Having largely exhausted in just a few years the various means of ripping off George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), in the early 1980s the low-budget Italian film industry set its sights on George Miller’s Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior, 1981), a brutal dystopian action vehicle that mixed junk-cool automative hardware, punk style, and more than a few iconic elements from John Ford Westerns that offered something entirely new at the time—and therefore ripe for the ripping in a new subgenre that came to be known as “Pastapocalypse.”

The enterprising director Enzo G. Castellari wasted no time, quickly producing in a two-year span what became known as the “Bronx Trilogy”: 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1990: I guerrieri del Bronx, 1982), Escape from the Bronx (Fuga dal Bronx, 1983), and The New Barbarians (aka Warriors of the Wasteland, I nuovi barbari, 1983). There were plenty of other Italian efforts during that same time span, and to be fair, other countries got in on the action, too, including New Zealand, which produced Battletruck (1982), and the U.S., which produced Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983). All of these films were pale copies, paper-thin imitators that understood the basic parameters of what made Mad Max successful, but lacked the commitment and ingenuity to match George Miller’s propulsive grit-and-oil artistry.

All of which makes 2020 Texas Gladiators (Anno 2020–I gladiatori del futuro) both utterly banal and completely fascinating. Produced on a couple of tattered shoestrings and assembled from bits and pieces of a wide range of genres, it is barely held together by its postapocalyptic premise, which presents us with yet another variation of a world-gone-savage after a nuclear World War III. While much of the film will look very familiar to anyone who has seen Mad Max and its numerous imitators, 2020 Texas Gladiators offers at least a few unique oddities, including its setting in Texas (which is, now that I think about it, never actually mentioned in the film and is not part of the original Italian title) and the presence of a Native American tribe that is coerced into fighting alongside a group of self-described Rangers who roam the landscape looking for people to help (and by “help,” I mean save them from rape and pillage).

The screenplay by actor-turned-scribe George Eastman, who had collaborated with director Joe D’Amato on several films previously, and Aldo Florio is less a cohesive narrative than it is a series of setpieces that sometimes stumble over each other in transition. We are dropped right in the middle of the action during the opening credits as five Rangers—Nisus (Al Cliver), Jab (Harrison Muller), Catch Dog (Daniel Stephen), Halakron (Peter Hooten), and Red Wolfe (Hal Yamanouchi)—stop a raging gang of violent sadists from destroying a church and raping all the nuns within (well, they still manage to rape some while another cuts her own throat with a piece of glass to avoid that fate). In the melee, Catch Dog loses his principles and tries to rape Maida (Sabrina Siani), a young woman who has taken refuge in the church, and for his sin he banished from the Ranger group.

We then confusingly cut ahead several years without any indication, where we find Nisus and Maida, now married and with a young daughter, living in a relatively peaceful settlement where they mine precious minerals. This, of course, makes them a target, and soon the same pack of vicious goons we saw in the first scene are back, this time on motorcycles and now being led by Catch Dog, who works for a man known as Black One (Donald O’Brien), who looks like a sneering castoff from one of the many Italian Nazsploitation movies that were all the range in the mid-1970s following Liliana Cavani’s controversial drama The Night Porter (Il portiere di notte, 1974). This brings the Rangers back to try to save the day, which requires them to join forces with the previously mentioned Native American tribe, who are understandably trying to stay out of it all. And, however poorly they are depicted, their presence does offer the otherwise rarely seen presence of horses, bows, and arrows in the postapocalyptic action genre. So … that is something.

Although the ubiquitously productive Joe D’Amato is credited as the director, he actually co-directed with George Eastman, who, as a novice director, didn’t feel confident enough to helm the action sequences, so they ended up splitting duties, with D’Amato handling the action and Eastman, who worked primarily as a screenwriter and actor, handling the dialogue scenes. However the work was divided, the end result is a film that feels like it was being made up on the fly. How else to explain, for example, why Black One’s fascistic-looking foot soldiers wield shields with an invisible thermal forcefield that can stop bullets, but not arrows and spears? The production team managed to find some decent locations, including what appears to be an abandoned factory where much of the action is set, although it is hard to really buy into the postapocalyptic wasteland when there is so much green grass in the background (the Outback really served Miller well). When they try to dress things up too much, though, such as a scene that takes place in what is mean to be evocative of an old West saloon, the seams really show. The lack of budget is evident at virtually every turn, especially the lack of any kind of wide shots that might betray the limitations of the production design. D’Amato makes the most of what he has in the action sequences, and some of the skirmishes have a gritty resourcefulness and schlocky economy that temporarily elevates the film to something better than it otherwise is. It doesn’t help that the characters are all essentially flat archetypes who offer little in the way of personality, although I did appreciate the sense of grinning good humor that Harrison Muller brought to Jab.

2020 Texas Gladiators was one of the first films produced by D’Amato under his company Filmirage, which he had taken over from producer Ermanno Donati. At that point D’Amato had already directed more than 50 of the eventual 200 films he would make during his three-decade career, which spanned virtually every genre. It is hard to say if he ever made what we might call a “good” film since he was, first and foremost, opportunistic in his approach to filmmaking, which is why so many of his films were derivative of others (when asked in an interview “what weight critics carry” with him, his response was, “I don’t give a damn”). In the year before making 2020 Texas Gladiators, he directed two Conan the Barbarian knockoffs, Ator: The Fighting Eagle (Ator l’invincibile, 1982) and its sequel The Blade Master (Ator 2: L’invincibile Orion, 1983), as well as Caligula: The Untold Story (Caligola: La storia mai raccontata, 1982), which attempted to cash in on Tinto Brass’s notorious art-porn film Caligula (1980). D’Amato had already proved that there was no boundary he wouldn’t cross, which is why the majority of the films he made were pornographic (especially in the second half of his career). By that standard, 2020 Texas Gladiators is positively chaste, although it has more than its share of blood and skin, which was, of course, a prerequisite of any such enterprise.

Alas, the film did not fare particularly well, failing to secure theatrical distribution in the United States (New Line Cinema had the rights in 1984–85 under the nonsensical title Sudden Death, but never actually put it in theaters). Instead, it went straight to video, where it joined the ranks of so many other similar films, waiting to develop a cult fandom. Given that it is now available in a three-disc, limited edition 4K UHD release, I would say mission accomplished.

Copyright © 2024 James Kendrick

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