Mad Max Ripoffs: Warriors of the Apocalypse!

This title font looks like something from a straight-to-DVD Barbie movie from the 90s.

Just as Albert Pyun used the marketability of the post-apocalyptic genre in the 80s as a springboard to explore his noir detective and Walter Hill fantasies, so Warriors of the Apocalypse, AKA Searchers of the Voodoo Mountain, quickly veers off in the direction of lost-civilisation discovery flicks like Siren of Atlantis, Hammer's She, or The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak. This article contains spoilers, but since the movie makes no sense it would be more truthful to say this article contains non-sequiturs.

Inside this aesthetic are two wolves. One is Rob Halford. The other is the cop from the Village People. But I'm not sure which is which.

Our protagonists are a Mad Maxian rabble of post-nuke leatherbois who seem to tool around the desert wasteland aimlessly until, as luck would have it, they run into a mysterious immortal who intervenes in a fight with an enormous fatass and his parasol-bearer, apparently over the plight of two black guys he keeps as slaves and feeds on scraps. Like everything in movies, this was probably meant as brown-nosing progressive sociopolitical commentary but ended up hilariously raycist instead.

I have a dream that one day little black filmmakers and little white filmmakers alike will stop embarrassing themselves with this crap.

The mysterious immortal leads our heroes into a lush jungle that apparently exists right next door to the desert, where they are immediately attacked by a succession of tribal hunter-gatherer types ranging from Pygmies to Amazons to this guy:

Remember Star Wars Kid? This is him now. Feel old yet?

At first the Village People easily defeat their attackers, since they have firearms that appear to shoot explosive projectiles, while the hunter-gatherer bros have spears and aren't much good with them. They run into more trouble with the Pygmies, whose leader, this vaguely androgynous shaman type in spoopy makeup whom I shall call Marilyn Manlet, has the ability to heal them back from death with psychic powers.

*Eric Cartman voice* neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh, pewwwww

This leads to ROUND TWO, in which the Pygmies catch up to our heroes and proceed to beat on them with wildly improbable success.

It doesn't seem to occur to this guy that he can just pick up his assailant and throw him literally about twenty feet with no effort at all.

Finally the Village People reach the Land of the Yik-Yak, or to be more precise, the land of Sheila, whose name might be a sly reference to She, and her underappreciated high priest, Julian Assange.

Sheila has kind of a Brazilian drag queen thing going on. She more like >she amirite?

Much like the real Assange, this character does nothing wrong but gets destroyed for it anyway, making this B-joint oddly prescient.

The Village People find their new home is a paradise of plenty, with all the food and female attention they could want - only they can't leave. Since everywhere else in the world seems to be a post-nuke desert, I'm not even sure why this condition strikes them as a problem, but they have to pull the thread, and soon all manner of secrets about the Land of the Yik-Yak are revealed, such as that Assange has managed to make everyone eternally young and have psychic powers by harnessing an underground reactor, because at least one 80s screenwriter was still going by the 50s B-movie consensus that atomic energy is basically magic.

The aesthetic shifts from Mad Max ripoff to jungle adventure to Dr No lair hit like a Mr Bungle song.

The movie comes to a head when Sheila seduces the leader of the Village People and openly plots with him to team up to get rid of Assange right in front of Assange, prompting a showdown in which Sheila and Assange shoot lasers at each other from their eyes. During this confrontation, radioactive mutants show up and revolt, causing Sheila to go full Samson option and blow up her entire compound with a cannon hidden in her throne.

Boy, that escalated quickly. That really got out of hand.

Perhaps, as in greatest movie of all time Zardoz, the idea is that the phony utopia bred in its spoiled rulers a desire for self-destruction; that the essence of fulfilling life is found in struggle; that Howard's triumphalist normative barbarism trumps Lovecraft's neurotic death-grip on the guard rails of civilisation as the height of man's potential. Maybe this movie is actually profound and great. And wouldn't that be the most shocking twist of all?

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: 0.

SHOULDER PADS: they seem to be incorporated in most of the Village People's character designs.

CUSTOM CARS: not even one.

MUTANTS: some guys with radiation burns who limp around in the underground lair.

GOGGLES: we're counting gas masks so yes.

TOTAL: 3/5 - the most post-apocalyptic Henry Ryder Haggard pastiche ever filmed.