hair. For the final battle, Scorpion wears an articulated, transparent plastic cuirasse over his bare torso because...its bulletproof? And yet the movie moves at a rapid clip and doesn't bog down much in exposition before heading to the next ridiculous scene. That makes it noteworthy.

What's more noteworthy, but for different reasons, is the incredibly awkward scene where, oh yeah....

SPOILERS BELOW

NO REALLY, AWKWARD SPOILERS INVOLVING BUTTS BELOW

After capturing Scorpion, One sodomizes him before the rest of the Templars. Now, you don't see any penetration, but it happens. Its weird, uncomfortable, and comes out of nowhere. What's stranger is that its also the scene that makes the most out of actual direction and cinematography to create an unpleasant atmosphere. There's multiple colored lights in the background, heavy use of shadows, and rapid cuts to extreme close ups of various people. Its the one scene of the film that artistically “goes for it,” and its the sodomizing scene. That is bizarre.

END SPOILERS

Writing

Written by Tito Carpi (of several Sartana movies and various other Spaghetti-Exploitation films), Enzo G. Castellari and Antonio Visone. The plot is lazy but functional, aping standard post-apocalyptic struggle-to-survive stories and conventions.

Then there's the whole “the Templars are genocidal, homosexual atheists” thing. I will say that's not something I've ever really seen before in a movie, so, uh, points for originality. They contrast with the peaceful, god-fearing, heterosexual settlers, but I'm not really sure there's an actual message to that. The caravan people are a stock element fresh out of Westerns, and their faith is alien to Scorpion and Nadir, who side with them because they're not murderous maniacs like the Templars. I honestly think the Templars' “mission statement” was something quickly slapped together to provide them with easy villainous motivation and that's it.

Sounds

Music by Claudio Simonetti. Its the standard low-budget 80s fare. Synths, guitars, the usual. The guns (which are regular guns) have pew pew noises. Everyone is dubbed over. All of the cars have this phony engine drone dubbed over them, because THE FUTURE.

The Verdict

Warriors of the Wasteland is an awful movie, yet a bizarrely watchable one. It moves quickly, is full of (idiotic) action scenes and car chases, and it lends itself to mockery so well. I wouldn't say its incompetently made, more lazy and cheap. A simple cash in that aspires to little more. Come for the giant shoulder pads, but stay for Fred Williamson, who appears to be the only actor having fun in the film. Oh, but what fun he has. 

Why? No reason.

“Yes! To be like the hu-man! To laugh! Feel! Want! Why are these things not in the plan?”

Hooboy. There’s bad movies, and then there’s epically bad, head scratching, WTF inducing piles of offal that make you wonder how they ever got released. Years ago, I saw a pseudo-documentary compiling clips from old, bad movies called It Came From Hollywood, and the few seconds of screen time from our next feature were lodged in my brain. Thanks, brain. For that I’m going to increase my alcohol consumption to punish you. It’s time to take a look at one of the most infamously bad movies of all time, 1953’s Robot Monster IN 3-D!! Well, in 2-D at least.

Plot
So we’ve got a kid who’s big into science fiction playing around in a “space helmet” with his sister and they run into some archeologists looking around in a cave, then their mother and older sister find them and have a picnic. Riveting. Then the kid wanders off back to the cave and the lightweight falls down when there’s a flash of lightning (or something), then we cut to incredibly random shots of reptiles from other movies, both real and stop motion, fighting with each other. Then the kid wakes up and is almost spotted by the monster of the film, who emerges from the cave (which is his base apparently, since there’s a bubble making machine at the entrance) and has a conversation with his overlord, where the audience finds out that all but eight human beings have been wiped out by the Robot Monster (DUN DUN DUN). The kid runs back to his family, who are holed up in a ruined building and we learn that his older sister, his dad and his dad’s assistant are scientists trying to find a way to beat the monster. Oh, and since the dad & assistant were the archeologists from the beginning, it’s not really a spoiler to say that this entire movie is a dream sequence when the movie lays it out for you.

Characters
Johnny: Gregory Moffett plays our young kid hero. In the beginning section, he’s just a sci-fi obsessed kid, but in the dream he’s a really dumb protagonist who keeps wandering off into danger and at one point, decides to confront the monster and ends up spilling all of the beans about how his family survived the death ray that killed 99% of the population. Way to hand the bad guy the nails for the coffin, kid.

The Professor: John Mylong is an archeologist in the framing sequence and the kid’s father in the dream, where he developed a serum that would’ve granted humanity immunity to pretty much all diseases but only had time to test it on 8 people. Hmmm… 8 test cases, 8 survivors… Also, he’s got a German accent for no story reason whatsoever (other than perhaps the actor himself being Austrian).

Mother: Selena Royle (misspelled Royale in the credits), is Johnny’s mother and…that’s about it.

Carla: Pamela Paulson plays Johnny’s annoying little sister. The best thing I can say about the character is that she gets strangled by the villain late in the picture.

Alice: Claudia Barrett plays the attractive older sister who’s also a scientist. She ends up being really important since she catches the villain’s eye, if you know what I mean (only if you’re also picturing a guy in a gorilla costume carrying her around the hills which YOU SHOULD).

Roy: George Nader plays the young male scientist assistant who, in the dream sequence, is Alice’s boyfriend/fiancée/only viable mate.

Ro-Man: Played by George Barrows and voiced by John Brown, this, I’m afraid, is our badass. A man in a gorilla costume with a plastic diving helmet & antennae. With the help of a bubble machine and some stock footage, this is the creature that wiped out humanity. And he gets to work on finishing the job until he discovers Alice, and his Ro-Man heart starts to question his mission to wipe out all the hu-mans. He takes orders from the Great Guidance, which is the same costume (and voice) with a slight variation.

Visuals/Effects
Man, low budget doesn’t even begin to describe this movie. Supposedly shot in a matter of days, they didn’t even have the money to afford a full space monster costume, so director Phil Tucker got his friend George Barrows to wear his gorilla costume with a different headpiece. Then there’s the sequences of dinosaurs and lizards fighting, which is just old footage from One Million B.C. and Flight To Mars and makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE FILM. NONE!!!

Although apparently the 3-D effects were quite decent back in the day, so, uh, hooray?

Let's see Ro-Man again...

Writing
The screenplay by Wyott Ordung is pretty bad, but I can see what they were going for; a post apocalyptic tale of humanity’s struggle to survive against a race that unreasonably hates it (there’s probably a Cold War metaphor in there somewhere), and I have to give that plot some credit for guts. After all, it kills off a defenseless (and really stupid) girl and then kills the young hero type guy with the strong implication that the Ro-Man finally does wipe out humanity. But of course the framing device lets us know that it’s only a dream right from the start, so they kind of backpedal on that apocalypse pretty quick.

Or do they???

Well, yeah, they do. It’s the kind of story that would make sense as a short story, but not as a 66 minute piece of schlock.

Sound
Oh man, Elmer Bernstein, what were you doing slumming it here? Oh well, at least the music for this pile was good.

Conclusion
Well, it’s short, I’ll give it that, but honestly, Robot Monster is easily one of the worst movie’s I’ve ever seen. This is definitely Z grade cinema, right here. It just stumbles right into "so bad it's good" territory. This is one of the big ones, right up there with Ed Wood's stuff & Manos the Hands of Fate.


Boy, that trailer text sure does sell you a bill of fare.