• Produced and directed by Bobby Suarez
• Written by Ken Metcalfe
  • Starring
  • Michael James
  • Deborah Moore
  • Franco Guerrero
  • Michael Cohen

I picked up this video from the previously-viewed bargain bin, lo these many moons ago. I never realized what it was that I had.

By which I mean, I had seen the first twenty minutes of it years ago with my friend Chris, after having recorded it off late-nite TV. We laughed at how impressively lame it was, then eventually got bored and did something else.

Well, this time, Chris was several counties away, and everyone else in my house was asleep, so there wasn’t anyone to distract me when things got boring. But that’s okay; I just let my mind wander, and everything seemed fine.

Speaking of wandering, that’s what a good portion of this movie is. Wandering. Our protagonists are a five-man party of scavenger-survivors who wander the requisite post-Boom desert for no given reason. They might have been kicked out of somewhere by the fashion police; their accessorized motorcycle outfits make them look like The Village People. (Wait, there’s no Indian. Okay, make that Judas Priest.) Plus, they have this thing for big quilted shoulder pads; one guy looks like he’s wearing saddles on each shoulder. Their leader is Trapper (Michael James, I assume — the end credits don’t match performers up with character names), a man so stoic that he doesn’t have to act. He just has to lead. As they wander.

“We’re just looking for the YMCA.”

Their wandering takes a different direction when they run across a similar band of ruffians. Well, not really similar; I mean, they do wear leather and shoulder pads and all that, but these guys are also keeping captured slaves to taunt. That makes them distinctly evil, so the somewhat gooder good guys take them out in a fist- and gun-fight. (Watch those guns. They’ve got the niftiest bullets, I tell you. Sometimes, they can take out an opponent without leaving a mark, Western style. Other times, they can blow a tree in half.) But the fight almost goes against them — until a mysterious mountain man leaps out and decides things in our heroes’ favor. If you can imagine an Indian with a pseudo-afro, then you can picture this new figure, who introduces himself afterward as Anook (I think — see the earlier complaint about the credits), and shares his food with them. They’re amazed by quality of his vittles; fresh fruit sure beats century-old Spam! His explanation is simple; he’s from a magical fertile mountain where people live forever in luxury. Oh, and by the way, there are scores of lonely women.

Trapper’s men never question whether a colony of affluent women would want to be visited by a handful of scruffy, smelly bachelors with bad fashion sense; they just take Anook up on his offer to follow him back home. And so very soon…

Attack of the Jungle Butt!!

…we’re in a locale that’s pretty uncommon for a low-budget post-apoc stinker: A jungle. (Say hello to cheap Philippines locations.) Not only that, but the party also manages to cross the only rope bridge suspended over a deep ravine in all of Moviedom which doesn’t collapse under their feet. But the jungle is dangerous in other ways: they are attacked by natives! (You know, dark-skinned fellows wearing grass wigs and garish body paint. “Natives.” No matter where you are in the world, that’s what “natives” look like.) They manage to fight them off once, but sheer weight of numbers (plus the fact that their bullets aren’t consistently exploding things anymore) leads them to capture. They are then subjected to a native dance designed to make them plead for the release of death (I think so — at least, that’s the reaction I had). Death seems certain — until they’re rescued, by the two slaves they rescued out on the desert! Boy, what are the odds?

It doesn’t take them long before they run across MORE hostile natives, though. But these ones… If this movie has any claim to fame, it’s the fact that it’s got a tribe of jungle dwarves who wear Kabuki-style face paint and speak with chipmunk voices. Somehow, I wish the movie had been about them instead of five scruffy guys in leather.

“There’s Noh business like show business, like Noh business I Noh…”

But even better — they’re IMMORTAL Kabuki dwarves! After they’ve been wasted once, their wounds all heal and they come back to attack again, until Anook reveals they’re really on his side, here to help “usher” Trapper’s men into the fabled city. (And to add some Kabuki dwarves to the movie.) Because it’s really hard to persuade five lonely men to visit a pseudo-Mayan city populated almost entirely by statuesque eternally-young blondes who really aren’t turned on by Kabuki dwarves.

Their queen, Shela or Sheba or Shira or Shiva (my kingdom for clear looping and/or closing credits!), decked out in high heels and lamé wraps, immediately takes a fancy to Trapper, while the other girls are content to split up the three other able-bodied men. (The token old guy, Doc, isn’t really in prime condition any more. But that’s okay; he’s a self-confessed Man of Science, and we all know they really don’t mind all those lonely nights.) The only one who isn’t ecstatic about the new blood is Gurik/Garak/Gorek/whateverthehell, the whitehaired high priest of the city’s temple. (Actually, he’s the only priest. And the only full-sized male resident.) He used to be the queen’s squeeze, but I guess a hundred and fifty years with the same mate can be tiring for even the most dedicated monogamist.

All this, and a face too!

Trapper’s men, naturally, are eager to get down to business (so much so that they don’t even feel a bit silly walking around decked as they have been), but there’s a catch: They have to wait for the fertility rite of the full moon. So the men walk around thinking about old nuns and dead kittens, while Gorook tries to find a way to get the men to voluntarily sneak away and escape.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: The fertility ritual’s got sinister overtones, and since immortal women usually need other people’s lifeforce or somesuch to stay young, the poor men are going to be led by their lusts to their gruesome dooms. Right? Well, I don’t think that it’s too much of a spoiler to tell you that, nope, nothing bad happens. After waiting for most of the movie, the men finally get dragged off to separate huts, each with a handful of girls of their very own, and dot dot dot. The dot dot dots get spelled out even more with Strapper and the queen, who get sweaty behind gossamer curtains while the saxophone love theme from some other movie plays.

Eventually, of course, the spat between Queen and Priest will come down to blowing things up (bedding down the wandering warrior always exacerbates these rifts), plus some mutant attacks. But hey — the men are still left with a hungry bunch of women who don’t know what a sharp-dressed man really is, so it’s sort of a happy ending. Except for Doc.

Garook shows why it’s so important to have your prescription checked regularly.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that post-apocalyptic movies, especially those produced by Euro-exploitation auteurs, mostly recycled the old Spaghetti Western tropes with rusty metal thrown in. Here, I suppose, the innovation is that the post-apocalyptic movie has been cross-bred with the jungle adventure, another Eurotrash specialty. (We don’t quite venture into the realm of the cannibal flick, though — I think cannibal Kabuki dwarves might have been too much even for me.)

And in conclusion…. Hm. I don’t have one. It’s a pretty forgettable movie, really, despite the odd touches. The dialogue is as leaden as the actors’ faces are immobile, and the plot meanders like it was made up on the spot. It’s bad, but pretty unremarkable in its badness. In other words, I expect someone will be schlepping the DVD version any minute now.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 50, plus 1 deer and 1 chicken
• breasts: 33 (coulda counted some twice, though)
• pasty white guy’s butts: 1
• explosions: 47
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0