After owning it unwatched for almost 40 years, last night I finally sat down and played my EV ex-rental big box VHS video of the English dub of a classic Italian action/near-future semi-sci fi movie from the early 1980s. Namely, 1990: The Bronx Warriors (aka The Bronx Warriors, The Riffs, 1990: I Guerneri del Bronx, and several other alternative release titles).
Directed by Enzo G. Castellari (who also takes a small acting role in it as the MC's vice-president), filmed in 1981, and released in 1982 by Fulvia Films, 1990: The Bronx Warriors (to give it its full title, as the year 1990 is central to its plot) belongs in some ways to the post-apocalypse survival sub-genre of science fiction movies, except that instead of the global disaster that usually features in them, here the devastation and gang rule is limited to a single borough of a single city, and has been caused not by nuclear annihilation but instead by officialdom's wholesale abandonment of said borough.
The city in question is New York City, the borough is the Bronx, and the year is 1990 – which is when, as announced in a brief preamble shortly after the movie opens, is when the NYC authorities gave up trying to fight the unrelenting crime wave that had overtaken this borough and abandoned it as a lawless no man's land. Since then, it has become a wholly feral hellhole, a ramshackle ruin of crumbling buildings and deserted homes, ruled by a diverse array of different gangs, each with its own fiercely-defended territory. And when it comes to the gangs, diverse is definitely the word to describe them.
The Riders, for instance, who take centre stage in this movie, is a no-nonsense motorcycle gang (some of its members were actually played by real-life Hell's Angels) led by the youthful albeit exceedingly tall Trash (played by Marco De Gregorio, but credited as Mark Gregory); whereas the Zombies, led by the charismatic Golan (George Eastman), zip around on roller skates in gleaming white shoulder-crescented costumes, wield deadly hockey sticks that are anything but jolly, and might have led to confusion with extras from Starlight Express – were it not for the incongruous fact that another gang, the ironically-titled Iron Men, actually do take their besequined sartorial inspiration from musical theatre (and are played by professional television dancers), but are no less violent than the other gangs all the same.
Also of serious note are the saloon-driving Tigers, led by the coolest dude this side of the Brooklyn Bridge, a kind of black Austin Powers known only as the Ogre (Fred Williamson), though he also styles himself King of the Bronx, and the other gangs pay him grudging, token respect as he is responsible for bringing into the Bronx from the outside world all manner of necessities, including food and especially weaponry – lots of it. Nor dare we forget the Scavengers, a gang of barely-human killers attired only in rags, who emerge from their subterranean hideaways to waylay anyone unfortunate enough to encounter these degenerate troglodytes who seem incapable of speech, communicating only via grunts and shrieks.
Clearly, the Bronx is not a safe place for any outsider to viait, which is why the sudden appearance there one night of a beautiful teenage girl named Ann (Stefania Girolami, the real-life daughter of director Castellari) attracts such interest – and not just from a group of Zombies who try to assault her, and from Trash who turns up in the nick of time to rescue her and take her back to the other Riders, where he swiftly falls in love with this veritable damsel in distress
For Manhattan's police and especially the exceedingly powerful president of a massive arms-manufacturing company based there named the Manhattan Corporation (MC) are soon aware of Ann's disappearance into the Bronx, thanks to a covert tagging device used by the MC called a gizmo. And because she just so happens to be the MC president's own daughter and therefore heiress to the entire company, he is determined to get her back safely, whatever it entails, and at whatever cost in money and human lives it takes.
With its core plot duly established, the rest of the movie is basically a thrilling series of set pieces initially involving inter-gang scuffles and skirmishes but followed by uneasy truces and co-operation in order to keep Ann safe once she reveals who she is and how she has fled because of her hatred of what the MC represents – its selling of weapons being responsible for untold killings and human suffering worldwide year after year. Needless to say, this is something that Ann wants no part of, but will be irrevocably linked to once she does eventually become its president.
Interspersed between the gangs' confrontations with one other are confrontations between the Riders (especially) and a psychotic Bronx-born mercenary named Hammer (Vic Morrow), who knows every inch of this godforsaken territory and has no scruples or conscience whatsoever in killing whosoever attempts to prevent him from recapturing Ann, having been hired and sent specifically to achieve this goal by her father. Reluctantly working alongside Hammer is another Bronx local, a deadbeat known only as Hot Dog (Christopher Connelly). Moreover, Hammer also gains a further ally when one of the Riders, Ice (John Loffredo), a treacherous, traitorous would-be usurper of Trash as leader of the Riders, volunteers to set gang against gang, which should enable the three of them during all of the undoubted ensuing mayhem to abduct Ann (and also, as Ice is secretly intending, to enable him to become supreme ruler of the Bronx when the gangs have all but exterminated each other.
As so often happens, however, the best-laid plans often fail to come to fruition, and Ice's is no exception. Let’s just say that when Hammer's actions falter, prompting the MC to send in a private army brandishing fire-throwers in addition to the usual artillery, the movie's climax is horrifically violent, with a truly apocalyptic death count, though in a last-minute twist, who is killed and who survives may not be who you are expecting – it certainly caught me by surprise.
Overall, The Bronx Warriors is very redolent of other Italian movies of this genre that were emerging at much the same time, as well as Hollywood's cult 1979 classic The Warriors and John Carpenter's 1981 neo-sci fi thriller Escape From New York, as well as Australia's Mad Max franchise. In turn, it went on to inspire countless more action flicks in this same movie mould. Consequently, as I'm a longstanding fan of such films there was nothing to see in it that I hadn't already seen countless times, with the albeit well-staged series of fight scenes beginning to pall after a time for me (though I can well understand why this movie attracted such fandom when first released to audiences who were far less accustomed back in the early 1980s to such superbly-choreographed spectacles).
On the plus side: despite this being a very violent movie there is scarcely any gore to be seen anywhere in it (though there may be more in uncut, unrated versions), which as far as I'm concerned is always a good thing – I'm a firm believer in the Hitchcockian approach to movie-making, i.e. gore is not more. Harnessing the human imagination can yield far greater scares and chills than anything presented fully on-screen.
Despite being a secondary character, The Ogre is certainly the most memorable in this movie, due to Williamson effortlessly stealing every scene that he appears in. Also arresting is Eastman as the Zombies' imposing crimson-garbed leader Golan (but named as Golem in some reviews read by me), making a pleasant change (at least by comparison) from his more (in)famous previous roles as cannibalistic serial killers (in Anthropophagus, 1980, and Absurd, 1981)! And Girolami's Ann is suitably pretty and decorous, contrasting sharply as the living Beauty against the dead, decayed, disintegrated Beast that had once been the thriving Bronx.
Conversely, although his fight scenes, motorbike riding, and stunts throughout the movie are both formidable and faultless (which is particularly noteworthy as he did everything himself, not using a stuntman double), and although I had no problem with his acting skills either (in spite of this movie being the very first that he'd appeared in), I did have a problem accepting Gregory as Trash, the all-powerful leader of a seriously tough adult biker gang.
My problem lay with the fact that Gregory had only just turned 18 (not 17, as often mistakenly claimed) when he filmed his role as Trash, and, unlike various other actors who can look much older than their real age, he really did only look 18. True he was tall, muscular, and undeniably very handsome, but he was clearly just a teenager, and as such I found it difficult to suspend disbelief in order to accept how someone like him could ever have become leader of a biker gang whose other members were all older, in some cases considerably older, than him (or at least looked it).
Perhaps it is no accident, therefore, that in publicity posters and on my video's front cover, Trash is portrayed in vibrant artwork depictions as a clearly much older, far more savage, bloodthirsty figure in full warrior mode, presumably to provide additional encouragement to viewers to watch the movie. Check out the three pictures below to see what I mean.
Worth noting, incidentally, is that Gregory came to director Castellari's attention after Gregory's fiancée sent a photo of him to Fluvia Film, which resulted in Castellari requesting Gregory to attend an audition. Whatever Castellari saw there, he evidently liked very much, youthful age notwithstanding, because Gregory ultimately won the lead role of Trash over 2,000 other applicants. Yet by the end of the 1980s, Gregory was shunning the film industry limelight entirely, for reasons still unclear (though he'd begun to suffer emotionally), and slipped into almost total obscurity thereafter, tragically dying via suicide in 2013 aged only 48. One of the few films that he made before turning his back on the world at large was a Bronx Warriors sequel entitled Escape From The Bronx, which was released in 1983, and which I now plan to watch too.
Meanwhile,, despite taking such an inordinately long time to do so, I am very happy to have finally watched The Bronx Warriors, and I can confirm that for me it was certainly well worth the wait. Equally, if you are also a fan of this movie sub-genre, I feel sure that you will enjoy it too, particularly if you watch it in the context of its production and release during the early 1980s, i.e. over 40 years ago, and don't attempt to compare it directly with the effects-exploding blockbusters of today's cinematic experience. The Bronx Warriors is very much a film of its time, and therefore should be judged accordingly.
If you'd like to experience briefly the barbaric Bronx of 1990 in this action-packed alternate-timeline movie, please click here to watch an official 1990: The Bronx Warriors trailer on YouTube; or click here to watch the entire movie free of charge there.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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