2019: After the Fall of New York

In The Year 2019, The Future Depends on One Man.

With a tagline like that, it had to be awesome, right?

If you said, "Yes James, I love knockoffs of Escape From New York and The Road Warrior, especially with lasers and sound boxes that kill little people," then you'd be in the same boat as me when I say that I loved this film.

I'm a huge fan of movies about the wasteland of a nuclear fallout, the type that they always predict but hasn't quite happened yet. It's always the near future, in this case 2019, and in the year 1983 when they made this film, it was still 36 years away. In some ways I liked it better than John Carpenter's epic (and no, nobody could ever match Snake Plissken for sheer intensity) but in the form of Tom Cruise lookalike Michael Sopkiw. This was his first of only 4 Italian genre films, and as an alternative to Kurt Russell's Plissken, his Parsifal (yes, a very... strange name, to be had) does the job amiably. You actually want him to succeed, to score the girl and to defeat the baddies on the way to a rocket ship off of this crazy world.

Directed by prolific Italian genre director Sergio Martino (Mannaja being one of my favorite films by him), he was one of the best at capitalizing on a flavor of the week, making it for cheap and using the best of effects, be it gore effects, backgrounds, locations and even some computer graphics, and making the producers some money means going on to the next film. They really don't make films like this anymore, and I wish for a time when the grindhouse type filmmaking comes to fruition again, which I believe we'll see a revival in the next 5 years or so.

So why else is this film so fantastic? Besides the ridiculous plot of out main hero Parsifal being the best in 'death race' type battles (even battling a car of 4 villains with weapons to the death) and winning himself some licenses to kill (which is strange because there is no actual law against killing), winning a transvestite and then letting her go because 1)he's a nice guy and 2)I don't think he swung that way. The future is desperate but Parsifal isn't that desperate.

It's all the Euracs fault, who are the main force in the world. A very Nazi-esque group, they are the combined forces of Asia, Europe and Africa and decided to bombard America with every nuclear weapon they have and thus making the world a sterile place. Luckily one scientist hid his daughter, the last woman on earth who is fertile and it's every man for himself in regards to trying to plant a seed inside her, so to speak.

Insane? Yes, but it somehow keeps the film going, from one set piece to another. To the old MTA trains of the 80's (you know the ones, all tagged up by some of the greatest artists of that time), to the hiding place beneath the United Nations for the little people I mentioned earlier before, it's just and exploitation film lover's dream come true.

What made me even happier was seeing one of my favorite genre actors of the 70's and 80's being in the film. His name of course is George Eastman, born Luigi Montefiori, but used many aliases over the years, appearing in well over 50 films. In this film he plays a character by the name of Big Ape. Yes, he is an ape man, thus showing they even took some slight elements from the Planet of the Apes series of films. He falls in love at first sight with the scientist's daughter and will stop at nothing at 'making a baby' with the sleeping beauty, in order to keep his legacy alive. What better way then to become immortal in a sterile world?

This film has everything. The gouging out of eyes, head's exploding, rats being skewered, random sex scenes, a woman who looks like the spitting image of Darryl Hannah. You even have a little person throwing himself against some old car to kill himself, so he wouldn't tell the Euracs where his new found friends were hiding.

And of course no great film would be complete without the synth score of the De Angelis brothers, better know as the Onion Brothers.

Go check it out ASAP. You won't be disappointed, especially if you have the same taste in movies that I tend to have. Viva Italia!