Wheels of Fire
Two weeks ago in this space I spoke of the liberating chaos of Mad Max rip-offs. Really, though, the subgenre also encompasses rip-offs of The Road Warrior (and even Beyond Thunderdome to some extent; if society holds up, I look forward to Fury Road rip-offs we’ll see one day, so long as we’re not living in it). We conflate those two aesthetics together, but they’re coming from different places — Mad Max is the chaotic unwinding of society as it’s happening, while The Road Warrior is the embodiment of the kinetic postapocalyptic runabout film. They’ve all got their something, and the side of the continuum tilting toward The Road Warrior is a little bit freer from the enervating terror of right now, which continues to get worse on a daily basis. So let’s spend this week diving deep into this cinematic timespace. As always, look back at past issues of the Scene for more recommendations of what to stream: March 26, April 2, April 9, April 16, April 23, April 30, May 7, May 14, May 21, May 28, June 4, June 11, June 18, June 25, July 2, July 9, July 16, July 23, July 30, Aug. 6, Aug. 13, Aug. 20, Aug. 27, Sept. 3.
The first two on deck, both streaming on Amazon Prime, are Cirio H. Santiago’s 1987 Equalizer 2000 and Harley Cokeliss’ 1982 Battletruck (the latter streaming under the title Warlords of the Twenty-First Century, because if there’s one lesson to learn from the exploitation game, more titles means more love ... or something). Both exist in desolate wastelands with lots of dunes and betrayal and not enough petrochemicals to keep the war machine going. The Santiago film is an ode to the joy of violence, ostensibly detailing the struggles of various factions to gain a doomsday weapon that will shift the balance of power forever. Future T-1000 Robert Patrick pops up as an unfortunately handsy minor official, there are henchmen with flamethrowers and a willingness to use them on anybody, and there is so much gunfire herein that you will find out exactly how concerned your neighbors are about your well-being.
Battletruck
In Battletruck — which amps up its narrative to become a metaphor for ’70s utopian sci-fi aesthetics in a deathmatch with the new Australian gears-and-grunge style — the war machine is literally a big truck. It looks like a souped-up Winnebago with gun turrets, and it terrorizes the land, siphoning resources and assaulting the people with the petulant iron hand of Col. Straker (James Wainwright). His daughter Corlie (Annie McEnroe) escapes his clutches, seeking refuge with Hunter (Michael Beck of The Warriors and Xanadu fame) and the vaguely hippie commune of Clearwater. As you know from decades of sci-fi and also the world we’re living in, fascists cannot abide a community peacefully getting by that believes in the tenets of equality and sustainability. So a confrontation brews in this Kiwi conflagration, and the end result scratches all postapocalyptic itches as well as deploying a great High Plains Drifter/Blazing Saddles approach to the big throwdown. It features John Ratzenberger (yes, Cliff Clavin) as a noble metalsmith and cinematography by Oscar winner Chris Menges (The Mission, plus second unit on The Empire Strikes Back)!
Santiago also directed Wheels of Fire (streaming on Prime), a 1985 journey into anxiety that is steeped in deeply retrograde gender theory and some genuinely inspiring flamethrower effects. (A note: This subgenre of exploitation film loves flamethrower effects — they are analog terror at its finest.) Wheels of Fire’s place in cinema history is probably clinched by inspiring the human-hood-ornament aspect of Tarantino’s Death Proof, though here the idea is much more dehumanizing and dangerous. One of the pernicious and recurrent issues in this subgenre is the degree to which the menace of sexual assault drives the narrative; a lot of films in this milieu use the wasteland as a backdrop for rape/revenge stories, which centers the inescapable tragedy at the heart of these films — humanity often simply refuses to learn from its mistakes.
And though it starts in a wasteland Ren Faire that promises a whole unforeseen angle of society, Wheels of Fire decides to emphasize lots of troubling patriarchal foolishness, as if that framework is somehow the only foundation that society can build itself on. Santiago loves gratuitous nudity, eliding narrative beats for purest, visceral sensation, and he also loves to deploy a third-act shock moment when one of the women characters (if there is more than one) is tragically killed for the flimsiest of reasons. But there’s also a lot of old-school plunger-based TNT explosions, which can be a delight for any Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote fans, and this movie is designed to provide maximum everything.
The Italian riffs on Mad Max and The Road Warrior (there are many, and Enzo Castellari somehow made the best and worst of them with his epic Bronx trilogy — if you dig on Battletruck, just you wait until you meet Megaweapon) tend to have a bit more going on narratively. But they also bog down in loose ends sometimes. We’ll get to them later on in the pandemic, which is a deeply disheartening sentence to have to write. The applicable generalization in postapocalyptic rip-off cinema is the genre itself, so you have to dig in and figure it out for yourself. Car stunts are a safe bet. The irony of driving vehicles throughout the wasteland despite the fetishized shortage/absence of petrochemical products is not addressed. Political perspectives will be represented — all of them. (If you ever wondered where The Dark Knight Rises got its insane political compass, look no further.) The children will be weird. As with all the many variants of exploitation cinema, your mileage may vary.
A note: The 2010 documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed, currently streaming on Hoopla, details the history of the Filipino exploitation film industry and features extensive material on Cirio Santiago and his body of work. Also, Brian DePalma’s essential sexy mystery Femme Fatale is streaming on Amazon Prime. Late, great Scene editor Jim Ridley wrote about it back in 2003. It has everything you could want, but what’s particularly wonderful is its cosmic sensibility about the grind of being alive. As a bonus, check out the international trailer, cut by former Nashvillian/USN alumnus Jamie Bradshaw.
