Ever wonder what Mad Max would be like if it was a little weirder and a hell of a lot more offensive? Well don’t you worry there, sport, director Enzo G. Castellari has your back as his utterly deranged The New Barbarians (aka. Warriors Of The Wasteland) has everything a lover of exploitation flicks could ever want.
Part of a very loose trilogy that barely has an original concept between them (both 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Escape The Bronx liberally steal from The Warriors and Escape From New New respectively), Barbarians is the only one of the trio that goes full, George Miller-style, apocalyptic wasteland, but while it lacks the grandiose feel of those Aussie epics, the director of the original Inglorious Bastards and the decidedly un-original The Last Shark gives us comic book insanity, cars with giant drill-bits on them and even a two-for-deal featuring Fred Williamson and George Eastman. It’s an apocalypse like you’ve blatantly seen before – but still… not quite like this.
After being shown the fate of civilisation thanks to an adorable cardboard model getting blown up like it’s a school diorama on nuclear devastation, we’re introduced to the ravaged year of 1999 where a horde of genocidal killers known as the Templars ride around in tricked out golf carts, trying to put an end to the floundering human race for good. Led by the obviously deranged One, a homosexual despot who rips Bibles in half like phone books and utters such pearls of wisdom as “The world is dead! It raped itself!”, they whizz around a world that’s seemingly nothing more than a series of gravel pits, exterminating everyone they find
Opposing them – sometimes – is Scorpion, a former Templar who drives around in his gadget laden bubble car while trying to look dashing in a green, sheepskin jacket and as a result, One has developed an almost perverse need to see his nemesis captured alive. However, after an altercation that sees Mako – the mohawked maniac that One is grooming for leadership – have a fatal meeting with Scorpion’s axle, One’s mania increases.
Thankfully, Scorpion’s got some help in the form of Nadir, a gold plated archer whose armoury of exploding arrow certainly proves to be useful when fending off the Templar’s attacks.
But when the Templars target a group of survivors who might have actually discovered a place not ravaged by desolation and roving gangs of gay psychopaths, Scorpion has to drop the whole lone wolf schtick and become the saviour of humanity by donning some see-through, plexiglass armour, and facing down One and the Templars one final time.
It ain’t exactly politically correct, but then I guess the end of the world doesn’t have time to deal with such issues…
Italian rip-offs are quite possibly the most mixed bag you can ever hope to imagine, but even taken on their famously bizarre terms, Enzo G. Castellari’s The New Barbarians is simply off the fucking chain thanks to the fact that the whole thing feels a sexually confused fever dream caused by ingesting Guatemalan insanity peppers. I was quite enamored of 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Castellari’s first installment of this not-really-a-trilogy, but The New Barbarians is a whole other kettle of fish entirely.
The early scenes set the stage perfectly with a shot of a female skeleton wearing a spacesuit that, for some unfathomable reason, has boob windows, and from there on in things become rapidly more unhinged. I suppose we’d get to it sooner or later, so it’s best we get it out the way now – the villains in this movie are a cult of gay extremists who parade around the wasteland in puffy white shoulder pads and expansive quiffs looking for all the world like Imperial Stormtroopers designed by ABBA. However, while the notion of a group of nihilistic homosexuals trying to purge the world while still maintaining exemplary hair care is obviously tremendously offensive, and yet, governed by the whacked-out rules of 80s Italian exploitation movies, The New Barbarians proves to be something of a goldmine when it comes to so-bad-it’s-good currency.
The Templars are ruled by big George Eastman, a stalwart of Italian exploitation cinema who puts past performances as unkillable slashers and cannibalistic mutants to shame as he chews what’s left of the scenery and the fact that his merciless acolytes drive around in cars that literally look like golf carts with tin foil wrapped around them is just straight up ludicrous.
Elsewhere, Giancarlo Prete’s lead is such an unfocused hero, he makes the similarly flawed Max Rockatansky seem like he has a Superman-sized urge to help people in comparison. This guy literally drives around the apocalyptic future in a car that not only looks like that Homer Simpson designed it in that episode where he bankrupted his half brother, but it has some of the strangest features I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure if having a button that randomly ejects one of your doors is a plus, but I suppose that’s what you get when your genius mechanic ends up being the creepy little fucker from The House By The Cemetery, but on the other hand, a hidden drill bit and boot mounted mortar cannon certainly has its uses.
Finally, dressed up in the most ridiculous getup the costume department had to offer (and believe me, that’s fucking saying something) is Fred “The Hammer” Williamson who looks so lost as the arrow twanging Nadir, you can’t help but feel for the poor bastard as tries to play his character as motiveless, dystopian, headband wearing Apollo Creed in the face of growing ridiculousness. Still, he gets to play the ladies man, he has an array of exploding arrowheads attached to his weird, Infinity Gauntlet-like glove and at least he doesn’t have to run around in laughable, plexiglass armour like Scorpion does that just raise more questions than it answers. Just why is it see-through, and couldn’t have Scorpion simply put a shirt on under it?
Still, if Castellari doesn’t even have a fraction of George Miller’s world-building skills, at least he knows how to have fun, and as a result, he pushes the tiny budget as hard as it go while Claudio Simonetti’s pounding disco score sounds weirdly like “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics. Nadir shoots Templars in the neck with his exploding arrowheads which send their heads spiralling through the air; some guy gets stapped in the dick by a rear-mounted lance and in the movie’s most audacious scene, a captive Scorpion gets it full up the tailpipe when he’s actually raped by his homoerotic foe in a scene that goes full phantasmagoria with the lights and editing.
While a far distance from being a good film (or even a serviceable one), The New Barbarians still manages to be bizarrely entertaining as Castellari proves that good taste apparently has no place in the apocalypse.
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