Original title: Il giustiziere della strada

One of the most tedious of the Italian Mad Max clones (and given the competition, that’s really saying something), Giuliano Carnimeo’s rock bottom addition to a cycle that was soon to outstay its welcome takes as much from Harley Cokeliss’ Warlords of the 21st Century (1982) as it does from George Miller’s Mad Max 2 (1981). Some time in the future – the English language title, The Exterminators of the Year 3000, suggests a highly unlikely thousand plus years after the film was made – the Earth has been turned into a desert by the obligatory nuclear war (we’re spared the usual stock footage apocalypse this time) and water has become the most precious of commodities. In this wasteland, a group of survivors in a cave are running low of H2O and are menaced by a band of road warriors – led by the improbable Crazy Bill (Fernand Bilbao, credited as Fred Harris and channelling Vernon Wells’s Wez from Miller’s film). Enter Alien (yes, he really is called Alien), the obligatory loner with attitude – and this case nicely permed hair and tidy beard – who saves the day.

Replace the water with fuel, annoying kid-with-a-bionic-arm Tommy (Luca Venantini, John-John in Lucio Fulci’s Paura nella città dei morti viventi (1980)) with the feral child and Alien with Max and basically you’ve got Mad Max 2, albeit a very shoddy imitation. Robert Iannucci (credited as Robert Jannucci) as Alien looks every bit the former Calvin Klein model (here smack in the middle of a very short-loved film career) that he was and displays not one iota of charm and has zero chemistry with his on-screen love interest, Alicia Moro (Slugs, muerte viscosa (1988), Al filo del hacha (1988)) as Trash. The rest of the cast is made up of faces anyone who gorged on Italian horror and science fiction films of the late 70s and early 80s will be familiar with: Alan Collins/Luciano Pigozzi, Beryl Cunningham, Luca Venantini, Venantino Venantini et al. None of them make much of an impact. The show is stolen by Bilbao (dubbed in the English version by Robert Sommer) who is suitably deranged as the villainous Crazy Bull, complete with a wonderfully bizarre line in dialogue. He urges his band of road warriors into battle with a cry of “onward my merry mother grabbers!” and utters oaths like “by the beard of the prophet!” It’s a peculiar performance in an otherwise very staid film.

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It occasionally sputters into life with some of the action scenes – Carnimeo knows how to set up a decent and deafening explosion and the early attack on a fleeing water tanker is a creditable attempt to re-stage the climactic petrol tanker chase from Mad Max 2. But these scenes are defeated by the tedious linking material, poorly written and acted with zero conviction by a cast that frequently looks as bored by it all as the audience.

Giuliano Carnimeo was a prolific director spaghetti westerns in the 70s, churning out no fewer than seventeen of them under the name Anthony Ascott. Whatever the merits or otherwise of those film he seems completely out of his depths in futuristic SF though he seemed to enjoy the genre enough to have another go with the rarely seen Computron 22 (1988) which would turn out to be his final film.