Review of 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983) by Robin W — 01 Jun 2009

The eighties were plagued with an awful lot of crappy rip-offs of "The Road Warriors", but it's doubtful that any of them were sillier than this Italian-made production from Enzo G. Castellari, a director who's no stranger to making clones of successful post-apocalyptic movies ("Escape from the Bronx", anyone?).

Featuring goofy costumes and hairstyles that make the Mad Max films look like a model of restraint, and lots of chase scenes with vehicles that appear to be golf carts wrapped in tin foil, this film also contains some surprising homosexual overtones; there's actually a sequence where the villain sodomizes the hero in front of his gang, but the hero later gets his revenge by the killing the bad guy with a large drill in none-too-subtle phallic fashion! However, despite the pointlessness of the proceedings, Castellari does know how to present mindless action and keep the pace moving, so the films is rarely boring.

I'd make a lot of jokes over the fact that Fred Williamson's character is named "Nadir", but since this came before his "Black Cobra" films, his career hadn't reached that point yet.