- Directed by Augusto Tamayo San Roman and Kevin Tent
- Written by Len Jenkin and Dan Kleinman
- Starring
- Dack Rambo
- Clare Beresford
- Meshach Taylor
- Produced by Mike Elliott and Luis Llosa
- Executive produced by Roger Corman
Here we go again! The members of the B-Masters Cabal have conspired again to treat you to a set of coordinated reviews. Since last time it was Apocalyptic movies, the logical followup is Post-Apocalyptic movies. All of the following reviews should be posted by this Saturday:
Damnation Alley, reviewed by The Bad Movie Report
A Boy and His Dog, reviewed by Badmovies.org
Warrior of the Lost World, reviewed by Oh the Humanity!
Robot Holocaust, reviewed by Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension
The Quiet Earth, reviewed by And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
Warriors of the Wasteland, reviewed by B-Notes
The Executioners, reviewed by the latest initiates of the Cabal, Stomp Tokyo
I appear to have been cursed.
I thought I’d take the easy way out for this B-Masters Festival and just grab something suitable off my shelf. Browsing the backs of the videos I haven’t watched, I found Future-Kill, an ’80s film with a cool (though thoroughly unrelated) H.R. Giger cover. The back cover showed a guy dressed in studded leather, with a metallic mohawked helmet; the description metioned a grim world where gangs battle in cities reduced to battlegrounds.
So I sat down to watch it last Saturday, and found that it’s not remotely post-apocalyptic; it’s instead a contemporary (well, 1984) setting with a bunch of frat boys who run afoul of a bunch of militant anti-nuke activists who inexplicably like to dress like rejected extras from Blade Runner.
Okay…
So I browed my shelf a little longer, and a little more thoroughly, and found a film called Wired to Kill. The back cover had all the right phrases: “bleak future,” “a deadly virus has wiped out most of the United States population,” “mutant gangs terrorize and victimize the few survivors”… Yep, the back cover seemed to fit the bill. I sat down to watch it Tuesday night.
Only the back cover lied! The premise is that small quarantine areas have been established to contain a deadly virus, and there is no law enforcement within those areas; most people are trying to maintain a semblance of suburban normality (which isn’t that hard, since they still get manufactured goods and TV broadcasts from the rest of the country), but a few bad apples are spoiling it.
Disgusted, I went out to the video store and looked for something to fit the last-minute bill. Presented with a couple of choices, I finally lit upon Ultra Warrior. The back of the box was very specific: there’s a radiation-scarred wasteland, mutant clans trying to protect themselves from sadistic warriors, lots of desert photos and studded leather… and the cover illustration was by Boris Vallejo. Jackpot.
Well, in a sense. This certainly was a post-apocalyptic movie in the accepted sense of the word.
It’s also one of the worst excuses for filmmaking to besmirch my VCR.
See, this came from New Horizons, Roger Corman’s company. Now, sometimes Roger will spring for enough money to make an acceptable product; other times, he’ll cut every corner imaginable in order to turn out filler on the cheap.
In this case, Ultra Warrior was filled with stock footage from every other post-holocaust film New Horizons ever made. The only one I specifically recognized was Dune Warriors, but the transitions between stock and original footage were obvious; costumes were different, film stock was different, weather and landscape were different… In addition, just to fill out the running time and in a vain attempt to add production value, footage from Battle Beyond the Stars, Lords of the Deep, and a number of war movies was added.
The result is such a Frankensteinian creation that it felt like the post-nuke version of Bimbo Movie Bash.
To wit:
We open with the obligatory montage which explains the future world, along with the equally-obligatory voice-over, that of a gentle mutant girl (whom we’ll meet later as “Grace”): That after the Space Defense System has an oopsie and bombs the world, the rich survivors form huge fascist cities, while the poor are forced into the radioactive wastelands and get mutated (which, in most cases, means that they get big ears. I’m not kidding). But that’s not all; out there, the mutants, whom Grace describes as “a simple spiritual group of genetically deformed nomads,” are then enslaved by miners who force them to mine for them, as well as “entertain” them. (This is all told under a slew of stock footage, including satellites, mushroom clouds, gleaming cities, various post-apoc combat scenes, and a four-breasted woman. That’s the “entertaining” part.)
Meanwhile. Dack Rambo, aka “Kenner,” is hanging around a strip bar with his young partner, Philip, listening to a spliced-in ’80s band play “The House of the Rising Sun.” (This gratuitous strip bar setting, along with the afore-mentioned four-breasted woman, contributes greatly to the final breast count.) They’re heading out on a mission tomorrow from Kansas City (that’s Big, Bad Fascist Kansas City to you) into the radioactive wasteland that used to be the eastern seaboard, now called “Oblivion.” They’re to check radation to see if it’s okay for the government to move in to mine zirconium. What? The future is lacking in fake diamond rings? No, the purpose of the zirconium is explained (after a fashion) later.
By way of extra exposition (and footage), Kenner talks to his superior on the videophone, who recounts that an alien race has been attacking their Mars outposts, where their main zirconium mines are, thus making it imperative that they find a source on Earth. (This attack is illustrated with footage from Battle Beyond the Stars.)
Oh yeah, before bed Kenner picks up a woman and goes back to his room for sex with her. Or rather, he goes back to his room, at which point we’re treated to a stock footage sex montage. That’s right, folks, the people having sex aren’t even the people who went into the room to have sex. And it’s pretty obvious; although they did they tried their best to avoid head shots, the guy in the sex scene has obviously longish, blond hair, whereas Dack Rambo’s hair is dark and short.
Next morning, it turns out that rookie Philip has promised some girl, Sheila, that they can take her into Oblivion for a look-see. As improbable as that sounds, Philip even more improbably manages to persuade Kenner to let her go. (Warning: Even more improbably, Sheila will amount to absolutely zero in the plot.) On the trip out into the wastes, Philip talks about how is father, a rich so-and-so, used to run a zirconium mine on the ocean floor, and the sights to be seen down there — sights shown to us as stock footage from Lords of the Deep, right down to the glowing orbs (identified by Philip as “zirconium gelsacs”). Alas, an earthquake destroyed the mine, cutting off yet another precious source of zirconium. Thus ends another pointless stock footage occasion.
Stopping over in what I can only assume is an Oblivion country store (I hear their chili dogs are great), our party runs into crazy old Elijah, a black man in one of those South American stocking caps with the ear flaps who always refers to himself in the third person. This poor bastard is played by yet another poor bastard, Meshach Taylor, apparently in a dry spell between his runs of Designing Women and Dave’s World. He’ll turn out to be… well, only marginally more important to the plot than Sheila.
So after camping out a night, Kenner and crew discover a small mutant girl caught in a leg trap of some kind. It’s obviously futuristic, see, because it has an orange glowing pulsating something attached to it, even though putting an orange light would probably lessen its effectiveness as a surprise trap. On the other hand, it worked; maybe these “muties” have an iresistable affinity for orange. And maybe I’m thinking about this way too much. Anyway, Kenner heals the big-eared mutie girl’s leg with his med kit, then carries her off, trying to find her home.
Entering an abandoned industrial building of some sort, Kenner & crew are captured by muties, including Grace, who seems to have been blessed with an absence of big ears; her only visible mutation is an odd red line meandering down the left side of her face. Just as Kenner returns the girl, a bunch of bad guy slavers burst in and shoot up the place. Philip is killed (that’s okay, he was only dead weight anyway), and Kenner and Sheila are rounded up with the muties.
Some stock footage later, the muties are unloaded in yet another industrial site, where a silver-beared man in an immaculate magician’s tux and top hat introduces himself as the Bishop, the big bad guy who, you know, kidnaps muties to work for him. That night, the muties are put to work providing gladiatorial combat for the amusement of their human captors. This amusement consists of the motorcycle jousting from Dune Warriors, and swinging-from-a-rope jousting from a movie I didn’t recognize. (One of my greatest fears in life is that someday I’ll rewatch this movie, and I’ll be able to identify every piece of stock footage.) Waiting in a cage with the muties, Kenner gets to know a few of them: Grace, a mutie with a little crest on his head (known as Chickenhead), a mutie with a huge bloated cranium named “Big” (and it’s got to be one of the worst appliances I’ve ever seen — he looks like he’s wearing a flesh-colored beret), and a pale mutie girl who can pick up other people’s thoughts named Radio. (No, Radio doesn’t amount to anything in the plot either.)
When Kenner is dragged out for gladiatorial sparring, he easily kills his opponent and runs off, in the process starting a mutie revolt. Naturally, the entire breakout is stitched together from nighttime escape scenes in a dozen other movies; in the end, Kenner ends up in a beater car with the muties he’s met, heading for a mutie stronghold.
At this point, experiencing great pain in my temporal lobes, I glanced at my watch, hoping that somehow we were speeding through this ordeal. Imagine my horror: Only 30 minutes had passed.
Onward, then. Kenner explains the reason that they need zirconium [cue stock footage]: an alien race from a parallel universe has been wandering around the solar system, inexplicably turning the gas giants into small suns! And the zirconium is the substance needed to produce the zirconium bombs, which are Earth’s only chance at fending off the aliens!
And just as we dissolve back to the car after that stock footage, Grace tells her own story [cue stock footage again]: Her parents were apparently in a resistance movement, fighting a band of albino subterranean mutants from another movie. We get to see their capture and what looks like their escape, though Grace tells us they died in the tunnels.
Oh, by the way, Sheila — remember her? — got left behind, and is now being introduced to life in the Bishop’s harem.
Along the way, Kenner and the mutants find a baby abandoned for its deformities by the normals. Grace explains that once they were on the verge of curing their children’s mutations [cue footage from The Unborn], but their lab was destroyed before they could complete their research.
Now finally, at the main mutant base underneath (guess what) an industrial-type building, we see “Uncle Lazarus,” a green-faced weirdo who lives in a tank and to whom the muties look as a spiritual advisor. He tells them [cue footage] that their ancestors once believed in a Great White Wolf, who brought prosperity, and that when the Great White Wolf comes again, the land will become a paradise. Oh-kay…
But they’re interrupted by a big-ass hunting party, the biggest they’ve ever seen. [Which means lots and lots of stock footage of post-holocaust vehicles cresting stock footage hills and firing stock footage guns to cause stock footage explosions in stock footage buildings.] Grace is ready to lead her people in a last desperate stand, but Kenner has a bad idea. Instead, he goes and whittles a stick while sitting by one of the tunnel entrances, and when the hunting party comes along he gets them to follow him into the tunnel; when they reach an open area in the subterranea, the muties above drop an explosive truck down a shaft (or, more accurately, an explosive toy truck) which wipes them out.
As a reward for a job well done, Kenner goes and gets good and drunk; thus he misses it when Uncle Lazarus declares that Kenner is actually the Great White Wolf come back to them. He also declares (meaningfully for Grace) that “one of you will be chosen to carry his seed. Do this willingly, with passion and great gusto.”
Sometimes words fail me.
Next morning, Kenner’s puzzled that all the muties have loaded themselves into the hunting party vehicles and await his leadership on where to go. When Big and Chickenhead tell him of his “promotion” by Uncle Lazarus (who is, by the way, staying behind to die), he brushes it off with all the normal “I didn’t want to be your leader, I came out here with a job to do” stuff. But he gets into the lead vehicle with Grace.
They get a radio transmission from the Coliseum (that’s the Bishop’s base), wondering where the North patrol is. Kenner fakes being the patrol, and then orders the convoy to turn around; he’s going to lead them right into the Coliseum and defeat Bishop.
That night, they capture old Elijah skulking around (remember? the blot on Meshach Taylor’s resume?), and force him to tell them of the Coliseum’s defenses. Radio monitors his thoughts to make sure he’s telling the truth. (This is known as two unused characters in search of a purpose in the plot.)
Kenner goes on a walk, and now (in stark contrast to this morning) he tells her that he’s doing all of this for her people — and for her. After she asks him about where he comes from [at which he spins a stock footage tale of the fascist city], they have stock footage sex.
By the next night (or maybe it’s later the same night), they make it to the Coliseum, but the bad guys have figured out that it’s not really the North Patrol coming in. The requisite firefight ensues, in which the muties somehow produce firearms that they never had before and exchange bullets with the bad guys, and with the bad guys’ big flamethrower on a tower.
They finally trap the Bishop in his rooms, at which point he tears off his face and reveals — he’s a mutant too, with a big ugly face that couldn’t possibly have hidden under that mask! Then he drops a smoke bomb (there’s a reason he’s wearing that magician’s getup, I guess) and disappears down a trapdoor. And the idea that someone went to the trouble to set up a sequel to this monstrosity fills me with the giggles. What, there was some leftover stock footage that you didn’t use, or were you planning on using all the same footage again in the next one?
Oh yeah, they also rescue Sheila somewhere along the line, but since they did’t treat it as any big whup, neither will I.
So finally, Kenner goes back to the city (with Grace) to turn in his report which says they should pay the muties to mine the zirconium for them. He also includes a personal letter to the President, which contains the following howlers:
“I have discovered something in Oblivion — I have discovered myself.”
“Now I have learned to trust the harmony which comes when one listens to his heart. A heart joined by others beats stronger than any alien star converter.”
“The soul of a man is not measured by the height of his hat or the width of his shoe. Indeed not.”
Then he and Grace go “home” to Oblivion.
Finis.
The saddest thing here is good ol’ Dack Rambo. At one point he did have a career, having appeared on several soap operas (including a couple of seasons of Dallas, until his storyline was cut short by Pam’s season-long dream). It’s quite possible that in 1992 he was just picking up a paycheck like Meshach Taylor, ready to go back to his real life in the near future. But real life never continued. Rambo succumbed to AIDS in 1994; Ultra Warrior was his last acting work.
And that’s just plain sad.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 34
- breasts: 18 (it always helps the totals to have a four-breasted woman)
- explosions: 61 (it also helps to have the entire Roger Corman film library from which to splice big booms)
- dream sequences: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
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