Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Scott LeBrun Steve Sandor ("Bonnie's Kids") is the title character in this routine "Mad Max" & "Road Warrior" inspired post-nuke sci-fi action flick. Teaming up with another hunky hero, Bandit (William Ostrander, "Christine"), he decides to help out a lovely young woman, Dielha (Andrea Savio), with knowledge of a plentiful water source. You see, in this world of the future, landscapes often consist of deserts, and water is hard to come by. The villain who stands in everybody's way is a snarling despot named Kardis (wrestler / actor Mike Lane, "The Harder They Fall").This was the first of *seven* movies that Filipino exploitation icon Cirio H. Santiago ("TNT Jackson") made with similar themes and stories. It's not particularly distinguished, and you soon see that the "story", such as it is, is often incoherent. At first it seems as if we won't ever get to know the characters very well, but Santiago does save that stuff for the second half of the picture, when things slow down for a bit. We even get a bit of romance.Santiago mostly concentrates on action and pace, and shows his audience a reasonably good time, with sex and violence aplenty. The music, credited to Ed Gatchalian and Susan Justin, is occasionally hilariously bad, but mostly it's good, atmospheric stuff, with a heavy accent on percussion. Costumes and vehicles are decent looking, but where the movie really works is the use of locations and the art direction.Sandor is not a bad actor, but he's just sort of taking up space here. His character is generic and lacks personality. Ostrander also does what he can with an under written role. Lane is an effective, amusing villain, and the supporting cast includes Monique St. Pierre ("Motel Hell") and Filipino exploitation mainstay Ken Metcalfe, who was also the casting director on this show.Not a terrible way to kill an hour and 24 minutes, but some people may prefer to just revisit the works of George Miller instead.Six out of 10.

Woodyanders The beautiful Delha (luscious Andrea Savio) holds the secret to the location of a spring of water in a bleak and violent post-apocalyptic world plagued by drought. It's up to rugged loner Stryker (beefy Steve Sandor in sturdy stoic and two-fisted form) to protect Delha from a bunch of vicious thugs led by the ruthless Kardis (a nicely hateful portrayal by the chrome-domed Mike Lane).Sure, this flick hasn't much of a plot and the characters are wafer thin, but fortunately director Cirio H. Santiago keeps the enjoyably mindless story moving along at a zippy pace, makes neat use of the desolate desert locations, and stages the lively and exciting action set pieces with considerable go-for-it gusto. Moreover, lots of stuff blows up real good, Savio bares her fabulously full breasts once during a nasty attempted rape scene, and both a tribe of helpful chattering dwarfs and a band of formidable warrior women in leather hot pants are tossed in for good goofy measure. The decent acting from the game cast keeps this movie humming: William Ostrander as the valiant Bandit, Julie Gray as the perky Laurenz, Monique St. Pierre as the fierce Cerce, and Ken Metcalfe as friendly old-timer Trun. Ed Gatchalian's funky-thudding score hits the stirring syncopated spot. Entertaining schlock.

videorama-759-859391 Santiago, in my opinion, though I've only seen three of his films (where I can pretty well imagine what his others are like) hasn't made anything that's matched up to the exciting, sexy, entertaining, and downright cheesy, Naked Fist aka: Firecracker. That's one of my favorite karate films, like The Protector, that I like to treat myself to on occasion. This was like a long dragging bore of a film, a pathetic reminder that these and other cheesy sci fi apocalyptic films existed in the eighties, with it's bad acting and script. It's one of those films, you lose interest in, then switch back, after a few minutes have lapsed, or something you just watch blankly. The story all so, mirrors the one on The Exterminators Of The Year 3000, a much livelier and exciting pic. Here, water has dried up. Situation: the good guys are helped by a girl who knows of the one last locations, where water is still to avail, only the bad guys are guarding it. There. Oh did I mention, the film has bad acting. This is a film, which if your girlfriend went down to the video store, and came back with it, you would strike (r) her. Forget it. Post apocalyptic crap.

Comeuppance Reviews In a post-apocalyptic world, water is scarce and is the most sought-after commodity in the new desert-like earth. When a woman appears who knows where to get a large supply of water, an evil, Sid Haig-like baddie kidnaps and tortures her for the information. However, only one man can rescue the girl and help spread the agua to the masses – Stryker (Sandor), of course. So because it's post-apocalypse, everyone puts on their wackiest getup and gets in their junkiest car, and the battle is on. During the "Quest For Water", which isn't a sequel to Quest for Fire (1981), Stryker and his babes have to contend with many obstacles, including some Jawa-like pygmies. Will they live to hydrate again? Out of all the many post-apocalyptic movies that hit video store shelves in the 1980's, our personal favorites tend to be the Italian ones, such as 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and Escape From the Bronx (1983). Italian Post-Ap's (as we call them) (not really) seem to, generally speaking, have the most verve and pizazz. This doesn't leave a lot of room for snoozers like Stryker, which doesn't bring a lot to the table. We've probably seen more Cirio movies than anyone, and this ranks towards the bottom as far as what we've seen of his to date. He even repeated the formula again with Raiders of the Sun (1992), another Post-Ap slog, but that one at least has Richard Norton (Norton also played Straker – pronounced "striker"- in Crossfire, so they have that in common). Though on the bright side, here we have Steve Sandor.While Sandor was unforgettable as Ollie Hand in Trained To Kill, U.S.A. (1973), here the character of Stryker has no real definition. We really get no sense of Stryker as a man or as a hero. On a scale for character development that we just invented, for the entire cast, not just Stryker, on a scale of 0-10, the CD scale for Stryker, the movie, is -5. That's right, negative character development. There's such a deficit, you end up owing the movie by the time the end credits roll. So in this particular wasteland, Stryker is just a generic dude with a beard.Or perhaps more accurately, he's just another supposed action hero in the 80's named Stryker. Let us remember the aforementioned Richard Norton, as well as Lance Henriksen and Wings Hauser, among others. So you don't really rally behind Stryker, as much as you might do with, say, Steve Rally. So with the movie as a whole, we've really seen it all before, so it's not very engaging. And that's certainly true in this case, as Stryker the movie is especially Mad Max (1979)-y. The filmmakers really didn't even try to hide the fact that it's a blatant knockoff. But that's the problem: the lack of window dressing in that sense really hurts, and then boredom sets in. But in the positives column we have a cool score, and some neat violent bits, but those two things aren't enough to keep it all afloat, unfortunately. The movie is as dry as the climate it takes place in.So pray the "nuc-u-lar" (as the narrator in the intro part clearly pronounces it) bomb never hits, if for no other reason than it would mean we would be LIVING inside the world of Stryker. And that would be the real catastrophe.