You Can Finally Watch The Best Mad Max Ripoff in Glorious Ultra HD
Or: the story of how Max Max got the Italian exploitation treatment.
In the four-year gap between Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome, not one, but two post-apocalyptic actioners clearly indebted to Australia’s most famous road warrior were released. They were both made by Italian exploitation maestro Joe D’Amato, who was never one to miss out on an opportunity to rip off a successful hit. Indeed, just six months after transforming the Big Apple into a nuclear wasteland in Endgame, the man of many pseudonyms envisioned a future where the Lone Star State was overrun by maniacal thugs dressed like they’d just wandered out from a BDSM club. That movie would go by the title 2020 Texas Gladiators.
2020 Texas Gladiators was part of a wave of similar cash-ins that swamped VHS bargain buckets in the early ‘80s. D’Amato, who only came on board Texas Gladiators when screenwriter/co-director George Eastman quickly discovered that action sequences weren’t his forte, admitted that the movie was made with a cynical reason in mind. "I only wrote these awful movies for financial reasons... no attempt at originality was made at all,” Eastman later said.
Yet while you can’t argue about its lack of cinematic quality or innovation, the confusingly-titled film (it has nothing to do with gladiators! it was filmed in Rome!) largely delivers when it comes to undemanding, entertaining schlock.
2020 Texas Gladiators certainly doesn’t waste any time setting the unashamedly unhinged tone. A maniacal gang starts raiding a monastery within the opening credits, going on to crucify a priest, sexually assault one nun, and cause another to slit her own throat in horror at her place of worship now resembling Satan’s lair. The film never explains how mankind has become so feral — but then why bother with narrative when you have countless heads to blow off?
Society has fallen into such a state of degradation that even one of the vigilante heroes known as The Rangers, who it must be said bide their time in coming to the rescue, swiftly turns over to the dark side when faced with one of the film’s many, many exposed breasts. Luckily, Catch Dog (Daniel Stephen) is stopped from acting on his impulses by the rest of his gang — including Halakron (Peter Hooten), Red Wolfe (Al Yamanouchi), and leading man Nisus (D’Amato regular Al Cliver) — and banished to the enemy.
Fast forward five years later and Nisus and the woman he helped to save, Maida (Sabrina Siani), are now parents to a young girl and living in an industrial settlement named Free Town. Of course, their peaceful existence is shattered when Catch Dog and his fellow bare-chested, bike-riding minions are ordered to steal the area’s energy resources by their totalitarian leader. And by any means necessary.
A traumatized nun starts as the film means to go on.
The Black One (Donal O’Brien) is the kind of boo-hiss baddie you’d expect from such a bare-bones story. He laughs like a Hammer Horror villain and he spouts his fascist rhetoric like a dollar store Hitler. Still, he’s undoubtedly effective: By the halfway mark, he’s put every surviving male to work in the uranium mine (without any shirts on, obviously), sold off every woman to the bar trade, and most shockingly of all, killed the hero.
Yes, in a bold move which sets 2020 Texas Gladiators apart from most of its fellow Mad Max knock-offs, Nisus is fatally gunned down (inappropriately, to the sound of a jaunty synth score) by The Black One’s masked men just 35 minutes in. Of course, feminism was still an unknown term in ‘80s exploitation cinema, and so, while Maida has to continue playing the damsel in distress, good old Halakron is tasked with saving the day instead. Well, him and a rather problematic Indigenous tribe, that is.
Once again proving the early ‘80s was a very different time, the Rangers find unlikely allies in a group of arrow-wielding warriors who are blatantly Italian men unconvincingly cosplaying as Native Americans. It’s even more glaring than the danger sign misspelled ‘Exsplosive.’
The newly-promoted leading man Halakron and his fellow Rangers.
The movie does get a little more progressive toward its shoot-em-up finale. A middle-aged mother (the only woman in the picture who isn’t scantily clad, obviously) gets to wreak bloody revenge on the neanderthal who both raped and murdered her son. And although her gun initially jams at the vital moment, Maida eventually delivers the killer shot to the dastardly Catch Dog.
However, anyone who’s been waiting to watch 2020 Texas Gladiators in ultra-high definition is unlikely to be disappointed by its distinctly un-PC nature. Finally released on the format for the first time this month, its 4K restoration allows exploitation fans to revel in all the “graphic violence, rampant nudity... and lawless Lone Star depravity” proudly promised in its marketing. Moreover, archival interviews with D’Amato, Cliver and assistant director Michelle Soavi add to its B-movie mythology, while an accompanying CD means you can now hum along to Carlo Maria Cordio’s anachronistic soundtrack from the comfort of your very own dune buggy.
Eastman is unlikely to be buying a copy, of course. But while 2020 Texas Gladiators was inevitably no match for the Tina Turner-assisted comeback that followed two years later (which did actually feature gladiators), it remains one of Mad Max’s most enjoyably trashy ripoffs.
