Wednesday, 12 August 2020

Mad Max Ripoffs: Exterminators of the Year 3000!

Spoilers.

nee-naw-nee-naw


As usual, there is an arbitrary shortage in the post-apocalypse. This time it's water again. Our main plot involves a boy and his hamster travelling in search of a mythical stash of H2O, but first we're treated to a completely pointless chase scene between a couple of cops and a man named literally Alien.


As is often the case with character design in these movies, they were going for grizzled badass but they wound up with ambiguously gay.
Alien casually wasting the most valuable resource in the world by dribbling it down the side of his mouth.


Alien starts off in possession of an especially tricked-out car, the Exterminator (presumably of the Year 3000). It has bullet-proof shutters for its windshield and a camera relay so the driver can still see out front on an interior screen, shoots missiles, extends a spike for ramming, and, most conveniently of all, can re-inflate its tires when slashed.

Self-resolving plot points are a great way to pad your movie out to feature length.


Sadly for Alien, his ill-advised bout of shenanigans with the cops leads to the capture of this OP vehicle by what will turn out to be an old girlfriend of his, Trash (no relation to Linnea Quigley's character from Return of the Living Dead). Shortly after this debacle, Hamster Boy finds himself wandering the desert as the sole survivor of his expedition to find water, courtesy of villain Crazy Bull and his gang of Road Warrior cosplayers.


Crazy Bull calls his gang "mother grabbers". I'm not sure if this is meant to be the name of the gang or a workaround for "motherfuckers" that allowed the movie to be released with a lower age rating in the English speaking market. It might be their actual name though, in the tradition of the Gayboy Berserkers and Smegma Crazies.
That face u make when h8ers aren't feeling ur eyebrow tutorial


Hamster Lad and Ayylmao team up to find the water, with Alien periodically vacillating between designated heroism and half-hearted stabs at self-interest. At one point he abandons Hamster Kid to the cosplayers, which made me smile, but then the movie bitched out and had him return to save the little brat. It would all have been so much funnier if he were just an absolute dickhead the entire time, but it was not meant to be.


I think the hamster simply disappears from the movie at some point, although it might have died, I forget. Later he turns out to have a robotic arm for some reason.

What is what-the-fuck hilarious though is the ending, in which Black Chick Wolverine (no doubt coming soon to a theater near you), in her dying moment of spite, releases all the water our dubious heroes have collected while they charge off to fight Crazy Bull.

"revenge is a dish best served completely pointless" - ancient mother-grabber proverb


They go back for another tanker-load, but by the time they get there someone blows up the facility.

The first time I saw this I misunderstood and thought it was the good guys waiting for the water delivery giving up and committing mass suicide, which would have been way better.


The movie should have ended there, but instead it just starts to rain out of nowhere. Though less funny than total failure, this is still funny as it means everything in the whole movie was just a waste of time (and lives), as all our heroes had to do was wait for it to rain. It's like the filmmakers are underlining in red marker what a waste of time it was for you to watch this POS, and for that, they have my undying respect.

Post-apocalypse checklist:


MOHAWKS: 0.

SHOULDER PADS: a few are spotted among Crazy Bull's gang.

CUSTOM CARS: the Exterminator and a few others.

MUTANTS: not unless you count the kid's robot arm.

GOGGLES: spotted among Crazy Bull's gang.

TOTAL: 3/5 - mid-range post-apocalypticism