A Mad Max rip-off given a spaghetti western spin, Steel Frontier makes very little use of its post-apocalyptic setting which adds nothing at all to the story. It’s just a not-very-good western with machine guns instead of Winchesters, motorcycles instead of horses and a fascist paramilitary group instead of the usual gang of outlaws. It’s a good looking film but its slavish devotion to the Mad Max trilogy, particularly Mad Max 2 (1981) with a dash of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) and so by extension Sergio Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari/A Fistful of Dollars (1964) thrown in for good measure, becomes tiring very quickly.
The publicity would have us believe that the film is set in 2019 though if that’s the case it’s hard to recall anyone mentioning the fact. The setting is the desert settlement of New Hope where the townspeople – who have survived the apocalypse with a plentiful supply of Old West clothing and a huge arsenal of guns – have found a way of extracting “natural resources” from old car tire. Which have also miraculously survived the end of everything… Into New Hope rides the gunslinger Johnny Yuma (Joe Lara), a deliberate reference no doubt to the Arizona town that lent its name to Delmer Daves’ 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma. Also in town are members of the “United Regime”, an outlaw gang also known colloquially as “The Death Riders.” Led by General Quantrill (Brion James) they plan to restore law and order but on their own brutal terms. Quantrill leaves his son Julius (James C. Victor) in charge, supported by his stoic right hand man Roy Ackett (Bo Svenson). Yuma finds himself involved with the Regime but plays the various internal factions off against each other while secretly working to free the people of New Hope from their oppressors.
Given that this is a production from 90s specialists in direct-to-video action films PM Entertainment (founded in 1989 by Joseph Merhi and Richard Pepin) there are an extraordinary number of explosions. PM loved a good explosion, the bigger and more senseless the better and here they excel themselves, reaching a new plateau in mid-budget destructiveness with the demolition of a huge industrial chimney. Steel Frontier was directed, not by Richard Pepin as was often the case for PM films (he was content this time to provide the good looking photography), but by Jacobsen Hart and Paul G. Volk who do well enough marshalling the firepower and detonators required to keep the feeble plot (written by Hart) moving along quite nicely.
Unfortunately the cast is less impressive. One-time Tarzan Joe Lara is hopeless as the supposedly enigmatic stranger and although the supporting cast is full of interesting faces (James, Leon from Blade Runner (1982), exploitation specialist Svenson, regular Jason Vorhees actor Kane Hodder) but they are often short-changed, James in particular being written out of the middle third of the script as he retreats into the desert to hang out, unseen, with his army. Brian Huckeba overcompensates for Lara’s woodenness with a ridiculously over-the-top turn as Chickenboy, this film’s answer to Mad Max 2‘s eccentric The Toadie.
The action scenes are pretty good though threadbare and it probably goes without saying that they’re not a patch on George Miller’s films, with plenty of fist fights, gun fights and things very noisily blowing up. But it’s just all a bit mediocre, a bit ho-hum. There’s nothing here you haven’t seen a million times before in either post-apocalyptic films or westerns (simply combining the two doesn’t make it clever or innovative) and although it’s technically competent the story never engages while the cast just seem to be going through the motions.
In the end you give up on the story and start pondering instead the film’s many oddities. Why does Yuma, who likes tootling away on a harmonics, play God Save the Queen for no apparent reason? How does that tire conversion process work? And why does Yuma’s plan to booby trap New Hope and lure in the Death Riders remind you so much of the plan hatched by The Waco Kid in Mel Brook’s Blazing Saddles (1974)? All good questions that will have you thinking a lot more deeply than any of the other nonsense in this eminently forgettable film.
The EOFFTV Review 