Mad Max Ripoffs: Clash of the Warlords!

Is 1985's Clash of the Warlords, AKA Mad Warrior, the shittiest Mad Max ripoff of all? Yes.

The version I watched on YouTube opens with a two-minute-long freeze frame of this explosion. Presumably it was intended to be filled in with opening titles or voiceover narration, but nah. Leave a comment if your version played differently, because I'm dying for that deep lore.

In this spin on the post-nuke world, goofily costumed baddy Malzon (????, Mad Warrior) entertains himself by making all his best fighters off one another in gladiatorial axe fights, which is strange, because he later muses that his main disadvantage against his enemies is fewer men. I disagree with this assessment, though, because it's clear his real main disadvantage is that he's a dribbling idiot even by post-nuke megalomaniac standards.

Malzon looks like the one guy at every Halloween party who put effort into his costume and now feels like a NERD.

Nor, dear reader, is this solely my assessment: for Malzon goes into an ear-biting meltdown every time he sees the moon, at which point his own goons chain him up and openly laugh at him for the gigatard he is. There's nothing quite like an outnumbered, mentally challenged villain whose own minions treat him as a huge joke to instill fear into the hearts of viewers.

Without his Phantom of the Opera mask, he looks like a Filipino Toxic Avenger.

If you think this lunar fixation will come into play at a timely moment to change the outcome of the movie, you'd be wrong: it's never mentioned again. Rather, his not particularly tragic downfall is precipitated by the escape of one of his gladiators, Rex, who goes to join the rebels from Return of the Jedi. That might seem like just a throwaway comparison, but this fucking gem has the brass balls to close out on a lightsaber fight straight out of a Star Wars fan film:

I love how there's no attempt to hide or fudge it whatsoever: they even use the same colour-coding.

It's clear director Willy Milan (I swear this is the name he's credited with on The Movie Database) just dumps whatever he liked in other movies into his, which is endearing, but incoherent. The movie literally ends with Rex riding off on a horse because I guess Ol' Willy saw a western once. For all its faults, Clash boasts one ace that sets it apart from the pack: its searing Top Gun Ray Bans beer commercial cock rock soundtrack is insultingly good for so farcical a project. If a cleaned-up version exists anywhere, send it my way, because it stomps absolute prostate.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: none.

SHOULDER PADS: special mention must go to the female lead's choice to don gold-plated ones, which in a low-res YT upload make her look like something off the Soldiers Under Command album cover.

Damn, Michael Sweet looks like that?

CUSTOM CARS: we have to count this dorky looking tricycle:

Lord Humungus and Wez would have raped this guy so many times.

MUTANTS: presumably Malzon.

GOGGLES: IDK, I don't recall any.

TOTAL: 3/5 - uuuurghhh

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.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Six String Samurai!

Calling the greatest movie of all time, Six String Samurai, a Mad Max ripoff is a bit of a stretch as, like Albert Pyun's Radioactive Dreams, it seems to owe more to Streets of Fire than Wheels of Fire. In 1957 there was the usual nuclear war, but this time none other than Elvis Presley rose up from the ashes to become King of Lost Vegas, the last bastion of hope in the wilderness. Now the King is dead and our hero, referred to as Buddy, is marching to Lost Vegas to claim his throne.

Buddy's look could be described as "disheveled", but I'm not sure he was ever sheveled to begin with.

The movie opens with a young boy witnessing a massacre and following our bespectacled swordsman as a substitute for his late family. Buddy spends the first part of the movie trying to ditch the kid before (spoilers!) eventually warming to him (somewhat). For he knows that death is on his trail in the form of villain Top Hat.

In an inversion of ZZ Top logic, he is in fact the one in the top hat.

Few post-apocalyptic movies play as fast and loose with style, tone and logic as Six String Samurai, which slips deftly between MTV surrealism, 90s camp and neo-western cool, features a colourful array of characters ranging from cavemen who pursue our heroes in the slowest car chase ever filmed to gas mask wearing cultists who worship a wind farm, and by its final stages boldly commits to unapologetic supernatural shenanigans as Top Hat really turns out to be Death himself, or the spirit of heavy metal, or something.

You should not be permitted to attend rock concerts short of this level of drip.

My limited research (I read a couple YouTube comments) leads me to believe this gem was made on a small budget and still flopped, with no one involved in it going on to do much else, except the composer, who seems to have scored gigs in the Fast and the Furious and M*rvel C*nematic Un*verse series. But in a way this gives it a doomed cult classic cred that feels appropriate to the material. I can't see it playing the same if any of the actors had gone on to be recognisable stars.

The guy who plays Buddy is in fact great, and his anonymity in movie history makes him a real man-with-no-name archetype.

If you pay to go to a film festival you'll come away with the impression that indie productions have to be black-and-white dramas about gay cowboys eating beans. Six String Samurai shows the world what they could be instead. The fact this isn't in that 1001 Movies To See Before you Die book is a travesty typical of the state of publishing. Watch Six String Samurai.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: 0.

SHOULDER PADS: nah.

CUSTOM CARS: the cavemen drive one.

MUTANTS: there's a hip hop dwarf who leads a gang of fishing net clad guys who gargle their lines, so your guess is as good as mine.

GOGGLES: I guess the gas mask guys count.

TOTAL: 3/5 - mid post-apocalypse of the day.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Radioactive Dreams!

You remember the nuclear war in 2010, right?

Albert Pyun remembers.

The name Albert Pyun is well-known among B-movie dorks for his various cyborg flicks, but it's clear that his real love is Walter Hill's top kino Streets of Fire. Pyun even filmed an unofficial sequel to Streets in 2012, which I have yet to see because I'm not honestly sure it was ever released, and checking would mean opening a whole other tab.

Rejects from The Warriors or rejects from The Lost Boys? You decide.

Nonetheless, the spirit of Streets pervades this 1985 Pyunkino every bit as much - perhaps more - than that of The Road Warrior. Like Streets, this movie mashes genres, lurks in deep shadows, and has dramatic scenes set to diegetic female renditions of Jim Steinman-esque anthems.

Seldom has live-music-based nightlife enjoyed such a resurgence after the bomb.

Philip and Marlowe are brothers who sat out the war in a bunker stocked with pulp detective novels and emerge into the post-nuke world expecting it to be like 40s film noir instead of 80s shoulderpadcore, leading to a number of high-larious misunderstandings, mostly revolving around the different meanings of the word "dick".

Fortunately the idea of the 80s collectively shoving the 40s in the locker is funny enough to sustain even the 106-minute cut of this thing.

While it would be easy for the reddit letter media fan to dismiss Pyun's work as kitschy drivel, Radioactive Dreams has a pretty strong throughline of coming-of-age, innocence lost and wisdom hard-won that puts anything released post, say, 2019 to shame. Give it a spin (or don't).

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: a couple show up on extras.

SHOULDER PADS: the bikers at the start have them.

CUSTOM CARS: nah.

MUTANTS: two kids are referred to as "The Disco Mutants", though they don't look mutated to me. There's also an enormous rat the size of a bus.

GOGGLES: Also sported by the bikers.

TOTAL: 4/5 - Pyunkino

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