Search - The New Barbarians on DVD

Damian M. (ratchet)
Reviewed on 3/11/2009...

A group of bikers called the Templars vow to destroy all humanity after the nuclear holocaust. They especially hate women (because they are the source of life?), books and religion. They butt-rape anyone who gets in their way. Fred Williamson vows to "get those faggots!" Horrible Italian Mad Max rip-off.

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Calling all cheese lovers!

Jeffrey Leach | Omaha, NE USA | 04/11/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"God, I love these cheesy Italian post-apocalyptic actioners! I can't get enough of the lousy special effects, the ludicrous dialogue, the ham-fisted action sequences, the outrageous costumes, and the supremely bad dubbing! I owe Media Blasters a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the back for digging these clunkers up, cleaning up the picture, and transferring them to DVD with scads of extras. They haven't released very many of them, about three so far I think, but it's obvious they will likely release more in the future. The one I'm waiting for is David Worth's "Warrior of the Lost World," a movie so bad that the team from MST3K viciously harpooned it. Until that glorious day arrives, however, I content myself by watching films like "The New Barbarians." This is the latest Media Blasters contribution, a movie that contains nearly every element we've come to expect in an Italian post-apoc flick, namely all of the abovementioned traits plus Fred Williamson and George Eastman. The director is none other than old favorite Enzo G. Castellari, a man who needs little introduction to fans of this and nearly every other Italian exploitation genre of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Oh yeah!

Sometime after the world went to heck in a hand basket, humanity struggles to survive in a harsh world. Well, I think it's humanity, but it might only be a bunch of dirty Italians in ripped clothing if this movie is any indication. Anyway, a group of harmless people picks up a radio signal hinting at some semblance of civilization, but when they try to discover its source they run smack dab into a gang of murderous thugs called the Templars. Led by One (George Eastman), these goons cruise around the countryside in tricked up golf carts while wearing uniforms consisting of shiny white padding and goofy helmets. Their idea of a good time is killing off groups of survivors, like the one above, because they don't think humanity should rebuild after the nuclear conflagration. Or some such nonsense. Anyway, their golf cart cruisers have lots of neat weapons that pop out at the push of a button and can lop off heads and blow huge, gaping holes in people. It looks like the Templars are pretty much unstoppable: they are well organized in a time of confusion, have a philosophy that they stick to, and they don't tolerate weakness even within their own organization.

Into this mix drives Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete), a sour faced hero with a Chuck Barris coif who drives a fancy car and doesn't like the Templars. With the help of his bow and exploding arrow carrying friend Nadir (Fred Williamson), Scorpion plans on defeating the Templars and making the world safe for humanity. This entails a lot of overdone car chases, exploding bodies and heads, some lovin' in a tent, and occasional visits to a kid who fixes up the car (Giovanni Frezza billed as "Young Mechanic"). If you've seen any of these films before, you know there isn't more to it than that. There's a big showdown where Scorpion, Nadir, and Young Mechanic make mincemeat out of the Templar baddies that is worth a laugh or two. And there's the requisite honeys roaming around in dire need of saving--in this case Alma (Anna Kanakis). You just know Scorpion will win the day. You just know One will bite the big one (pun intended). And you know as the movie shudders to a halt that you'll sit in open mouthed awe that a film like "The New Barbarians" not only got made but probably had a theatrical run somewhere back in the early 1980s. Hey, it's not impossible; I saw Joe D'Amato's "Ator" on the big screen during roughly the same time period.

What's not to love about this tacky sleazefest? Well, Giovanni Frezza comes to mind. He's the actor who played the annoying kid in Lucio Fulci's "House by the Cemetery," and he's grown no less irritating here. His dubbed voice and dumb laughter coupled with the idea of having him proficient in the art of deadly slingshot warfare tends to grate after, oh, two or three seconds. Aside from Frezza's grating presence, "The New Barbarians" consists of one belly laugh after another. The sound effects for everything from the vehicles to the weapons sound like something whipped up on a cheap Radio Shack keyboard. And everything makes a noise in this film, EVERYTHING. It's beep, blat, whee, whiz, and a thousand other sounds from start to finish. The future is, if nothing else, a rather noisy place. It's also a rather sadistic place as evidenced by what One and his fellow Templars do to Scorpion when they capture him. Whew mamma! Never, EVER bend down to pick something up around these guys! That scene'll stay with you long after the movie ends, let me tell you! Throw in tons of over the top gore and a rather effective drum and synthesizer score from Claudio Simonetti and you've got a great way to spend an hour and change.

Media Blasters always manages to find plenty of extras for obscure films, and the disc for "The New Barbarians" is no exception. We get an Enzo G. Castellari commentary track, a trailer, and bonus trailers for "Hell High," "Duck: The Carbine High Massacre," "The Bronx Warriors," and "2019: After the Fall of New York." The Castellari commentary is definitely the high point seeing as how the man tries to tell us what he tried to accomplish with the movie. Whether he succeeded or not shouldn't matter; this is a fun film that cheese lovers the world over should rejoice in. Definitely give this one a go if you like movies with a high crud quotient.




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"Hate! Hate! And Exterminate!"

cookieman108 | Inside the jar... | 08/17/2005

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Holy regurgitated film sequences, Batman! While watching The New Barbarians (1982) aka Warriors of the Wasteland aka I Nuovi barbari it's nearly impossible not to notice how much this Italian post apocalyptic exploitation flick takes from other, more popular and infinitely better produced films. Now I'll agree this kind of thing isn't limited to the Italian cinema, as Hollywood can be just as unoriginal (and often is), but in terms of brazenly reproducing plots and sequences, the Italians seemed to have few equals...I mean, nearly this entire film was lifted from The Road Warrior (1981), along with a few others, specifically the Clint Eastwood westerner A Fist Full of Dollars (1964), which was also an Italian film that stole from previously made Japanese film titled Yojimbo (1961). Oh well...as the saying goes `What was once old is new again"...or better yet, `If you haven't seen it, it's new to you'. Co-written and directed by Enzo G. Castellari, who would later further beat the genre into the ground with such classics as 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and Escape from the Bronx (1983), The New Barbarians stars Giancarlo Prete (Detective School Dropouts, Ladyhawke), George Eastman (Antropophagus, Sexy Nights of the Living Dead), and Fred `The Hammer' Williamson (Black Caesar, Mr. Mean), none of whom were strangers to the world of craptacular cinema. Also appearing is Anna Kanakis (2019: After the Fall of New York), Giovanni Frezza (Manhattan Baby), Massimo Vanni (1990: The Bronx Warriors), and Ennio Girolami (Escape from the Bronx), who looks so much like actor Lee Van Cleef its creepy...if Lee Van Cleef wore a crummy blonde wig.

As the film begins we learn the year is 2019, and the nuclear holocaust is over, but the nightmare is just beginning. There seems to be three groups wandering the wastelands of what was once civilized society;

1. Caravanning bands of survivors, clinging meekly to their precious humanity, constantly monitoring the radio airwaves, searching for signs of life, and surviving on the hope of finding other pathetic non-mutated souls like themselves (strength in numbers, I suppose).
2. Those once humans irrevocably altered by the atomic wastes, since transformed into feral, cannibalistic mutants (`nuff said).
3. The Templars, a gang of nihilistic fancy lads dressed in white who are self proclaimed `high priests of death chosen to make others pay for the crime of being alive' i.e. they want to kill everyone who isn't them.

And then there are the nomadic wanderers such as Scorpion (Prete) and Nadir (Williamson) who owe allegiance to no one but themselves, cruising the toxic landscape for purposes entirely their own. So anyway, basically the Templars ride around on shiny, modified go-karts raiding and pillaging whatever caravans they find, that is until Scorpion and Nadir get in the way, resulting in an all out, post apocalyptic blood brawl, the fate of all humanity hanging in the balance...or something like that.

One thing you have to understand before going into a movie like this is very rarely do they have a well-defined storyline. Usually the plot consists of a series of grabasstic events tied together in an awkward continuity that often makes little sense, but the hope is that the director had the good sense to load the film with a whole mess of exciting action sequences to offset this factor, to which there are some pretty good kill scenes (exploding craniums, etc.), but otherwise the whole affair was a rather tepid one. One scene featured the hero character, Scorpion, being dragged behind a vehicle with the intent on killing him, but since said vehicle was traveling at a speed of about 20 mph, his demise seemed highly unlikely. There's one scene that really made me laugh in that Scorpion, having a showdown near the with the main baddies, blasts one of them in the face, the end result being much like that of what one would see in a cartoon in that of an antagonistic character encountering an explosive device, said device detonating, and the character subsequently appearing charred and blackened. The main character of Scorpion was pretty listless, basically a poor apeing of Mel Gibson's Mad Max, with a dash of Clint Eastwood's the man without a name characters in his early westerns. Scorpion travels around in a modified (modified meaning goofy, useless tubing extruding from the hood, and a giant, transparent plastic bubble attached to the roof which glows with a sickly green light at night) muscle car, complete with weaponry cast off from a James Bond film. I think he was meant to be a dark, brooding figure with a sympathetic side, but he came off as a poor amalgam of characters seen in other, better films. And then there's Fred Williamson...the gung ho warrior, riding around in a rocket car that looks like it has a top speed of about 30 mph, firing explosive tipped arrows, garbed in what appears to be an outfit leftover from a homersexual gladiator movie (nice golden codpiece, Fred). And I agree with a fellow reviewer...the worst character was that of the slingshot toting' kid mechanic with the toothy, idiot grin. Oh how I desired to see something bad happen to him...I very rarely wish harm on real individuals, especially children, but characters in a movie are fair game, especially one as annoying as he was...as far as the bad guys go, there's the leader of the Templars, named the One (Eastman). He does all right, if you like your cinema fraught with ham, but he seemed unable to control his subordinates, specifically his lieutenants, as they were regularly disobeying orders with the intent on taking his position. The Templars, as a whole, were hardly menacing (a great many of them got murderlated during an opening sequence where they were raiding a relatively passive encampment of survivors), and a later sequence, one where they're torturing a captured Scorpion, confirmed my inferred beliefs towards their preferences towards the love we dare not speak. Some scenes of interest...watch as Scorpion has an intimate interlude in a transparent bubble tent with a rescued damsel with giant hair, and Fred Williamson's character spies on them from a distance...I guess in the post apocalyptic future, you get your kicks where you can find them. Another sequence involves a Templar with a purple mohawk suffering a severe case of the road rash...so very satisfying. The entire movie appears to have been shot in and around a vacant quarry, which was a let down as I was expecting the decaying remnants of once great cities as the backdrop, or, at least the hint of such...derelict automobiles set of fire didn't convey the sense of a post apocalyptic setting but rather a poorly secured junkyard haunted by pyromaniacs. Another aspect I found entirely annoying (besides the kid) was near the end the Templars ran off to raid a rather large encampment, to which we saw none of the ensuing carnage, but only the aftermath...a letdown, to say the least. There were fairly copious amounts of gooey violence, and there is some fun to be had here, as long as you know what you're getting yourself into...

Mediablaster/Shriekshow provide a good-looking widescreen (2.35:1) print, enhanced for 16X9 TVs, on this DVD, but I had a real problem with the Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono as it was very soft, despite my raising the volume. In some scenes I couldn't even hear the dialog (perhaps that was for the best). Special features include a commentary track with director Enzo G. Castellari, an interview with Fred `The Hammer' Williamson, a washed out theatrical trailer for the film, and trailers for other Shriek Show releases like Duck! The Carbine High Massacre (2000), Hell High (1989), 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), and 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983). I would have given this release three stars on the virtue of its schlock value, but it lost a star due to poor audio.

Cookieman108

By the way, in the post apocalyptic future, if you're having trouble with your automobile due to engine problems, check under the hood for body parts...just a word of advice. Also, there are a couple of separate DVD releases of a film titled Warriors of the Wasteland available...it's the same film...I'm unsure the quality on those DVDs, though.
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