MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*
WARLORDS, one of the earliest post-apoc adventures to show some (possible) influence from 1979's MAD MAX, is an adequate but not overly exciting formula flick on a roughly similar theme. Again, the world has fallen into chaos due to a lack of fuel resources. In contrast to the Miller films, director/co-writer Harley Cokeliss injects brief references to areas polluted by radiation after the conflicts that destroyed all centralized authority. I'm not sure why Cokeliss did so, since the radiation areas have no effect on the script. This one-off movie has no super-technology resulting either from the war or from mutation, and if it didn't take place in the future, the two armored-up vehicles in the story would only fall into the domain of the uncanny.
Both hero and villain descend from the disbanded armed forces of the U.S. (where the film is supposedly located, though not many modern viewers will fail to recognize the colorful, spacious scenery of New Zealand). Hunter (Michael Beck) lives alone on a small farm, the only remnant of his military life being a high-powered motorcycle. He has occasional communications with a nearby settlement with the idyllic name of Clearwater, but plainly he wishes to remain isolated from human contact.
Hunter's opposite is Colonel Straker (James Wainwright), who has organized a small coterie of armed thugs with which to dominate all the settlements he can find. His main weapon is a huge armored truck, presumably one designed for some previous military conflict, and he can use this to ram the small buildings of setllers. Straker is utterly devoted to his mission of conquest, displaying his callousness in an opening scene where he approaches a trader with soft speech and then abruptly slits the man's throat. Straker seems to hold no ideal but pure power, though he's failed to make his most important convert in his daughter Corlie (Annie McEnroe). Early on it's clear Corlie is the merciful type, refusing to countenance her old man's enormities, though it's not clear how she escaped his influence, given that her mother is implicitly long deceased. Straker for his part does not punish his wayward daughter, but going by a late conversation between the two, he seems less motivated by love than by some belief in maintaining his "immortality" through blood succession.
Arguably the apocalyptic narrative's usual emphasis on the conflict between settled communities and roving raiders is de-emphasized in favor of a conflict of a "heavy father" interfering in the romance of his daughter and the male of her choice-- though in this case, there's no sense that Straker has any particular successor in mind to ensure him his genetic perserverance. Granted, Hunter doesn't exactly prove a Lochinvar. When Corlie flees her father's camp, Hunter rescues her from her old man's enforcers, but the hero tries to palm Corlie off on the Clearwater residents because Hunter just prefers his solitude for whatever reason. Hunter and Corlie do eventually get together but he doesn't renounce his "lone ranger" tendencies in favor of a pipe and slippers.
Still, the back-and-forth battles are decent and the settlers are more pro-active here than in many Miller imitations, with one inventor providing Hunter with his own armored automobile. Unfortunately Hunter's so underwritten that actor Beck can't do anything interesting with the character. McEnroe and Wainwright get all the decent lines and consequently both thespians can hold the viewer's interest better. Kevin Peek's brooding score sometimes reminded me of Cameron's for the 1984 TERMINATOR, and on the trivia front, a pre-CHEERS John Ratzenbeger plays the aforementioned inventor.
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