Sometimes it’s nice to watch a focused, restrained motion picture that’s actually about something that makes you a better and smarter person for having watched it – and at other times it’s great to watch an Enzo G. Castellari film. An unabashed purveyor of Italian schlock, not only did he give us the original Inglorious Bastards and the absolutely hysterical Jaws ripoff, The Last Shark, but at the height of his exploitation powers, he delivered a masterstroke his his perfectly imperfectly Post Apocalyptic trilogy that shamelessly ripped off around twice as many movies than it actually contained.
Anyone not enamoured of the deja-vu afflicted films of the Italian film industry of the 70s and 80s might wanna give this one a wide berth – but if you like your heroes as stoic as mannequins, your violence plentiful and your plots stolen wholesale from other, better movies, allow the 1990: The Bronx Warriors to give you a hit of the good/bad shit.
In the “not too distant future” (e.g. around thirty years ago) crime has gotten so bad in New York, the authorities have declared the Bronx a no go zone after giving up trying to clean it up altogether. In this lawless void of hollowed out buildings and questionable fashions, numerous gangs struggle for supremacy amid the rubble which includes the motorcycle revving Riders, the snappily dressed Tigers or the rollerskating Zombies, but the equilibrium is thrown into disarray when the unscrupulous, arms manufacturering giant, the Manhattan Corporation starts sticking it’s oar in.
It seems that Ann, the 17 year-old heiress to the evil corporate entity, can’t bear the guilt of running such an evil business, so instead of – oh, I don’t know – trying to change it from within, she flees her responsibilities on her 18th birthday and decides to take refuge in the Bronx despite it being one of the most dangerous places on the earth. Of course, she’s barely there for five minutes before being attacked by the Zombies, but she’s rescued by the luxuriously maned leader of the Riders who (much like Forky from Toy Story 4) refers to himself as Trash. As they have so much in common (noticable lack of personality, great hair) the blank-faced gang leader and the inheritor of an evil corporation almost instantly fall in love, but this unsurprisingly causes its own complications.
The Manhattan Corporation want their future CEO back and hire psychopathic mercenary, the Hammer, to do it for them – but as he’s something of a meticulous sort of guy, he plans to accomplish it by distabling the thin harmony that exists between the gangs with the aid of Trash’s turncoat general, Ice and a local trucker named Hot Dog. As Hammer goes about killing random gang members and then framing our gangs for it, Trash desides to try and straighten things out by making the dangerous journey to have an audience with the charismatic leader of the Tigers, the Ogre, and suggest a union. But will this prove to be the opportunity that give Hammer the chance to nail them all?
1990: The Bronx Warriors is a film that cannot be considered good by conventional means, but that has never stopped Castellari before as he leeches the best bits from Walter Hill’s The Warriors and then exagerates it with random moments swiped from John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. In fact, the entire, loose trilogy seems to be entirely based around stealing vast plot points from either The Warriors, Escape From New York and Mad Max II – but if you’re going to be hideously unoriginal, at least Castellari’s thieving from the best.
The result is endlessly amusing as every directorial decision, both good and bad, usually result in some example of genius level idiocy that proves to be tremendously entertaining if you’re on its level. If Mark Gregory’s “heroic” Trash was anymore static, you’d swear he’s was dead from the neck up, but what he lacks in anything even remotely approaching charisma, he more than compensates with a dead-eyed line readings (“Look, it could be a pile of shit from somebody’s asshole!”) and a look that leans heavily on luxurious hair and shirt optional fashion choices. Similarly, Stefania Girolami’s clean cut female lead is rendered a blank faced personality void by some typically ropey dubbing, but where our to main protagonists will tease out the unintentional chuckles due to their astonishingly stilted deliveries, the rest of the cast suffer from a magnificent excess in personality that matches the director’s gonzoid energy. Obviously, the main culprit here is Fred Williamson who plays The Ogre like he’s an aggressively mustached character from a dystopian blaxploitation flick who somehow is clad in slick shirts and leather pants despite everyone living in a constant state of poverty, but when he isn’t whupping butt on an industrial scale, he’s commanding his underlings with the same, irrepressible style he brought to further Castellari extravaganzas. Someone else who popped up in more than one Castellari movie is Vic Morrow, who went from aping Robert Shaw in The Last Shark to chewing the dilapidated scenery here as the spectacularly deranged Hammer.
Exactly why a clearly grown-ass man would run around calling himself “Hammer” I don’t know (apologies to Fred Williamson), but the sight of the jobbing actor grabbing his role with both hands is a sight to see, especially when he dons a leather, Nazi style version of a NY police officer and starts ranting like a maniac (“Hammer is God! And God is Hammer”) while waving a flamethrower around. However, while other Castellari regulars such as Joshua Sinclair and George Eastman (who would infamously later go on to play a flamboyant genocidal homosexual in The New Barbarians) do their thing, one person who utterly refuses to be upstaged by his actors is the director himself who throws so much bewildering crap at the screen, you’ll often find yourself failing to care if any of it makes any logical sense. Why is there an actual random drummer tapping out the score during a tense meet up between the gang leaders, why do the Riders have rinky dink, light-up skulls on the handle bars of their bikes, why would the Zombies think spending all their time on rollerskates be a good idea for gang warfare and would the subterranean dwelling scavengers by constantly covered in cobwebs? It frequently refuses to make any sense, but you can’t deny that final battle, that sees fascist cops irresponsibly choose to wield flamethrowers while on horseback – I mean, it looks cool, but aiming must be a bitch and the horses don’t look happy at all. Even more alarming than the sight of genuinely terrified horses is a staggeringly down-beat ending that sees around 95% of the cast bite the big one, thus making the entirety of the previous ninety minutes amusingly pointless.
However, amusing and pointless are Castellari’s middle names – metaphorically speaking of course – and he ensures the pulp lunacy keeps flowing like really cheap wine. Is it in the same league as The Warriors? Oh behave, it’s barely in the same sport, but in the world of cheesy Italian rip offs, this Bronx tale delivers quality Trash much like its sleepy-eyed protagonist.
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