Back in the early 1980’s, the VHS market allowed my family to enjoy movies that never made it to Ellwood City, about an hour from Pittsburgh. Our hometown video store, Prime Time Video, was packed with films that fascinated me. I wish that someone had footage of all of the movies on shelf. I know we definitely rented Ruggero Deodato’s Raiders of Atlantisand this bizarre piece of cinema about an Aztec god loose in Manhattan. What a time to be alive, when you could walk down the street and wander row after row of horror movie choices!
The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, a feather winged dragon, has found its new pyramid on the Chrysler Building. The film starts by showing us how it finds and devours the heads of its victims in gory detail. Meanwhile, an Aztec cult is leaving sacrificed victims in its wake as Detective Shepard (David Carradine, Death Race 2000) and Sgt. Powell (Richard Roundtree, Shaft) try to keep up.
The film cuts to a failed diamond heist that leads Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty, who owns this film with a manic Method performance) to the title monster’s nest. He uses his new knowledge to move away from crime (and jazz piano playing) as he extorts the city for the location of the creature’s egg.
Shephard finds out the location on his own, ruining Quinn’s plans. The cops conduct an attack that takes out a baby Q as the creature returns home, wiping out nearly everyone (don’t take Shaft, Q!) until it’s shot over and over, falling dead to the streets below. The cop also saves Quinn as a crazed Aztec priest almost sacrifices the crook to his gods.
That said — the magic of the past in man’s modern world is not gone. The film ends with one last egg hatching.
Q is a great movie even without the monster. In Will Harris’ great oral history of the film, David Caradine said: “I thought if [Larry] had left the monster out of it, between me and Michael Moriarty, there was a real great story there between the detectives and the sleazebag heroin addict/petty-thief character. That’s where the power in the movie is. That’s where the heart of it is… and not in the chicken that ate New York!”
And this is a movie that rose from tragedy! Cohen had just been fired from I, the Jury and didn’t want to waste the hotel room he had already paid for. He wrote the script, hired actors and was done with pre-production in just six days!
Like all of Cohen’s films — do I sound repetitive yet? — this is a movie that outdoes its small budget and looks like a million bucks. It has heart — and plenty of other organs — and verve and panache and any other hyperbole you’d love to bestow upon it.
It‘s easy to find, too. If you have Shudder, it’s right here! And you can grab the blu-ray from Scream Factory.
Four years before Teen Wolf (and 24 years after I Was a Teenage Werewolf), Larry Cohen wrote, produced and directed Full Moon High, a comedic take on what it’d be like to be a werewolf in high school. Ironically, it came out in the same year as An American Werewolf in London, covering some of the same ground, but from a very different perspective.
The tie to Michael Landon’s werewolf turn is that the opening of this film is in the 1950’s. There, Tony Walker (Adam Arkin, Halloween H2O) is a high school football player whose dad, Colonel William Walker (Ed McMahon!), is in the CIA. He takes his son with him to Romania for a secret mission where he’ll shove some microfilm up his own ass. Yes, if you ever wanted to see Johnny Carson’s sidekick yell things like, “Did you get laid?” and act like he’s being butt plugged, then this is the film for you!
Tony gets his palm read by a gypsy while his dad is having sex with a prostitute — yes, this is a comedy — and finds out that he’ll be an eternal doomed to wander the earth. Soon, he will return home to find his destiny and he shouldn’t make any plans during the full moon. On his way back to the hotel, Tony is killed by a werewolf and returns from the dead the next morning.
On their way back to the U.S., Cuban terrorists hijack their plane, but Tony transforms into a werewolf and takes them out. However, Tony’s curse keeps him too distracted to play football, so he misses the big game and costs his school the championship. He also starts to hide from his girlfriend Jane (Roz Kelly, New Year’s Evil) as he’s worried that he will kill her. His dad is convinced that Tony is a neighbor’s dog until he catches him transforming and tries to shoot his son. The bullet ricochets and kills the Colonel and Tony skips town after the funeral.
The film descends into pathos here — not the last time it’ll happen — as Tony wanders the earth for twenty-five years before returning home. It’s just in time, as Tony’s football team hasn’t scored a touchdown since he left town.
His old girlfriend, Jane, is married to his old friend Flynn and still calls out his name during sex. She figures out that Tony Jr., as he calls himself as he returns to town, is really Tony. And she’s fine with having sex with a werewolf. There’s also Ricky (Joanne Nail, The Visitor), a high school girl who falls for him. Oh yeah — and Tony also goes full werewolf and kills his principal before turning himself in. His court-appointed shrink, Dr. Brand (Adam Arkin’s dad, Alan) really wants to conduct experiments on Tony, but acts like he’s trying to help him.
There are plenty of character actors and strange personalities in this strangely cast film. In addition to Ed McMahon, there’s also Laurene Landon (Maniac Cop, …All the Marbles, The Stuff), Sanford and Son‘s Demond Wilson, 1980’s sitcom and Hollywood Squares star Jim J. Bullock, Bob Saget in an early role as a sportscaster and Pat Morita (The Karate Kid) as a silversmith.
Cohen said of the film, “It has some interesting ideas about how life in America has changed sexually and politically since the early sixties. All of Arkin’s friends have changed but he hasn’t. And whereas he changes into a werewolf all of the time, his friends change into middle-aged people while he is gone, with different values and different ideas. They change as much as he does, actually.”
Where most of Larry Cohen’s films succeed in spite of their high concept and low budget, Full Moon High was a bit of a struggle for me. That said, Alan Arkin is great in this and elevates every scene he’s in.
Shout! Factory is finally releasing this film on blu-ray. It’s been available in grey market form for awhile, but it’s getting their full treatment and comes out on April 10th, complete with plenty of extras.
According to Larry Cohen, God is one of the most violent characters in literature. Take that insight, toss in some Chariots of the Gods, a little police procedural and a gradually involving drama that ends up taking over the life of the hero and you have God Told Me To.
New York City in the 1970s. It’s a horrible place to be. And now, with a gunman atop a water tower shooting into a crowd below, it’s a deadly place. 15 pedestrians are already dead before Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco, The French Connection, TV’s Law & Order) climbs the tower to speak with him. Tony’s skilled at getting crazy people to back down and his technique is to communicate with them. He tells the killer everything — his age, what he’s doing, even the fact that he’s a devout Catholic — in the hopes that he can stop his rampage. Then, the killer looks Tony in the eye and says, “God told me to,” before he leaps to his death.
Attack after attack follows, all seemingly unconnected except for those words: “God told me to.”
There’s a stabbing in a supermarket. A cop (Andy Kaufman!) shooting into the St. Patrick’s Day crowd (there were no permits for this scene, which blows my mind. Also, while Cohen was organizing the crew to set up the shot, Kaufman antagonized the crowd by making faces, leading to people jumping the barricades to fight him, requiring Cohen to get in between the actor/comedian/force of nature and angry New Yorkers). And a man who kills his wife and children because God has always asked people to sacrifice their children since Abraham. This sends Tony over the edge and he attacks the man.
One of the killers says that his orders came from Bernard Phillips. Tony visits the address but is attacked by Phillips’ knife-wielding mother. She falls down the stairs as Tony dodges her attack and before she dies, she tells him that she was a virgin who was taken by aliens and given a pregnancy without taking her virginity, much like the conception of Jesus.
When Tony brings this information to his superiors, they tell him to put a lid on it. There’s no need for more religious panic. He leaks the story to the press anyway with the expected results.
That’s when Tony meets Bernard Phillips’ cult, who he contacts and controls with his psychic powers. He tells them when each murder will happen and now wants Tony to join them. Instead, Tony asks about Phillips’ mother, which causes a follower to drop dead. Another tries to kill him by pushing him in front of a subway train, but Tony defeats him and uses the man to come to Phillips’ underground lair. That follower — upset that he has come so close to his god — decapitates himself.
Upon meeting the glowing, ethereal and hermaphroditic Phillips, Tony realizes that the self-styled god cannot and will not kill him. Therefore, Tony realizes that he is special and has a purpose. Tony’s girlfriend and wife (look, it was the 70’s) come together to try and save him, but numerous revelations come out — Tony’s estranged wife had numerous pregnancies that her husband seemed to will into stillbirth, afraid of what his children would become.
Tony finds his adoption records, finally meeting his birth mother, who gave up her child — another divine birth — after being impregnated by an orb of light at the 1941 Worlds Fair. The footage accompanying this scene is digital manipulated stock footage from Space:1999! This meeting nearly gives both a nervous breakdown and ruins Tony’s sense of self.
Tony decides to meet his brother/sister one more time and learns the truth: they are alien messiahs, children of an entity of light. Tony’s human side is dominant while Phillips is more like the alien that gave them life. Phillips reveals his true sex — a mixture of sex organs on his side and asks his brother to impregnate him so that they can create new life. Tony refuses and attacks his sibling, who retaliates by bringing the building down on both of them.
Only Tony survives and he is arrested for the murder of Phillips. As the police lead him away, a reporter asks him why he committed the crime. He answers simply, “God told me to.”
God Told Me To did not do well upon original release, but time has proven to be quite kind. Watching it forty plus years later, I was amazed by how prescient it is, with killers opening fire for no reason, with the schism between sexes being seen as divine and by a public and leaders who are ill-equipped to deal with a true crisis of faith in their midst. It’s a brutal little film and a real triumph in the way that it starts as a simple police story and unravels not just the plot but the way the main character perceives himself. Even his multiple times a day shows of Catholic worship cannot protect him from the knowledge that he very well could be the Messiah — but not in the way that anyone expected.
The TV commercial for It’s Alive terrified me. The music, the slowly turning bassinet, the fact that a demon baby was inside — it was too much for my child brain to handle. I would cover my ears and yell every single time I saw it. The power and memory and latent fear for this thirty seconds created stayed with me for decades, ensuring that I would never watch this film. Until now.
Frank and Lenore Davis are excitedly expecting the birth of their second child. They’ve been waiting for years and properly planned the child’s birth, with Lenore using birth control pills until the time was right. However, their infant is a monster, a deformed creature with fangs and claws that is so horrifying, one of the doctors instantly tries to suffocate it. The baby kills the team who delivered it before escaping, leaving a crying Lenore and frightened Frank.
The baby goes on a murderous rampage while Frank denies that the child is his, as a parallel is made to Frankenstein and how Dr. Frankenstein abandoned his creation. It turns out that the birth control drugs Lenore was on may have caused the mutation. To protect their bottom line, they want the child destroyed.
The baby finds its way home, where Lenore embraces her child. Their first son, Chris, becomes homesick (he’d been staying with Charley, a family friend) and returns home, where he meets his sibling and promises to protect him. Frank discovers that the child is being hidden and shoots at it, but the baby escapes and kills Charley.
The police and Frank track the child to the sewer, where the father realizes that the beast is his flesh and blood. Hiding the baby in his coat, Frank tries to escape, but he’s caught by the police. Then, his child leaps from his arms to kill the pharmaceutical company representative who is with the cops. The police open fire, killing the child and the man who he is attacking.
As the police take the Davis family home, we learn that another deformed child has been born in Seattle.
When Larry Cohen completed the film, he learned that the executives who had produced the film were all gone. It’s Alive got a paltry one week run in Chicago and a limited release. Three years later, after that team of executives were replaced, Cohen convinced Warner Brothers to re-release the film with the ad campaign featured above, leading to a successful run.
It’s Alive preys on our worst fears — that our children will grow to become monsters. However, Cohen takes it a step further. These children instantly are monstrous killers.
Two sequels — It Lives Again and It’s Alive 3: Island of the Alive — followed, as well as a remake. The original — shot at the same time as Hell Up in Harlem by a crew that was doing day and night shoots 7 days a week — is an impressive film. Like all Cohen’s work, the idea is stronger than the budget and the final product looks so much better than the dollars it cost to create would suggest.
The basic story of Bone is simple: a rich couple deals with a home invasion. But this movie has Larry Cohen at the helm, so it’s going to be anything but basic. The man who is there to take them for everything soon learns that the couple is anything but rich. And they’re anything but happy.
Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten, St. Elmo’s Fire, Grown Ups) and Bill (Andrew Duggan, In Like Flint, It Lives Again) are a seemingly rich Beverly Hills couple. Bill’s a used car salesman who feels that he’s the only one working hard, symbolized by his wife refusing to even getting up to answer the phone while he cleans the pool. Then, a rat gets stuck in the drain. That’s what brings Bone (Yaphet Kotto, Alien, Live and Let Die) into their lives.
Mistaking him for an exterminator, they ask him to pull the rat out. He does and instead of hiding it from them, he confronts them with it. He then takes them hostage as he goes through their home looking for money.
It turns out that the couple has little in liquid assets and is deeply in debt. Their son may be in Vietnam or he may be in jail. And it turns out Bill has a secret bank account that Bernadette knows nothing about. Bone commands him to clean out that account and bring him the money in an hour or he’ll rape and kill his wife.
Bill ends up taking his time as he realizes how little he loves his wife. He drinks with a lady (Brett Sommers from TV’s Match Game) that explains how her husband died from too many dental x-rays. Soon, he’s been seduced by a young girl (Elaine May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin, The Heartbreak Kid, Inherent Vice) who steals from the system, attracted to her offbeat ways and youthful spirit.
He comes home without the money. But meanwhile, after learning how to make eggs — she doesn’t cook anymore — Bernadette and Bone have gotten drunk and ended up on the couch together. He explains to her how raping white women and the black mystique used to take him so far, but today, black and white love is commonplace. What started as him continually saying he was going to rape her has turned and she begins to seduce him, kissing him and “doing all the work.” He talks about how black men have troubles now making love and she tells him that it’s not just black men.
After they bond, Bernadette tries to convince Bone to help her murder Bill for his insurance. They ride the bus to the end of the line, then chase Bill to the beach. He tries to win them over with a used car pitch to keep him alive, Bernadette smothers and kills him. Bone realizes that he wants nothing to do with this life and leaves.
On Cohen’s website, the characters in this film are broken down by how they relate to the world: Bill is The Establishment who may be open to change. Bernadette is liberation and feminism that has been held down. The X-Ray Lady is the real Establishment, the old guard ready to die off. The Girl is the hippy love generation already giving way to the darkness of the 70’s. Then there’s Bone — facing racism but willing to play with it to get what he wants, as he says, “I’m just a big bad buck, ready to do what’s expected of him.” He even talks about how he’s held onto the past, enjoying his part of the world of racism because it was easier and there was a role. Now, in this new world, he doesn’t know who to be.
The character work in this film is superb. Witness the scene where the girl explains to Bill how she was raped as a child and that’s why she’s attracted to old men like him. Even when he tries to connect with her by telling her about the Street & Smith pulps he bought as a kid, she still tries to connect him to the rapist who took her virginity as she begins to make love to him.
If I didn’t say it yet, Yaphet Kotto is fucking amazing in this movie. His performance is quite literally a tour de force. He’s always great in everything he’s in, but in this film, he’s transcendent. I also love that he borrowed Cohen’s red sweater for a scene late in the movie and never returned it.
Amazingly, this was Cohen’s first film. It’s assured and poised, straddling the line between art film and exploitation.
You can watch it on Brown Sugar or Amazon Prime. I’d advise you to do so at your next convenience.
Director Giuliano Carnimeo is better known for his Western films with the Sartana character, as well as 1972’s The Case of the Bloody Iris, a movie that I believe is at once a giallo and a satire of the genre.
By 1983, everyone in Italy was directed post-apocalyptic films. This one is pretty much The Road Warrior with little difference. But hey! It has Pag (Luciano Pigozzi) from Yor, Hunter from the Future in it!
It also has a bandana-wearing good guy named Alien (former model Robert Iannucci) who drives around in a car called The Exterminator! He ha an ex-girlfriend named Trash that helps him and a cyborg child named Tommy that he has to grudgingly protect.
There’s also a gang led by Crazy Bull that’s after all the water — instead of Humungus being after all the gas. And there are some great stunts.
But that’s it. Far be it from me to demand that a spaghetti post-apoc flick has an actual plot or character arc, but it can be done. It doesn’t get done here.
I actually feel bad ending this week on a down note. I mean, there were so many great movies. And this stinker…but don’t worry! There are plenty more coming in June. I promise that almost every single one of them is better than this movie, which suckered me in with an awesome title and poster. That has happened before. It will happen again.
Of course, Shout! Factory has released this. There are better Italian clones of Australian end of the world movies. But don’t let me stop you from ordering it.
I think it’s best that I watch some movies by myself. Like this one. That’s because the minute George Eastman showed up on screen, I let out an audible cheer of pure bliss. No one needs to hear me screaming like that.
2025. A nuclear war has left New York City in ruins, populated by scavengers and telepathic mutants who are hunted and killed by the elite. To keep the people of this world from revolting, the reality game show Endgame has been created, where hunters and gladiators battle to the death in the place of warfare.
Lilith (Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser, credited as Moira Chen!) is a psychic who wants protection for her band of mutants. She hires the best Endgame player ever — Ron Shannon (Al Cliver from Zombi and The Beyond!) — to help. Shannon has his own problems, as he’s in the middle of Endgame and facing off against professional killers like Kurt Karnak (the much loved Eastman, who also co-wrote this film), who was Shannon’s childhood friend and has now become his greatest rival. The last time Shannon and Karnak battled in an Endgame, time ran out before they could determine which man was the best player.
Lilith helps Shannon defeat Karnak, at which point his sponsor and the cameramen show up and ask him to drink Lifeplus on screen. Lilith reaches out to him and he rushes to save her. That’s when he agrees to help her and the mutants she protects.
Karnak has lost his mind due to losing, shooting targets obsessively. Colonel Morgan and his men try to recruit him to their cause while Shannon tries to recruit his own team, including Ninja (Hal Yamanouchi, who in addition to playing Silver Samurai in 2013’s The Wolverine also appears in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, 2020 Texas Gladiators and 2019: After the Fall of New York as the Rat Eater King!) and Bull (Gabriele Tinti, who was married to Gemser and appeared in nearly every Black Emanuelle movie) .
“You’re too famous to disappear in a city that grows smaller every day,” says Colonel Morgan when he catches up to Shannon, asking him to give up Lilith. This leads to a firefight where he’s saved by Karnak! George Eastman as a good guy? Holy shit, I’m fucking in!
If you haven’t guessed by all the shouting and exclamation points, this movie is the perfect combination of everything I look for in film — it’s a ripoff, it’s post-apocalyptic, it shares Italian genre favorites and it’s in a ridiculous world where everyone either dresses like a viking or Dump Matsumoto (1980’s Japanese women’s wrestling bad girl supreme).
Meanwhile, in the wasteland, our heroes come upon mutants, which Professor Levin (oh yeah, he takes care of the telepaths) explains have combined man’s primordial caveman past with feral instincts. Which means, in layman’s terms, that they look like human fish or apes.
Think that’s crazy? They then come upon holy monks who have blinded themselves so that they can be guided by psychics and kill anyone who offends their conception of God. What follows is a scene of black-robed maniacs fighting with machine guns and grenades and knives and motorcycles and man…a cast of hundreds gets killed until Shannon finds the captured psychic and instead of saving him, tosses an axe at his head. All the monks have no idea where they are, wandering around yelling that they are blind as our heroes make their escape. If you think they aren’t going to drive over the head of one of the monks, well, you haven’t been watching Italian genre cinema!
Meanwhile, Lilith explains to Shannon that she keeps one of the young psychic kids basically autistic, because if he starts to experience emotions, he’s liable to wipe out everyone around him.
Then, the professor gets killed in a trap, but asks Shannon to save all of them. But that means Bull discovers that she’s psychic, which means that the entire team learns that everyone is a mutant. Everyone starts arguing before Karnak shows up to let them know that more enemies are on the way. Monkey-faced enemies! And a fish-faced leader who has two women with roped up bare breasts on his modified golf cart! What is going on with this movie?
Ninja and Kovack get killed and Lilith is captured. Karnak offers to help Shannon save her. Lilith reaches out to Shannon, telling him that Karnak only wants gold and then to kill him. Then, the fishman leader tears off Lilith’s clothes, yelling “Look at me while I rape you, dammit!” Shannon asks if she’s OK because he’s seeing flashes and she’s all like, “Yeah, I’m fine,” while a fish mutant slobbers all over her. Umm…
When the guys get there, Lilith is fully clothed and the mutant is passed out on the bed. So are we to believe that she enjoyed it? Or that she just went with it? I guess if you’re looking for woke feminism, a Joe D’Amato movie is probably the last place one should root around.
Then they find Kovack, who the mutants have left inside a wall. They can’t help him escape and he wants to die, so Karnak breaks his neck. He faces off against an entire room of mutants while Shannon and Lilith escape. She can tell that Karnak is in trouble, but not dead, to which Shannon replies “Fate decides the winner of Endgame, not me.”
Lilith reunites with the children and everyone celebrates that they are only ten kilometers from the rendezvous. Of course, the government is waiting to take everyone out. SS logo adorned stormtroopers show up and just start shooting, but Shannon talks Tommy, one of the mutant children, into creating wind storms and telekinetically using a machine gun and an avalanche to kill all of the soldiers. He even levitates a car that crushes several of them and sets a fire that wipes out even more. Then, he forces Colonel Morgan to kill himself.
Lilith asks Shannon to come with them, but he says “She is the future and he is the past.” She leaves while he stays behind in the wasteland with the gold. As he goes to pick up his gold, Karnak comes back and tells him they haven’t played the final round yet. He throws away his gun as we get an awesome long shot of both men, like something out of a western. They rush at one another with knives and the credits roll.
The poster for this film promises “For An Endgame Champion In The Year 2025, There’s Only One Way To Live. Dangerously.” And this film more than lives up that. If you only know D’Amato from his adult work or gorefests like Beyond the Darkness and Antropophagus, you should totally check this one out. Movies like this are why I went from worrying about the end of the world to wishing that it would happen!
Endgame has been released on a real, honest to goodness DVD yet, but you can find it at Cult Action! You can also watch it on Amazon Prime.
In 2015, mankind finally did what we knew they all would. They blew the Earth up real good. Afterward, the Eurax won the war and the Pan-American Confederacy was wiped out. The healthy survivors were experimented on and everyone else was murdered in so many different ways. The Eurax look like Darth Vader, if they wore the British wrestling version of Kendo Nagasaki’s outfits. And oh yeah — there haven’t been any children born since the nukes got dropped.
Out in the desert, life goes on. And by life, we mean punk rockers and goths watching two cars fight. One is filled with guys in face paint wearing football pads. The other has our hero, Parsifal (Michael Sopkiw, Blastfighter). He defeats the other team and is awarded prizes by a top-hat wearing circus barker and a robot clown, including a woman of his very own. He then heads out into the wasteland on his super cool tricycle, where he passes some dead cyborgs.
A hovercraft comes along and demands that our hero come with them. He refuses, then drives along until he finds some mutants who are foaming at the mouth. Green foam, that is. Parsifal kills them and then sets the woman free, giving her a horse. And then, to prove how ineffectual of a hero he is, he’s instantly knocked out cold by the dudes from the hovercraft and taken to Alaska.
Why Alaska? Because we’re in the base of the Pan-American Confederacy, who have survived. Their President sends Parsifal on a mission to find the only fertile woman in New York and harvest her eggs. If he succeeds, he gets to go away from Earth on a spaceship. And he has Ratchet, a one-eyed badass, and Bronx, a dude with a claw for a hand, to help him.
They break into the city via tunnels and run afoul of a gang of mutants — led by the Rat Eater King — after trying to save a little person named Shorty. Then Eurax troops attack and only Parsifal, Bronx and Giara, one of the bad girls, are saved.
Bronx is questioned by a Eurax commander (or Eurac, internet sites just don’t agree on the proper spelling) who has Picasso art all over his interrogation room. Bronx decides to rip out the man’s eyes while Parsifal is being tortured on a rack. That doesn’t seem to work well, so Officer Ania (Anna Kanakis, Warriors of the Wasteland) makes out with him until he tells all of his secrets, again showing what a completely inept hero he is. Well, I guess he’s smart enough to tell them that Giara is the fertile one when she isn’t.
Parsifal and Giara make their escape, covered by Bronx, who kills several soldiers until Ania shoots him. Thanks to the return of Ratchet and Shorty, they make their way to the ruined UN building. Good news! Shorty knows where to find that mythical last fertile woman in New York.
The commander gets new eyeballs while Ania tells him that they have eight submarines watching for the escapees. The Eurax find Shorty’s people and, as they usually do, kill everyone with a high frequency sound weapon. Only Shorty, Parsifal, Ratchet and Giara escape.
While they’re being chased, they run into Big Ape (George Eastman! Yes!) and his Hairy Men, who are kind of like Planet of the Apes in this otherwise Mad Max affair. Big Ape looks like a hairy beast wearing a pirate outfit, so of course, he’s my favorite character in this movie. Turns out he always wanted to knock a woman up, so he agrees to help.
Oh yeah — Parsifal fights off one of the Hairy Men who has taken a liking to Giara. So there’s that happening now.
They find the last fertile woman, who has been put into suspended animation by her dead professor father (and also dressed in see-through plastic). The guys all run off to get armor for a vehicle while Big Ape knocks out Giara and makes his move on the last fertile woman. Oh yeah — Shorty also sacrifices himself to save everyone.
Our heroes escape — Giara strangely not saying anything about Big Ape attacking her and having sex with a woman who can’t consent, so #metoo will exist even after the fall of New York — and make their way through the Eurax defenses. However, a laser beam penetrates the car and turns Big Ape into a smoking skeleton! What! This movie confounds the senses sometimes!
Ania shoots the Eurax leader and takes over. And out of nowhere, Ratchet turns on everyone and tries to kill Parsifal. Why? Honestly, I have no idea why. Maybe because he’s a cyborg, even if we haven’t determined that cyborgs are evil? Giara ends up saving him and getting killed as a result, telling our hero that humanity is worth saving.
So when Parsifal comes back, the leader tells him that because he’s dying and won’t survive the space trip, he can have his seat. As the spaceship leaves Earth, the last fertile woman wakes up and looks into Parsifal’s eyes.
Wait — so that’s it? Were they setting up a sequel? Are we missing a few reels of the film? Did a bunch get cut out of the American version? I have no idea! This movie makes little to no sense. And I love it!
“They baked the Big Apple!” one character yells as the synthesized sounds of Oliver Onions (the dudes who wrote the theme for Yor, Hunter from the Future) plays. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this movie, I really don’t know what else to tell you.
What movie would Sean Connery choose to follow up his run as James Bond with? Well, it’s The Offence, but this was his second movie after. And it’s definitely the first film John Boorman did after Deliverance. What they created was a film that absolutely cannot be easily explained. I’ve watched it in the double digits and there are whole sequences that I can’t unpack.
In the year 2293, Earth has lived beyond the end of the world. There are two populations, the immortal Eternals and the mortal Brutals. The Eternals live in the Vortex, a country estate that affords them comfort at the expense of excitement. The Brutals live in a wasteland growing food for the immortals, yet face constant danger.
The Brutal Exterminators are the ones that keep the machinery running, as they are ordered by a giant flying stone head named Zardoz to kill other Brutals and exchange food for more weapons.
One of the Brutals, Zed (Connery) goes for a ride on Zardoz, even temporarily killing its pilot, Arthur Frayn. Zed goes to the Vortex, where he meets Consuella (Charlotte Rampling, The Damned, Asylum) and May (Sara Kestelman, Liztomania). They defeat him with psychic powers and use him for menial labor. Consuella wants hm destroyed, while May and Frayn want to keep him alive.
Zed learns that the Eternals are watched over by an artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle. Because they live forever, they have become bored and no longer have sex. Some of them have fallen into comas and are known as Apathetics. And despite their vast resources of knowledge, all they care about is making special bread, meditating and enforcing their social rules by artificially aging anyone who violates their byzantine rules.
The Eternals misjudge Zed — he is far more intelligent than he lets on. He learns that he is part of Arthur Frayn’s eugenics experiment and that Frayn is also Zardoz. He’s also learned to read, and once he discovers that Zardoz isn’t a god but a play on the Wizard of Oz, he becomes enraged.
Zed lives up to Arthur’s goal for him — to deliver death and freedom (one and the same) to the Eternals. He absorbs all of their knowledge as he leads the Brutals on a killing spree against the Eternals.
The film ends with still images of Consuella and Zed falling in love to the tune of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony — an ode to soldiers — and giving birth to a son before they age into skeletons. It’s complex and simple and moving and silly all at the same time. Kind of like the rest of Zardoz.
I didn’t even mention the animated scene of how erections work or Connery in a wedding dress or the weird outfit Zed and the Brutal Exterminators wear — knee-high boots and a giant red thong.
The film was inspired by Boorman almost making The Lord of the Rings. Although the project ended, he wanted to see if he could create his own fantasy world. A fantasy world that makes little or no sense, as evidenced by the spoken word intro that 20th Century Fox executives asked Boorman to create. The goal was to help the audience understand the film. But just look at this dialogue:
“I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived three hundred years, and I long to die. But death is no longer possible. I am immortal. I present now my story, full of mystery and intrigue — rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep in a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred, but they may. Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale, I am a fake god by occupation — and a magician, by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented, too, for your entertainment — and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?”
There’s no way to really prepare you for this movie. Trust me when I say that there has never been a movie like it before or since.
After 1990: The Bronx Warriors, director Enzo G. Castellari created this film, originally entitled The New Barbarians. The title change reflects the name New Line Cinema would use when they released the film in the United States. This movie checks off nearly every box when it comes to what it’ll take to get me to love a film: it’s Italian. It’s a ripoff of Mad Max. It has George Eastman in it. It has a big name (well, in Italy) American star, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson. It’s packed with enough weird quirks that would put off anyone else, but they made me fall in love with it. And oh yeah — Giovanni Frezza (Bob from House by the Cemetery) makes an appearance.
2019. No relation to 2019: After the Fall of New York. But after a nuclear war, a gang called the Templars take it upon themselves to purge the Earth of anyone left alive. The film starts by showing us just one of their attacks, as they take their modified cars and golf carts out for a spin, murdering a convoy of survivors. Normal humans might look ragtag and dirty, but the Templars wear all white battle armor and have punk rock hairdos. The gang is a real family affair, as Shadow (Ennio Girolami) is Castellari’s brother and Mako (Massimo Vanni) is their cousin. Their leader is George Eastman as One.
After murdering everyone they’ve found, One tears a Bible apart and proclaims, “Books. That’s what started the whole apocalypse!” and “The world is dead. It raped itself. But I’ll purify it with blood. No one is innocent. But only we, the Templars, are the ministers of revenge!” Needless to say, George Eastman is doing what he does best here: not only chewing the scenery but taking big bloody bites out of it.
Later, Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete, Escape from the Bronx, Black Belly of the Tarantula) finds the survivors of the attack and fends off some scavengers. He puts one man out of his misery and takes what’s left for himself. We follow him as he meets up with his mechanic — yep, little Bob — who lives in an armored ice cream van, ala the KLF. They have a little gun battle, as you do, just to show that they’re friends. Scorpion needs his gearshift fixed and the problem seems to be that there’s an ear stuck in it. Yep. You read that right.
The Templars are looking for The Signal, the radio station that shows where humanity is still alive. Any car they see, they destroy, including the modified UPS van that Alma is in. They impale the driver and drag him off while she’s saved by Scorpion after being caught and dragged by a net. Scorpion and Shadow have a war of words after our hero spares Mako.
You can’t tell me that Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard didn’t base the look of The Walking Dead character Princess on this film.
Anyways, Scorpion takes Alma to his base where he repairs her shoulder and makes sweet, sweet love to her. Against One’s commands, Mako leads a group of Templars against Scorpion, who is saved by Nadir (Williamson), an arrow wielding, well-dressed badass. No, seriously, let’s all drink in the magic that is Nadir.
While Scorpion uses a car to roll over Mako’s dead body, Nadir shoots one of his arrows directly into a Templar’s neck, blowing his body to bits. Our hero sends Mako’s body back to One as his answer to where he stands. Holy shit, when Nadir talks, saying stuff like, “I enjoyed…your little game…of war!” I lose my mind every single time.
One kills the rest of Mako’s men while studying the fallen man’s dead body. He yells, “We are the Templars. The warriors of vengeance. We are the Templars. The high priests of death. We have been chosen to make others pay for the crime of being alive. We guarantee that all humanity, accomplices and heirs of the nuclear holocaust, will be wiped out once and for all. That the seed of Man will be canceled forever from the face of the earth!” They honor Mako’s dead body, saying that they will take ten thousand lives for his and will now hate and exterminate. But only One will have vengeance on Scorpion.
Our three heroes then meet a caravan of religious people led by Moses who have found The Signal, the aforementioned radio signal which will lead its followers to the last civilization on Earth. Alma and Nadir decide to stay with the caravan. And why would Nadir leave after he finds such perfect companionship with Vinya, a girl with glittery eye makeup, a side ponytail, access to booze and who does the deep concentration service and biorhythmic concentration (but it’s been a while since she’s done it). Let me tell you — the entire scene where she and Nadir talk about the end of the world before he starts making out with her is ridiculous and nonsensical and so perfect.
However, Scorpion claims that “heaven is dead” and that “memories are worth nothing.” Man. He was emo before anyone knew what it meant. He walks in on Nadir, who has obviously just got done making love and says goodbye. The rest of the Templars find him in seconds and take him to One, who reinitiates Scorpion into the Templars by anally raping him. Yes, you read that right. All of the motorcycle helmet wearing dudes watch while hanging around on cars and bikes as One takes it to our hero. Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting that. He gets interrupted by a scout who tells them they’ve found the caravan and that they need to finish off Scorpion while he goes off and murders everyone else.
Luckily, Nadir gets to Scorpion just in time. Not as luckily, doing so means that the caravan gets easily overtaken. He then yells at our hero, “Here lies the great Scorpion, in pain, victim of the big, bad queers, the Templars! All you had to do was ask. Nadir, I need your help. You’re not so great now, Scorpion.” But don’t worry. One training montage later and the mechanic kid — let’s call him little Bob, as that’s what I always call Giovanni Frezza in any movie — and our heroes are back to save everyone.
One smokes some weed while listening to a tape that says, “If you could win the sky, if you could win the sky, I, this evening would have possessed the world. But I don’t want to stain my name with ridicule. Fighting against the world of endless sky. Yet, I feel that soon, I too shall breach the supreme barrier.” What? What the fuck is he listening to! The dude is just totally smoking up while everyone else is out there killing humanity!
This leads to One giving another amazing speech: “Idiots! Dreamers! Don’t you understand? The world is dead! We have all closed our eyes! Even the heavens are silent! You! And you! And you! You are walking dead! Walking corpses! There is nothing left! Nothing. Not even The Signal you think you hear. Nothing. There’s no more soul. There’s no more hope. There’s only one faith. One ecstasy. Death! And death you shall have, you last ugly dregs of humanity! You don’t deserve to live!” A car filled with dead bodies shows up and interrupts, but they realize too late…it’s a trap! Scorpion, Nadir and Bob are here to kill as many Templars as possible and save the day.
One and Scorpion have a stare down. It’s obvious that beyond the rape earlier that these guys were lovers at one point. They have to be for this much pent up hatred. One gets off the first shot, but Scorpion has on clear body armor under his cape. You have to see this shit to believe it!
Meanwhile, Shadow starts taking out people one by one, killing Moses and Wiz. But Scorpion blows him away as Nadir takes out the rest of the Templars. There’s even a scene where Bob saves Nadir, leading to a high five. Then, Scorpion tracks down One before he runs away and impales him in the ass with a drill before blowing his car up.
The survivors gather. Nadir’s woman lived. So did Alma. And one would imagine that they’ll look for The Signal, but that’s it. Scorpion and Bob hold hands as Claudio Simonetti’s synth score blares. All hail Warriors of the Wasteland! Or The New Barbarians!
I wish that Enzo G. Castellari had made ten of these movies. This is exactly why I watch movies — to be entertained, to yell at the screen, to jump up and down in glee. Exploding arrows, heads flying off, cars with domes and saw blades that hack off human heads — this one has it all! Throw in “The Hammer” as a bad ass who could pretty much carry his own movie — he’s honestly way more entertaining than the lead — and you have a winner.
Seriously — with the idea of a religious group versus an evil gay biker army, this movie seems like a Jack Chick tract come to life. Yes, after the fall of man and the rapture, only a radio signal will lead us all to heaven, that is, if you can avoid all the rapes and murder. It goes without saying that this movie has no interest in being politically correct. The fact that it has no real animals were murdered makes it as woke as Italian cinema gets.
You can watch this on Amazon Video. And you should do so right now. Seriously, fuck the rest of your day. This movie is more important than anything else you would be doing anyway.
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