Original title: Anno 2020 – I gladiatori del futuro

The indefatigable Joe D’Amato made his first foray into the 80s Italian post-apocalypse field with a film that bears his name as director but which he claims he had little to do with. 2020 Texas Gladiators, he later revealed, was mostly shot by his long-time collaborator George Eastman/Luigi Montefiore who was supposed to be making his directorial debut with the film but was nervous of handling the action scenes. While he shot the scenes with the actors – the majority of the film – and D’Amato handled the second unit action stuff, it was D’Amato’s name alone that made it to the credits (everyone in the credits has their name anglicised in an effort to disguise the film’s Italian roots.)

The eponymous gladiators are The Rangers, first seen breaking up a gang rape in an abandoned warehouse and slaughtering pasty-faced bad guys who look like extras from a Lucio Fulci zombie film. The Rangers are the only vestige of law and order in a world ravaged by war and natural disasters. The Rangers – Nisus (Al Cliver), the improbably named Catch Dog (Daniel Stephen), Red Wolfe (Hal Yamanouchi), Halkaron (Peter Hooten) and Jab (Harrison Muller) – save Maida (Sabrina Siani) from the rapacious marauders but are forced to cut Catch Dog loose when he also tries to sexually assault her. Five years later, Nisus and Maida are living a seemingly comfortable life in the settlement of Free Town with their young daughter. But their lives are turned upside when bandits led by Catch Dog and working for fascist warlord Black One (Donal O’Brien, making his first film appearance after he suffered a fall that left him in a coma and with visible and sometimes very obvious physical impediments), turn up and attack the settlement, looking to appropriate their power plant and uranium mine. Nisus is killed in the attack and the colony falls, leaving Maida to team up with the three remaining Rangers, recruit a nearby Native American tribe and set off to reclaim Free Town.

2020 Texas Gladiators is, refreshingly, not the Mad Max 2 (1981)/Escape from New York (1981) clone that so many of the Italian post-apocalypse films tended to be but rather a futuristic western, similar in intent to “Jules Harrison”/Giuliano Carnimeo’s Il giustiziere della strada/The Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983). It borrows some superficial imagery from Miller and Carpenter (one of Catch Dog’s gang sports a Snake Plisken-like eye patch and others display the same leather fetish as the biker gang in Mad Max 2, but it bears all the hallmarks of a western, most notably John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960) (and so by extension, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic Shichinin no samurai/The Seven Samurai (1954)), though here we have to make do with a slightly less than magnificent four.

It’s fairly action-packed with lots of things blowing up and the Rangers wiping out enough extras to fill a whole film in the opening scene alone and there are moments here that are a lot of fun. But there’s also an undeniable air of shoddiness about the proceedings. A pray-painted sign reads “DANGER EXSPLOSIVE” which we see a couple of times in huge close-up, and there’s a feeling that something – several somethings in fact – are missing from the plot. There are throwaway references to an “atomic war” but that’s about as much we learn about the world situation. While we’re missing some vital information, D’Amato and Eastman take us off on some unnecessary detours which add very little to the story – a game of Russian roulette is feels particularly like egregious time filling.

There’s a lot of brutality, a certain amount of cruelty, some nudity (one of the warrior women runs around in a highly impractical costume that leaves her breasts exposed) but not a great deal of anything meaningful going on in 2020 Texas Gladiators. But it’s certainly very odd and sometimes its oddities can be strangely entertaining, even if only inadvertently. For example, a fairly mundane actioner turns very weird with 20 or so minutes to go, not to ay politically very dubious, when a tribe of very stereotypical Native Americans turn up. Had you not made the connection with the western before, this is where it gets hammered home with a vengeance.

D’Amato went on to make another of the post-apocalypse films with the truly nuts Endgame (Bronx lotta finale)/Endgame (1983) in which Eastman appears as the villain alongside Cliver and that other great D’Amato collaborator Laura Gemser. They were his only contributions to the genre which was already showing signs of heading down a dead end by the time he made Endgame. By now, D’Amato was running his own production company, Filmirage, which financed his post-apocalypic thillers but really made an impact when it bankrolled Michele Soavi’s excellent horror, Deliria/Stagefright (1987).