New Gladiators, The (1983)

Posted on Mar 19, 2003 under Sci-fi |

aka Fighting Centurions, aka Rome, 2072 A.D., aka Warriors of the Year 2072

Directed by Lucio Fulci
Written by Elisa Briganti, Cesare Frugoni, Lucio Fulci, and Dardano Sacchetti
Starring
- Jared Martin
- Fred Williamson
- Howard Ross
- Eleanor Gold
- Cosimo Cinieri

Badmovies.org reviews Rollerball (1975)
Scifilm.org reviews Rollerball (2002)
Jabootu.com reviews Deathsport (1978)

The subject under discussion is deadly sports, and given that modern cultural awareness of sports is largely imparted through TV, it’s no surprise that the majority of movies reviewed in this little mini-fest will revolve around televised deadly sports (many of which take Rollerball as their template). In the interests of full disclosure, I probably ought to tell you that I’m about the least sports-minded person of my gender. I wasn’t terribly good at them as a child, and never enjoyed the idea of exercise for its own sake enough to participate in activities at which I sucked. And the idea of watching other people play sports… boy, that one never sunk in for me. Seems about as much fun as watching other people play Monopoly or work out on the treadmill. Yeah, I can understand if it’s your kid out there on the court or the field; then you’re there not because of the sport, but because of the person. But our culture’s overwhelming obsession with vicarious sports is frankly puzzling to me, especially the way in which individuals will seize on a particular team as being “theirs” for no geographic or qualitative reason. I’m just stumped.

Hey! Who let Liza Minnelli redecorate the Coliseum?

Movies about sports, those I can understand. Add characterization, narrative tension, judicious editing, and an appropriate score, and any activity can be made interesting — chess, mountain-climbing, even touchy-feely relationship stuff. So I can enjoy a sports movie. Especially a brutal, fight-to-the-death sports movie. Especially one which can provide interesting social commentary on pop culture, the media, and the bloodthirstiness of modern “civilized” audiences.

Not that this movie does any of those things. It’s just a stupid futuristic gladiator movie.

In the year 2072 (we are ponderously informed by a voiceover), the viewing audience has become addicted to violence through exposure to decades of war. (That’s funny — usually, nothing cures a longing for vicarious brutality like personal exposure.) Two worldwide networks are at war for the eyeballs of the people:

- Seven Seas, whose top-rated program is “Killbike,” a full-contact motorcross game whose current champion and superstar is Drake (Jared Martin);

“To survive our challenge, you must first survive… our fashions!”

- and WBS, whose top-runner, “The Danger Game,” trails “Killbike” pathetically, mostly because the game puts contestants into virtual-reality endurance contests of horrific death. Apparently, future viewers know it just isn’t real, and aren’t as captivated. (Boy, as soon as modern audiences get that sophisticated, pro wrestling is in for a nosedive. So is Cinemax, for that matter.)

So in desperation and at the insistence of his higher-ups, WBS exec Cortez (Claudio Cassinelli in a terrible haircut) starts working on a new, ultimate spectacular: “Battle of the Damned,” a last-man-standing contests between condemned convicts. And to give it the added star power, he proposes to get Drake on board. How? Oh, by devious means, naturally…

…To wit, a trio of tandem-whistling assassins go to Drake’s house and murder his wife. Rarely have I seen a scene which so obviously looked good on paper, yet proved laughable on screen. I mean, three guys in white suits ominously surround her, jauntily whistling together! That ranks slightly higher on the panic-o-meter than murderous line dancers. Nevertheless, it has the desired effect, i.e., she ends up dead just as Drake comes home, he jumps through the window into the house in a murderous rage, and next thing we know, he’s a convicted killer who’s opted to join on with “Battle of the Damned.”

**“Yeah, but I make this getup work.”**

He’s given a never-comes-off wristband and placed in the hands of the gladiator’s sadistic trainer/commandant, Raven (Howard Ross), who dresses in black fascist PVC like some kind of gay fetish nightclub act, along with his “Praetorians,” who get to do cool stuff like ride their motorcycles around all the landmarks of Rome at night. (Hey, gotta spend that budget somewhere, right?) Drake also meets his bunkmates, and though there are twenty or so gladiators, only a few ever make it on screen with him, including:

Abdul (Fred Williamson);
Akira (Al Yamanouchi, naturally — if you needed a skinny Asian fighter in Italian cinema in the ’80s, it was bound to be Yamanouchi);
Kirk (Al Cliver — and despite his character’s name, he’s actually playing the role of Chekov; need someone to scream or get hurt or beaten? Think Kirk!).

Amid plenty of filler training footage (shot with a strobelight for that added psychedelic effect), Drake also gets a session in the comfy chair with pretty showrunner Sarah (Eleanor Gold), who forces Drake to relive his memories of the night of the murder in order to pinpoint his psychological limits, and discovers — gasp! — he’s not a murderer! No, there was someone else there that night, killing the three goons with a laser rifle that melted their faces right off, almost as if they were nothing but wax FX props. Why did Sarah dig this out? Shucks, Drake just didn’t seem like a killer to her.

Which, if you think about it, is ludicrous. I mean, what was his dayjob? That’s right, “Killbike.” In the little clip we saw that introduced Drake for us, we saw at least one other biker die gruesomely in flames. So it’s not like Drake hasn’t been party to unjustifiable deaths before. Is it supposed to recommend the guy’s character that he seems like someone who would kill only when it was for a paycheck, not out of rage?

Make your own Michael Jackson joke.

Anyway. While Drake and cohorts go through more “artsy” psychedelic training and taunt the Praetorians (since Drake realizes that they — well, he, really — are too valuable to the network to risk killing them with discipline), Sarah develops suspicions that “Junior,” the HAL-ripoff computer which advises the network, is manipulating their programming strategy for its own mysterious ends. This subplot, which gets her running around at night tracking down Junior’s retired programmer, doesn’t really add to the enjoyment of watching the movie, but does give us plenty of clunky dialogue lamenting the control computers exercise over us, and pontificating on whether computers have souls or an awareness of good and evil. Nothing spells good violent entertainment like puerile and poorly-translated philosophizing on computer ethics.

It takes a full hour to get to the actual gladiatorial combat, which starts out by placing the combatants in pseudo-Roman armor on motorcycles decked out with a cut-metal bird on the front of each (at least, I hope they were meant to be birds — they looked more like butterflies), with a weapon apiece, fighting each other in a obstacle-ridden coliseum. Following that, it’s motorized chariot time, with paired-off gladiators trying to get through the requisite number of laps while knocking opponents off their bikes. I appreciate the idea of variety in their weapons, but I think the guy with the flamethrower has a wee bit of an edge, don’t you?

**“Wait! I’m not supposed to be here — I was trying out for Starlight Express!”**

The toughest fight going on here, though, was my fight to stay awake. A large part of the problem is Riz Ortolani’s stultifying “score” — really just a single uninspired synth-and-electric-guitar phrase repeated with minimal variation for the entire ninety minutes. But that’s really a minor problem, compared to the fact that director Lucio Fulci simply can’t tell a coherent story. The work he’s best known and liked for are his dreamlike horror flicks like Zombie, City of the Living Dead, and The Beyond, which rely on nightmarish imagery and visceral grue for their limited appeal. But place the poor slob in a production where he’s supposed to communicate a linear plotline, and he’s as lost as a Newfoundlander in a round room, trying to find a corner to pee in.

All the same, though, given a choice between “Battle of the Damned” or any of the tawdry pseudo-reality shows that fill the broadcast line-ups, well, give me good clean violence any day.