MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*
Yawn. Here we have yet another apocaflick from Filipino filmmaker Cirio H. Santiago. Prior to 1992 he'd directed half a dozen movies on this theme, and this one is just as desultory and low-impact as most of the others. (I need to rewatch WHEELS OF FIRE, which I recall being a little better.)
The movie's three writers stuck pretty closely to the George Miller template, though this time, the prized commodity is not gasoline but gunpowder. Heroic Brodie (Richard Norton, who'd made one previous apocaflick with Santiago) belongs to the Alpha League, a beneficent political group seeking to bring back democracy to the wasteland. One of the League's own officers, a fellow named Clay, deserted to found a gang of raiders. This backstory proves pretty inconsequential, because the raiders' secondary commander Hoghead (Rick Dean) gets a lot more screen time being evil. Hoghead (and yes, he wears a replica of a hog's-head for a hat) abducts the cute wife of Brodie's fellow commando Talbot. Talbot goes undercover so that he can infiltrate the raiders as a new member to their ranks, and he gets the best scene in the movie: swiping a hundred-dollar bill from beneath the nose of a poisonous snake.
As for Brodie, he supplies the Miller-trope where the hero encounters a tribe of Edenic primitives. This time the tribe has access to a potassium mine, meaning that they possess the makings for the prized gunpowder. The primitives--most of whom are dwarfs, except for a full-sized Asian beauty who becomes Brodie's romantic partner-- just want to be left out of all the fighting, but of course Brodie persuades them that they should join his side out of self-defense. Speaking of fighting, Norton really executes more gun-fu than kung-fu. And though I didn't keep count of kung-fu scenes, it seemed to me that Norton's character had fewer than did the character of Vera, nicely executed by American actress Brigitta Stenberg. Her handful of fight-scenes were the only ones that stood out; everything else was from hunger.
BTW, for a change the title actually means something. The village of the Potassium Primitives is named "Porto del Sol," which Brodie translates as "Gate of the Sun."
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