Directed by David Engelbach
USA; 1985
So, did you hear the one about the Macho Toy who scanned a hot plastic Frau in season and ready for action? He got cold pissed when he found she was an effin Plugot!!! That’s waggos, yo!
Um...well, anyways... I guess you had to be there.
“900 years after the Great Nuke.
The world Man created, he destroyed.
Out of the darkness and ignorance of the radioactive rubble emerges a new order...”
In yet another post-post-apocalyptic wasteland film from the Reagan Age, the world as we knew it is now divided– Plugots (male): inferior, homeless savages made up of Machos (hard laborers), Toys (castrated, mute man-pets), & Seeders (baby-makers), and Fraus (female): the dominant side of the desert bed who have the tools and the talent to kick ass and call names. And when they’re not busy enslaving Plugots for fun and target practice or heading out to a former gas station turned love shack to get ritually restrained and begrudgingly fucked by a hooded Seeder in hopes of popping out a baby girl or two, the Fraus spend time training the younger warrior princesses by throwing them into a cage with Aargh the Awful, a seven foot tall mutant wendigo-type with a $2 smile who manhandles skulls like ossified basketballs!
Two boy slaves, Gruss and Korvis (Chuck Wagner, TV’s AUTOMAN), escape the sadistic Fraus, and after finding a “Learn to Read” book of ABCs in an antique suitcase they decide that being somebody else’s bitch may have been cool for their parents, but not for them. Years later, they’ve started their own tribe of like-minded brothers from other mothers safe within the confines of a forbidden Radioactive Zone. Led by the motivated Korvis, their one desire is gender liberation; to be simply FREE MEN.
After an initial scrimmage against the Fraus, a left-for-dead Korvis stumbles upon a US underground nuclear war bunker just as it was 900 years ago...except for the rotten corpses. Touring the facility, he’s more impressed with the laser guns, grenades, and GIGANTIC BOOMBOX (with batteries that still work), than with the infinitely more awesome President’s quarters completely tricked out with a Galaga arcade unit and a Medusa pinball machine. Korvis studies the accompanying pamphlet on how to use a laser gun (!), gears up with one of the gold lame' radiation suits (!!) and heads out on horseback with his new boombox at full volume (!!!).
Soon enough, he’s mistaken for the mythological “Prezzi-dent”, who (it is written) will come and issue a new world order of peace and understanding, and manages to get a special conference with Vena, the leader of the local Fraus. They make sweet post-apocalyptic love back in the Prez’s bunker bed, and Vena agrees to a truce.
Meanwhile, there’s been a mutiny in the Frau camp, and they’ve gone ahead and attacked the Plugots, resulting in an all-out massacre of explosions, crossbows, and spinning roundhouses.
Can Vena and Korvis band-aid the situation for a better tomorrow? Can both sides lay down their arms and come to terms? Will the movie end with a freeze-framed shot of Aargh jumping in mid-air clutching that coveted vintage boombox?
Yes, my friends. YES.
Brought to colorful life by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the same production team responsible for such marginal cinema classics as MISSING IN ACTION, COBRA, DEATH WISH II, BREAKIN’, ROBOTECH, and MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, this film is curiously labeled as an action comedy, but everything is played too straight and without a sense of irony to be truly comical. However, the action sequences were so much better than I was expecting, especially the martial arts action, which was coordinated by Ernie Reyes who also choreographed the wonderfully cultish THE LAST DRAGON and SURF NINJAS. Plus, the fact that one of the bitchin’ amazon babes is played by a former Grand Champion of the US Open Karate Championship and Blackbelt Hall of Famer Karen Lee Sheperd didn’t hurt, either.
Overall, in this pleasing WWIII fantasy piece loaded with insanely ludicrous futuristic lingo seasoned in a simmering “I Love the 80s” broth, I’d say AMERICA 3000 is technically competent MST3K fodder in the grand tradition of YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE.
Effin hot.
Review by Scott "Jealous Pervert" Wallis!
