At the same time, or rather slightly before, in 1981, a wild bunch of Australians released a little film called Road Warrior, a sequel to a rather good, intense "society on the edge" film called Mad Max. Both the original and its sequel (let's all pretend there was never a third movie made, and the world will be a happier place) starred a handsome up-and-comer named Mel Gibson, and I feel safe in saying I expect big things from him at some point in his career. In much the same was as Conan, Road Warrior become a phenomenon and sparked an entire genre of post-apocalyptic movies features guys in shoulderpads driving around in the desert and shooting each other with crossbows.

Of course, most of these films lacked a few key elements that made Road Warrior such a hit. For one, Road Warrior was exciting and action-packed. Most of the imitators were not. For another thing, Road Warrior had good writing, good acting, good music, and a wild cast of characters. Max, our hero, was the classic spaghetti western antihero. And then you have the hooting feral kid with the razor blade boomerang, the goofy guy in the gyrocopter, the stunning female warrior with the Kim Novak eyebrow action going on, the little weasely guy who gets his fingers cut off, Vernon Wells with a pink mohawk and assless leather pants, that guy who went on to be in Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn, and of course, a bodybuilder in an iron Quiet Riot mask who carries his own set of loudspeakers around and calls himself The Humongous.

And need I even mention that this is the movie that gave us the phrase, "Ayatollah of Rock and Roll-a!" Even if the movie hadn't been good, that alone justifies its existence.

The legion of imitators, on the other hand, tended to lack these key components and were, instead, ninety or so minutes of sullen guys trying to pass bad acting off as end-of-the-world angst. You got cheap sets, lame stunts -- especially compared to the spectacular stunts in both Mad Max and Road Warrior -- and bland as dry white toast characters. And worst of all, in order to mimic Road Warrior as best they could, almost all of them are set in the desert, barring the offshoot genre where some muscular guy is in the Bronx (which shifted the rip-off material from Road Warrior to Escape from New York). It made sense for Road Warrior to be in the desert. After all, Australia has a lot of desert, and in the context of the film, we can assume that only a few people even bothered to brave the outback. It wasn't like the entire country moved into the desert. But if the film is set in America, why would everyone live in the desert? We have nice countryside, and last I checked, one of the many affects of a nuclear war was not changing everything into the Sahara Desert.

More than likely, they were just aping Road Warrior and also discovered it's a lot easier and cheaper to have your post-apocalypse in a desert than in a city. Sort of like one of those sci-fi films set a hundred years in the future but all the action takes place in "an amusement park designed to look exactly like a small American town in 1985."

Still, as stupid and cheap as many of these knock-offs were, which again seemed to come primarily from Italy, a lot of them were also tremendous amounts of fun. Their shoestring budgets and slapdash structure often resulted in some entertaining stuff, though not always entertaining in the way the makers might have intended. New Barbarians, despite everything that is wrong with it, is one of these entertaining films.

I've noticed that you can trace b-movie trends through the years simply by looking at an Italian director's filmography. Enzo Castellari started his career in spaghetti westerns, then in the 1970s moved on to low-budget black action films (with a couple really blatant Jaws rip-offs thrown in for good measure), and then into the exploding post-apocalypse film, where he actually made many of the genres more amusing and entertaining entries, including 1990: Bronx Warriors, Desert Warrior, Escape from the Bronx, and the movie we're here to discuss, New Barbarians.

Giancarlo Prete stars as Scorpio, since all post-apocalypse type guys have to have cool names like that. You don't ever hear about a guy named Mike saving a tribe from marauders. Prete worked with director Castellari on several films, and even managed to score a part in cult fave Ladyhawke. Scorpio is your typical wasteland wanderer. He has a suped-up car, though to be honest, most of the suping-up seems to consist of randomly attaching fins and little sticky-out bits of chrome to your car. However, we can tell Scorpio is a cut above some mullet working on his Camero in the front yard, because Scorpio had the good sense to install a keen green-tinted plastic observation bubble in his car. This, of course, serves no purpose whatsoever. In one of those boss custom vans with the Yaz artwork airbrushed on the side, you can use an observation bubble because the back of the van can get dark, and sometimes when your laying back there, sparking one up with your baby as you listen to Toto, you want to be able to stare up at the stars and talk about your dreams. Sure, we've all been there, right?

But this is a car. There are windows all round you. Why do you need an observation bubble? Well, I guess because it looks cool and he can turn the light on and get the slick green glowing effect. Who am I to question Scorpio? It's not like I've survived the end of the world or anything, though I did survive seeing Cats.

At this point, I need to get a little something off my chest. Like many of you, I was a child of the 1970s, and I cling to that notion and that decade as my heritage, primarily because I really hate that 1980s synth rock crap. Gary Numan my ass. Having been squeezed out in 1972, I feel I have enough conscious years during the 1970s under my belt to claim it as my fatherland. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying disco was good, because we all know disco was a fart straight from the sour bowels of Satan himself, and I'm not a big fan of feathered hair. But the 1970s gave us many wonderful things as I've discussed multiple times in other reviews and need not retread here.

With that established, I have to confess that as much as I may make fun of them, I sometimes really wish I had been one of those 1970s van guys. You know, I could drive my Chevy custom with a wizard brushed on the side out into the desert to just think and look at the stars. I could cruise around town listening to Skynard and James Taylor and Golden Earring, who I once saw play live at the Louisville Riverfront Festival along with Foghat. I could put the moves on my baby in the back, which would of course be done up with some boss, red shag carpet. I could wear tight jeans and smoke pot with friends while saying, "Dude, they are so right. We really are just dust in the wind." I could take my baby by the hand in the back of my Chevy van after making clumsy but sweet love to her, and give her the whole "Freebird" speech about how I'm a wandering spirit who can't be held down to any one place. She would understand, because she's cool that way, and one day she would stand on the edge of town, a lonely tear rolling down her cheek, as I kissed her good-bye, climbed into my van, and rambled on to the next town. "See ya around, Keith Allison," she'd say to herself as I disappeared into the setting sun.

Yes, the van guy -- philosopher morons. A dying breed in today's world of high tech computers, electronic music, and these Limp Bizkit fans with their piercing and their loud rudeness. In this modern age, there seems scarce little room for a lazy, introspective dreamer downing a Coors in the back of his van and really empathizing with the melancholy lyrics of "Beth." And I sit here, surrounded by mountains of steel and concrete, awash in a sea of technology that accomplishes nothing, drowning in a deluge of boundless information and no wisdom. I sit here, and I pine for the simpler days that passed me by. I sit here and I shed a solitary tear for the last of a dying breed, the van guy. To you I raise my glass and say, "carry on, my wayward son."

Scorpio is a van guy, or he would have been a van guy if the world hadn't ended. You can see it in his eyes. As things stand, however, he spends most of his time driving around aimlessly in the desert, making one wonder where he gets his gas (I get mine at the taco stand -- thank you and good night! You're a wonderful crowd! I'm here all week).

There's this bunch of goofball survivors who have a caravan of crappy "future" cars going through the desert. Then there are these guys called the Templars who, just like the actual Templars did when they started getting insane and corrupt, go around hassling people. The movie opens with the caravan under siege, and mere minutes into the film we get brutal yet incredibly fake looking decapitations and mass slaughter. That's a good way to open any film, and I wish more films opened with gory mayhem, especially films that deal with Meg Ryan and her struggle to find a meaningful relationship in this crazy modern world of ours (hint for Meg: look for a van guy). Now if You've Got Mail or Hanging Up started off with a scene of nomads being slaughtered, then maybe I'd be interested.

The Templars kill people in a variety of ways. Sure, there's the simple killing and stabbing and shooting, but why do just that when you can mount a razor blade fan on your running board and drive around chopping people in half with it? Sure, being able to use some of your weapons requires an amazingly coincidental set-up, but you know how people are. If you are trying to run them over with your razor blade fan dune buggy, they will oblige you by running slowly directly to the left of your car and will even stumble when you need them to so you get that good cleaver to the head effect.

So we can deduce that the Templars are not the nicest of fellows, but to be honest, how would you feel if you had to wear all white padded outfits with oversized shoulderpads? Scorpio has a couple run-ins with these guys, more by accident than as a result of him trying to help anyone out. We get the less-than-shocking realization that, at one time, Scorpio was a Templar himself, but turned his back on their cruel ways so he could drive around in the desert causing them grief. Along the way he picks up a sexy lady and Fred Williamson. Of course, if you have Fred Williamson, a sexy lady can't be far behind.

Fred, who had also worked with the director before on GI Bro (oh brother), plays Nadir, and obviously he's a total bad-ass in a casual way. When I think of all the action stars who I would not want to cross, Fred Williamson tops the list. The man is simply the paramount of outdated cool and tough. How can you not love a guy who, in the late 1990s answers the question "Have you ever thought of marketing and selling your trademark cigars?" with the reply (paraphrased from memory) "Hell no! What would I do if I saw some punk walking down the street smoking one of my cigars and looking like some sort of faggot?"

Williamson represents one of the film's key cool aspects. Usually, when a white hero has a black sidekick, the black guy is comic relief or, despite being better than the white guy, ends up captured and having to be rescued. Look at The Matrix. Does anyone honestly believe Lawrence Fishbourne needs Keaneu Reeves' help in a fight? I didn't think so. In New Barbarians however, Williamson kicks ass from start to finish and never once makes a mistake. He's the one who has to bail the white guy out, not the other way around. He's the one who doesn't need help, even though he's smart enough to take it when it's offered. And he shoots dynamite bow and arrows like Bo and Luke Duke! All hail Fred Williamson!

I can't remember a damn thing about the woman except Scorpio beds her at some point and she probably does get captured. She's not a very interesting part of the story.

Scorpio is also friends with a wily little juvenile mechanic played by Giovanni Frezza, known to cult film fans the world over as "Little Bob" from Lucio Fulci's House by the Cemetery. At least this time around he hasn't been dubbed with the most annoying voice ever in the whole universe, so you can actually get to like him. He is the ace repairman who customizes Scorpio's car. Like Nadir, he's far more competent than Scorpio at pretty much everything you can think of. I started wondering why Scorpio was even the hero of the movie, since he's easily the least memorable of all the guys.

Eventually, Scorpio bungles his way into getting captured by the Templars, and the main Templar gets to give the whole, "Join us, and together we could rule the land!" speech, though you have to wonder why they are so intent on ruling a patch of very dead and worthless desert. When Scorpio refuses they tie him up and shock the whole audience by raping him. Yep, you heard right. Most sleazy action films, especially ones set after the fall of civilization, feature at least one woman getting raped, but how many have the bravado to leave the women alone and simply rape the male lead? Not too many, as I can recall, and while it's not "good," it was certainly unexpected and daring.

Back in college, I took a course on literature and war. In it, we read a short story in which the narrator was a member of a tribe of gorillas who descend into madness and warfare. Quite a good story, really, and an interesting study of how animals behave when faced with impossible odds. One of the many things the dominant male gorillas did as the violence progressed was to begin mounting lesser males. The same thing happens in prisons, of course. More times than not, it is not a sexual act, let alone a homosexual act. It's simply a desperate display of power. It's a way to showcase your dominance over weaker members of the tribe. I'm not saying that New Barbarians is by any stretch of the imagination dipping its toes into the pool of analyzing the human psyche and what happens to it when its plunged into an environment of progressively more violent decay. More than likely, they just thought it would be shocking and unusual to victimize the male hero for a change. But if I was backed into a corner and was unable to escape the question by flashing my eye spots, at least I have ammunition for the argument, though quite frankly, I can't imagine any instance where I'd be backed into a corner and forced to debate the social and psychological implications of Scorpio getting sodomized by a Templar.

Anyway, this gets Scorpio fired up for taking out the Templars once and for all. After escaping their evil clutches when they all take off to do a little massacring, Scorpio commissions Little Bob (okay, so that's not his name in this movie, but still...) to make him a see-thru bulbous plastic suit of armor. This is easily the most disturbing thing ever. Imagine, if you can, if you dare, a vaguely out of shape David Hasslehoff (more out shape than Hasslehoff himself) squeezing his hairy, oiled-up beefiness into a clear plastic container, then running around wearing nothing but a pair of bikini briefs underneath as he blows things up. That's pretty damn frightening, and I'm sorry for even planting the image in your head.

Scorpio gets help from Nadir and Little Bob, who actually do just about all the work and killing. Nadir has the explosive-tipped arrows, but rather than firing them, he just takes off the arrowheads and throws them at people. It seems a bit of overkill to use an entire stick of dynamite's worth of explosives for individual guys, but the end result is lots of exploding people, or rather, lot's of exploding mannequins. We're not talking high tech here.

While Little Bob and Nadir single-handedly take out the entire Templar army and save the caravan people, Scorpio lumbers about awkwardly in his little plastic outfit until the head Templar finally stumbles across him for the final showdown. Does Scorpio end the reign of terror, kill the Templar leader, then wander back off into the wasteland? Well, what do you think?

There are a lot of adjectives one could apply to this film, but the most appropriate seems to be "absurd." Scorpio is obviously a loser. Everyone in the whole world is more competent than he is. But hey, all he wants to do is drive his car, baby! For a post-apocalyptic world, things sure are easy to obtain. Williamson has an expensive patent leather outfit that looks shiny and new. No one seems to have any trouble finding endless amounts of ammunition for their exploding arrows and bullets, and no one is hurting for gasoline. And these are cool explosives people have. Sometimes they will blow up entire compounds, while other times they will just blow up a barrel. The head Templar's gun seems particularly versatile with the level of explosive action it can generate.

And I have to pull Road Warrior into the fray one more time. Max: dusty, torn-up leather outfit. Scorpio: trousers, a fuzzy Sonny Bono sheepskin vest, and then that frightful naked bubbleman outfit. And you wonder why not as many people remember Scorpio.

Of course it's the absolute absurdity of this film that keeps it entertaining, though the awkward but frequent violence and action certainly help out. I mean, the film makers really tried to have a lot of cool brutality and car stunts; it's just that they failed miserably every single chance they got, and that in itself is worth enjoying to no end. The acting is on par with what you'll see on display at your local community theater, and the Templars in particular are positively Renaissance Faire-esque in their talent. Fred Williamson is, as you would suspect, Fred Williamson. Who would tell him to do anything differently? And why would they want to in the first place? You cast Fred Williamson because you want Fred Williamson. When you want a bad-ass who never shows weakness and never makes a mistake, you cast Fred. When you want a spastic nerd, you cast Eddie Deezen. If you put them in the same movie, that's money in the bank. Unfortunately, Eddie Deezen is not in this film.

New Barbarians is bad. It's really bad. It's also amazingly entertaining and full of energy. Despite the cheapness on display and the ludicrous scenario, there's no denying that the film delivers plenty of action and violence, and the whole thing is tremendously fun. If you are looking to explore the polluted waters of post-apocalypse films, then the work of Enzo G. Castellari are the perfect place to start, and this is one of his wildest, most enjoyable films.