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Land Of Doom
This is yet another low-budget, post-apocalyptic, post-Mad Max, evil-raiders taking everybody’s ass kinda thing. There is no plot, really, just a survivor-type woman comes across the rapey-ass raiders and tries to avoid them, somehow ends up traveling with a guy they're chasing (whose crime was suggesting that maybe they shouldn't just go around raping everybody) and... well, that's basically the whole movie.
While the acting is adequate and they make full use of the desert, literally almost nothing happens and to some degree they seem to be making the script up as they go along. Like there was a sale on studded black leather so they decided to make a movie and then started filming while they figured out what the people in studded black leather should actually, ya know, do. Other than look really, really silly. More like a parody of The Road Warrior than an actual attempt at it.
What is on that guy's head?!!!
Love your bikes!
That said, the movie is pretty rapey, though with no nudity which feels like it tones down the exploitative nature of rape on film, this is more just a bunch of savage dudes just rape everybody they meet. They even stab each other so they can rape the person someone else is already raping.
The villain, like the whole movie, is terribly silly in that way that they were in 80s low-budget films where, because The Lord Humungus had his mask, every knock-off villain has to have one or some other facial flair (like an eye-patch or a cyborg eye or something). But this one is just some skinny, charisma-less blonde dude with his hair blown out sporting a really ridiculous leather mask. What the criteria for casting him was I can’t imagine.
I mean, that whole image is even sillier than the previous ones and yet the villain, Slater, takes the cake. Just look at him! What the hell is on his face?! And why?! Silly.
Also, this movie has Jawas in it. Full on Jawas. For no real reason. Seems like that was not totally uncommon in the 80s. How they didn’t all get sued I have no idea. Maybe because they, inexplicably, didn't put the Jawas on the poster.
I also have to say that I enjoyed how the guns, which were just old shotguns and machine guns and stuff left over from civilization, that fired regular bullets, would occasionally make a pew-pew noise just to further invoke Star Wars. At some point you just embrace the silliness so you can finish the film and that touch made me smile.
One interesting feature of the movie is whatever is going on with Harmony. Nothing she actually does, as I mentioned nothing really happens in this movie. But, she’s an attractive woman in an 80s genre movie and yet dresses fully covered from head to toe. I found it amusing that on the poster she's in skimpy studded black leather but in the film, you don’t even see her elbows or ankles in this film and I feel like that means something.
That is literally her skimpiest outfit in this film. Passing on the opportunity to unnecessarily (except for the box-office) show her bathing or dressed up in a skimpy leather outfit when she's captured by the villains or something seems almost virtuous in a film of this era and it does kinda underscore how gratuitous skin really is in a lot of genre films. There's no real reason for her to ever be in a leather bikini, or out of one for that matter, in this film, so she's not. What a crazy idea.
All that said, her character is the closest thing to a character in this film and whatever her deal is, it's the most interesting thing in the film. She travels alone, trusts no one, is a pretty damn good survivor, and she doesn’t let anyone touch her. You do not want to try and touch her, she will kill you first. It is never expressly said why she feels this way but, based on the raiders' behavior and the fact that she is alone, you can maybe guess. The fact that the movie doesn't come out and just say it is actually slightly artistic. That’s really the only interesting aspect of this film.
There are much better, albeit more exploitative movies just like this. I'm not sure it matters which ones you watch, although I can tell you that this movie lacks whatever style the Italians put into their post-apocalyptic Road Warrior knockoffs and is nowhere near as good as something like Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone. Still, I finished it, so it must not have been that bad.
Land Of Doom
This is yet another low-budget, post-apocalyptic, post-Mad Max, evil-raiders taking everybody’s ass kinda thing. There is no plot, really, just a survivor-type woman comes across the rapey-ass raiders and tries to avoid them, somehow ends up traveling with a guy they're chasing (whose crime was suggesting that maybe they shouldn't just go around raping everybody) and... well, that's basically the whole movie.
While the acting is adequate and they make full use of the desert, literally almost nothing happens and to some degree they seem to be making the script up as they go along. Like there was a sale on studded black leather so they decided to make a movie and then started filming while they figured out what the people in studded black leather should actually, ya know, do. Other than look really, really silly. More like a parody of The Road Warrior than an actual attempt at it.
What is on that guy's head?!!!
Love your bikes!
That said, the movie is pretty rapey, though with no nudity which feels like it tones down the exploitative nature of rape on film, this is more just a bunch of savage dudes just rape everybody they meet. They even stab each other so they can rape the person someone else is already raping.
The villain, like the whole movie, is terribly silly in that way that they were in 80s low-budget films where, because The Lord Humungus had his mask, every knock-off villain has to have one or some other facial flair (like an eye-patch or a cyborg eye or something). But this one is just some skinny, charisma-less blonde dude with his hair blown out sporting a really ridiculous leather mask. What the criteria for casting him was I can’t imagine.
I mean, that whole image is even sillier than the previous ones and yet the villain, Slater, takes the cake. Just look at him! What the hell is on his face?! And why?! Silly.
Also, this movie has Jawas in it. Full on Jawas. For no real reason. Seems like that was not totally uncommon in the 80s. How they didn’t all get sued I have no idea. Maybe because they, inexplicably, didn't put the Jawas on the poster.
I also have to say that I enjoyed how the guns, which were just old shotguns and machine guns and stuff left over from civilization, that fired regular bullets, would occasionally make a pew-pew noise just to further invoke Star Wars. At some point you just embrace the silliness so you can finish the film and that touch made me smile.
One interesting feature of the movie is whatever is going on with Harmony. Nothing she actually does, as I mentioned nothing really happens in this movie. But, she’s an attractive woman in an 80s genre movie and yet dresses fully covered from head to toe. I found it amusing that on the poster she's in skimpy studded black leather but in the film, you don’t even see her elbows or ankles in this film and I feel like that means something.
That is literally her skimpiest outfit in this film. Passing on the opportunity to unnecessarily (except for the box-office) show her bathing or dressed up in a skimpy leather outfit when she's captured by the villains or something seems almost virtuous in a film of this era and it does kinda underscore how gratuitous skin really is in a lot of genre films. There's no real reason for her to ever be in a leather bikini, or out of one for that matter, in this film, so she's not. What a crazy idea.
All that said, her character is the closest thing to a character in this film and whatever her deal is, it's the most interesting thing in the film. She travels alone, trusts no one, is a pretty damn good survivor, and she doesn’t let anyone touch her. You do not want to try and touch her, she will kill you first. It is never expressly said why she feels this way but, based on the raiders' behavior and the fact that she is alone, you can maybe guess. The fact that the movie doesn't come out and just say it is actually slightly artistic. That’s really the only interesting aspect of this film.
There are much better, albeit more exploitative movies just like this. I'm not sure it matters which ones you watch, although I can tell you that this movie lacks whatever style the Italians put into their post-apocalyptic Road Warrior knockoffs and is nowhere near as good as something like Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone. Still, I finished it, so it must not have been that bad.