Survival Zone (1983)

Another of the endless Mad Max ripoffs, and this one ranks with the stinkinest of all time. I don't mind a few stinkers, and I love the campiness of these late 70's/early 80's post-nuke films, but this is probably the worst film I've seen since Blair Witch 2. After a WWIII holocaust, we look in on the lives of a few survivors who are about to cross paths. We have the scum biker gang, the all-American dad and child with a foreign sounding wife and daughter (who have an old man as a mock grandpa),we have the last 2 remaining horses on planet earth, a convent of nuns, and finally a loner stud lookin' for action any way he can get it.All I can say is, all of the horrible clichés are in affect. Absolutely nothing happens for about the first 50-55 minutes except a lot of garbage talk about the way things were and how retarded man is for destroying everything. The rest of the film cannot be considered action, horror, or science fiction in my opinion. You just have to make a whole new genre for films like this and call it the Sh*t genre. You could fit this 90 min. film into a 25 min. TV show package.The editing is horrible also, and you have the feel that some scenes (including the ending) needed more extensions onto them to help tell the story, but I have a feeling this would just prolong the pain of viewing it even more. Please be warned, there's a good reason why less than 30 people have rated this film.

After a devastating nuclear war most of the land has become contaminated by radioactive fallout. Only several scattered patches of land known as "survival zones" remain untainted. Rugged, hard-working farmer Ben Faber (forcefully essayed by dour, husky, pudgy-faced "2001: A Space Odysey" star Gary Lockwood) resides on one such area with his gutsy wife Lucy (lovely Camilla Spav), willful teenage daughter Rachel (comely brunette knockout Zoli Marki), adoring son, and feisty old buddy Uncle Luke. The Faber's peaceful existence gets jeopardized when a vicious horde of scummy, black leather-clad cannibalistic bikers led by the highly intimidating and intelligent Bigman (coolly underplayed by big, brawny, hirsute George Eastman lookalike Ian Steadman) stop by and lay siege to their house. Fortunately, nice guy itinerant loner Adam Strong (a likable turn by handsome, muscular Morgan Stevens) comes to the Fabers' aid.The shopworn premise, basically just another rough'n'tumble post-nuke survivalist take on a classic Western movie scenario (the Fabers are clearly patterned after early settlers, with Strong as a heroic roving troubleshooter type and the bikers substituting for marauding Native Americans), doesn't promise much, but luckily the uniformly sound performances, unusually complex, well-drawn and even plausibly human characters, a welcome element of genuine humanity, Percival Rubens and Eric Brown's smart, surprisingly thoughtful and introspective script, a few unsettling oddball touches (Bigman has a severed doll's head affixed to the top of his motorcycle helmet), Rubens' capable direction, a sturdy theme which addresses how a man ought to fight for what's his and stand up for what he believes in (Ben refuses just to let the bikers destroy his farm without putting up a fight), an unsparingly harsh and savage tone (early in the picture the bikers raid a missionary and murder a bunch of nuns!), and shocking outbursts of raw, brutal violence lift this one well out of the rut. Vincent Cox and Colin Taylor's spare, stripped-down cinematography, shot on gritty film stock, gives the film a convincingly scrappy look. Only the somewhat sluggish pace and Nic Labuschagne's slushy, obtrusively overwrought score detract from this otherwise satisfyingly tense and gripping winner.

This like it's going to be a good slasher at the beginning, when in the second scene, Bigman defeats another bikie in a jousting match with chains, then soon after another of his gang punches a nun to death, but it goes very quiet after that and never picks up.

This movie is not too shabby. The scenery is magnificent. Zoli Marki turns in another one of her brilliant, brown-eyed performances (she could have been the South African Lara Flynn Boyle). The rest of the cast is okay, but as things go with these "international" productions you can't pay too close attention to the accents (you might ask why, for instance, is the dad American, the mother English, and the two children South African). The main villain looks like a lost member of the Village People and wears a tight leather outfit with "Big Man" spelled out in studs across his back. As in THE DEMON (another film made by the same director and crew), the blood is orange.