Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to [email protected].
Drama, Comedy, Romance, Science Fiction, Musical…cinema is filled with grand, sweeping, big tent genres. And yet, so often Cinapse’s particular brand of cinephilia dwells in the subgenres. Too numerous to list, subgenres are where the meat is really added to the bone of deep-cut cinema. And one of the greatest subgenres of them all is the post-apocalyptic picture! This month we’re celebrating the release of author David J. Moore’s World Gone Wild, Restocked and Reloaded 2nd Edition: A Survivor’s Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Movies with a curated selection of some of the Cinapse team’s very favorite and most beloved post-apocalypse films – all of which are highlighted in Moore’s exhaustive love letter!
The Pick: THE NEW BARBARIANS (1983)
This week’s selection ventures into the wild world of Enzo G. Castellari’s The New Barbarians (released Stateside as Warriors of the Wasteland), made in a blitz of Italian dystopian knockoffs that paid more than homage to successful genre blockbusters like The Warriors and The Road Warrior. Set in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse, the last stragglers of humanity are divided into two camps: a roaming caravan of hopeful hangers-on and the Templars, a mohawked, leather-bound death cult driven to eradicate what’s left of humanity. Skorpion, an ex-Templar, makes it his mission to protect a lone band of survivors from the Templars’ disturbing antics–and is joined by the badass Fred Williamson as Nadir, whose specialty is delivering a barrage of exploding arrows. A buried Italian treasure rich with low-budget, high-thrills schlock, The New Barbarians feels like a bombastic Europop cover of your favorite post-apocalyptic hits.
Pretty well-known for being such a crummy movie, The New Barbarians is silly when at its best and a heavy-handed time-waster the rest of the time. The year is 2019 (a very popular year for post-apocalypse movies) and the gang that controls the wastelands is a group of men who call themselves the Templars. Their leader, One (George Eastman), is someone who holds a grudge against every human being for being the spawn of the men and women who caused the end of civilization. His motto is “hate and exterminate,” which is fine as far as mission statements go, but only two of his men have any lines to say, so we never get a sense of how his philosophy has affected the others. His second-in-command, Shadow (who looks ridiculous), is mostly envious of the power One has over his men, but Mako (who is the first to die, and a clone of Wez from The Road Warrior) is a reckless and violence-loving member who doesn’t seem to have a personal agenda. A former member of their group is a man named Skorpion (Timothy Brent, a.k.a. Giancarlo Prete) who cruises around in a car with a big bubble on the roof. This guy left the group for various reasons, and though he is still a marauder of sorts, he has a code of honor, which another lone warrior of the wastelands named Nadir (Fred Williamson) seems to appreciate. Nadir tropes around wielding a huge bow that shoots explosive arrows, and he always rescues Skorpion when he needs to be. At one point, the Templars (who are all apparently homosexual) capture Skorpion and put him through a torturous rite of initiation, which is to tie a man up and sodomize him, and One more than willingly does the honors. One is just that kind of guy. He says all the best lines: “The world is dead—it raped itself!” There is also a sidekick blonde kid (I call him Slingshot Kid) who fixes cars and outfits Skorpion with a see-through bulletproof body armor.
Enzo G. Castellari made two terrible postapocalypse movies around the same time: this and 1990: Bronx Warriors. Both bear the distinctive mark of an Italian’s idea of what made movies like The Road Warrior and Escape from New York work, but they miss the mark by miles. The look of this movie is not quite apocalyptic, but dreary and drizzly, and there are bodies of water in the distance if you look for them. The vehicles that the Templars drive are too manufactured and clunky to be convincing, and the Templars themselves are stupid looking. The stylistic choices made on this movie are awkward, and the relationships formed and broken in the film are not at all believable. Even the synthesized music by Claudio Simonetti is redundant. Cool poster, though.
Excited to be ending a month of Mad Max rip-offs with one of my absolute favorite subgenres; Italian rip-offs!
As one would expect, this is piece meal of a few different “inspirations”, with the most obvious one being Star Wars, as we watch our roguish lead take on an army of white armored thugs set on destroying the world. There’s also your classic western stylings throughout, and a scene shot like a disco freakout that is VERY much out of left field (more on that in a bit).
Also to be expected from these rip-offs are the true stars being hidden in supporting roles; Here, it’s George Eastman and Fred Williamson. Williamson seems to have been beamed in from a different film; a bow-carrying, glittery headband-wearing warrior who seduces the ladies and blows up the bad guys. Eastman, on the other hand, understands the assignment completely, as his natural disquieting intensity makes him a creepy screen presence, as he struts around his base, wearing pieces of armor and S&M gear, talking about how he is going to wipe out the world, and take away his nemesis’s dignity.
On that note, (SPOILER FOR SOME FUCKED SHIT) there’s a real, uh, unique perspective present here. Director Enzo Castellari looked at all the S&M gear in those Mad Max films and thought, “what if they were actually into bondage shit?”. All of this leads us to the most out-of-nowhere rape scene ever put to film.
Presented like an execution at first, we are instead treated to a 30-second long string of fast cuts across neon lights and clinched jaws as our lead is ceremonially raped by the antagonist in front of a crowd. It is over as soon as it started, and the film returns to a standard hero’s journey soon after that, but it’s kind of impossible to return to “regular programming” after something so sudden and jarring. If you’re an absolute sicko that’s fascinated by cinematic hard left turns like this, it’ll be right up your alley. If not, you’re in for an unpleasant 90 seconds.
The New Barbarians doesn’t really present anything new, and the new stuff it does introduce is problematic, but there is still a charm to these films; non-stop dubbing, goofy action scenes, and incredibly intense violence and gore. I’ll never turn down the opportunity to watch one; you never know what insanity you’ll get!
Back in the Netflix “discs in the mail” era I luxuriated in Italian crime films and post-apocalyptic Mad Max rip-offs as part of a new sense of freedom that I didn’t need to pay for each rental but rather could see as many movies as possible if I simply watched them fast and returned them fast to Netflix. It was in this era that I fell in love with Mr. Enzo G. Castellari (highlights being Street Law, Keoma, and Inglorious Bastards). In that context, I actually wasn’t the biggest fan of Warriors Of The Wasteland aka The New Barbarians. But this revisit helped me see the film through new eyes and while it’s still dimestore Road Warrior… the more Road Warrior the better in my book. What’s still not great about the film is the location work; the entire thing is shot in a gravel pit, the lead actor being outshined at every moment by Fred Williamson and all the villains and supporting cast, and the hysterical Mad Max Lite post-apocalyptic vehicles. In my man Castellari’s mind, nothing is more futuristic than DOMES! Just slap a dome anywhere you can and call it the apocalypse!
A postapocalyptic, screen-ready, instrument of death from Director George Miller’s seminal motion picture Mad Max.A postapocalyptic, screen-ready, instrument of death from Director Enzo Castellari’s similar motion picture The New Barbarians.
I first stumbled upon The New Barbarians in my early 20s during a late-night YouTube crawl, and quickly found myself baffled with delight at this Italian post-apocalyptic fever dream of ramshackle death-trap cars, Queer death cults, and synth-fueled fury.
On its face, Barbarians (released stateside as Warriors of the Wasteland) seems like nothing more than a cheaply made Road Warrior ripoff, made alongside its Warriors mockbuster cousins The Bronx Warriors and Escape from the Bronx in a 6-month period by director Enzo G. Castellari. There’s a stoic, masculine hero, a plucky (if grating) kid mechanic sidekick, a caravan of world-weary survivors, and an endlessly marauding gang of BDSM-inspired villains. But as one progresses through this mucky green “wasteland,” there’s so many bombastic, scrappy moments to love that are wholly this film’s own.
For one–there’s commitment to the bit. Every character and contraption has explosive fuel in its veins, rigged to slow-motion explode at the slightest provocation. Many of these moments come from Fred Williamson’s badass bow-slinger Nadir, a fellow scavenger who rocks gold-plated armor and a gauntlet full of bomb-tipped arrows. If things don’t explode, they slice and dice; every car has some gonzo addition that stabs, burns, or mows down anything in its path, often accompanied by some Looney Tunes sound effects. The whole affair plays out not like Road Warrior, but the frenzied recap of a George Miller movie by a kid hopped up on sugar and adrenaline (or the screenwriter of Fast Five). Most of the film’s inventions feel so alien and impractical, from the bubble-domes on nearly every car to the way tents are constucted out of the flimsiest plastic pool floats. There isn’t a dedication to coherent world-building within the universe of the film, just what seems to have been readily available to the production at hand. Yet what Castellari and team are able to throw together with the barest of resources is itself a testament to Barbarians’ journeyman ingenuity, and the film ultimately delights audiences on a base, satisfying primal level. Barbarians is the kind of film where a dude’s head exploding after being hit with an arrow is met with either eye-popping guffaws or fist-pumping cheers.
The Templars also stand out as a refreshing antagonist in this genre wasteland, defined not by the usual desire to rebuild the world in their image but by their mission to finish the destruction the Apocalypse began. Reflecting the film’s sparse production resources, there’s little for these survivors to fight over, let alone live for—making the Templars’ scorched-earth philosophy feel disturbingly coherent as our heroes fight back for survival. While the film’s creators surely didn’t intend such depth–and its practice is viscerally reprehensible–the Templars’ warped embrace of hedonistic and exploitative sexual violence as a tool of control adds even more disturbing layers of unsettling nihilism to their ideology of ensuring humanity’s stagnation rather than its renewal. It’s a layer of fatalism that feels distinctly Queer in its rage and transgression, spitting in the face of the hopeful “go forth and multiply” mandate that usually closes out post-apocalyptic fare. more overt here than in the subtle coding of, say, The Road Warrior. This grotesquely memorable aspect of The New Barbarians ultimately becomes emblematic of the film’s unabashed commitment to the ethos of its homemade apocalypse.
Do you like lavender mohawks, huge shoulder pads, and decapitations? Do you also love child mechanics, horrible sound design, and exploding body parts? Well, have I got the film for you.
If looking for any depth, substance, or much discernible plot – look elsewhere. But if you want quirky and unique style, fun early 80s effects, bizarre costuming choices, and Fred “The Hammer” Williamson – look no further.
It’s hard for me to write with any real focus, because, to me, this film is essentially just dumb fun. I enjoyed it but mostly for its nonsensical design decisions and fun kills. Then again, what else can we really ask for in a post-apocalyptic ripoff exploitation film?
…YOU KNOW THAT’S ACTUALLY A CHRISTMAS MOVIE, RIGHT?
To ring in the Holiday Season, the Cinapse team has assembled all of our favorite movies full of Holiday Cheer–all while pretending to be anything but a Christmas movie. Our list for Noel Actually includes Sylvester Stallone action epics, Medieval twists of fate, a whimsical anime take on the Biblical Magi, the rebirth of Humanity, and of course, Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman–ensuring December has a wide spectrum of cinema for the nice and naughty alike to enjoy.
My hope is that by reading through this, you too will feel bold enough to dive into the horror series with a group of friends and use this list of ten films to help get you started with what I believe is the most entertaining and interesting film genre right now.
