Podcast: New Barbarians
Cheap. Lazy. Incredibly stupid. And yet, it sparked a wildly popular trend of Mad Max ripoffs in Italy.
99 Cent Rental Podcast
Episode 64: New Barbarians
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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.
Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.
This very podcast was predicated upon one of our favorite movies from one of our favorite directors, 1990: Bronx Warriors from director Enzo G. Castellari. The following year we covered its sequel, Escape From The Bronx but there’s a secret sequel and we felt incomplete leaving it out. Until now!
The New Barbarians is a sequel in the loosest possible sense. It takes place in 2019 and steals liberally from George Miller’s 1981 sequel to Mad Max, The Road Warrior. We find Mike Brady lookalike, Scorpion driving the post-apocalyptic wasteland, on the run from his former gang, the genocidal Templars. Mike’s dedication to the loner lifestyle is put to the test when he rescues a mysterious injured woman from the Templars and he’ll be called on to protect a colony of survivors when the ghosts of his past return to settle an old beef.
New Barbarians leans into the spaghetti western overtures that inspired Mad Max while stealing from the same movie but on a significantly smaller budget. Italian Mas Max ripoffs are already a cheap, threadbare affair but this movie, the very first of many more to follow, starts off from an even cheaper, more threadbare position and it’s quite frankly amazing that this movie proved that ripping off a high-flying Australian stunt spectacular with the crappiest cars and wasteland punks you’ve ever seen.
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