Captive Women is one of the earliest – possibly even the earliest – example of that genre of post-apocalyptic adventure film that would become hugely popular in the 1980s in the wake of the global successes of the Mad Max films. Written by Jack Pollexfen and Aubrey Wisberg who had brought a measure of intelligence to The Man from Planet X (1951) provide another script full of big ideas, but the film is scuppered by a lack of budget (the post-apocalyptic landscape was realised almost entirely on soundstages, the only exceptions being some matte paintings of a ruined New York by Irving Block and Jack Rabin) and by prosaic director from former editor Stuart Gilmore.

The end of the world is represented by another of those stock footage apocalypses so popular in the 50s before the action settles down to the aftermath, possibly set a thousand years later (the working title was 3000 AD, a setting confirmed by film’s lengthy opening voice-over). It’s a shattered world where the survivors have managed to make many fanciful costumes based on Romans and something that might have been lifted from an old Robin Hood film and where men sport perfectly styled facial hair and the women have no trouble finding make-up and hair products but where no-one has yet thought of trying to actually rebuild anything. In this world, the human race – or at least that part of it that has survived in the New York area – has divided into three camps, the Satan-worshipping Norms, the scarred but devoutly Christian Mutates (who aren’t above abducting Norm women for breeding stock) and the brutal Upriver People led by Gordon (Stuart Randall). Norm prince Robert (Robert Clarke) is planning to marry the beautiful but traitorous Catherine (Gloria Saunders) when the Upriver People attack with the help the aid of Catherine and fellow traitor Jason (Douglas Evans). Gordon installs himself as the new king Catherine as his queen and Robert and his sidekick Bram (Robert Bice) are captured by the Mutates who have already saved another Norm leader, Riddon (Ron Randell). Much theological chatter ensues until an understanding of sorts is reached between the Norms and the Mutates who join forces to attack the Upriver People.

It’s a packed screenplay and some of the ideas are higher than the budget was ever going to allow. The RKO logo at the start might lead you to expect something a bit classier, but they were simply distributing the film for notoriously penny-pinching producer Albert Zugsmith who was never going to come up with the money necessary to pull all this off believably. Edgar G. Ulmer, a vastly better director than Gilmore, had managed to surmount the lack of resources to turn The Man from Planet X into something interesting the previous year, but Gilmore was desperately out-of-his depth here. He’d had some experience making low budget westerns but the logistics of bringing a ruined future world to life was just beyond him. In an interview with Tom Weaver for Fangoria, Robert Clarke recalled that Gilmore “was lost. Completely. The poor man had tremendous problems; there were too many people in the cast, too many actors with no dialogue in the scenes, and the fact that they had over-extended themselves for special effects… The whole film was ineffectual.”

He was done few favours by a script that was constantly being rewritten during production and by post-production tinkering which kept the film off screens for some time after it was shot. There was no way that any amount of rejigging was going to solve the problems of too many sub-plots and far too many virtually interchangeable, flavourless characters (all of them white – there’s not a black, Asian or Latino face to be seen despite it being set in the ruins of the famously multi-cultural New York), problems which might have been overlooked if the direction had a bit more pep. But Gilmore simply didn’t have him in it and he can do little to temper the heavy-handed religious subtext or make the few action scenes feel believable. “Gilmore was in over his head, ” Clarke concluded. “He didn’t know directing.”

He’d got the job at the insistence of RKO boss Howard Hughes who regarded him as one of his best editors and it was Gilmore who insisted on retitling the film from the none-more-science-fiction 3000 AD to Captive Women, which made it sound like a cheap sexploitation thriller. The publicists didn’t help, issuing stills of musclebound and slightly bored looking Stuart Randall lugging captive women Paula Dorety and Chili Williams round by the hair, giving a rather distorted idea of what the film is really like. Whatever ambitions Pollexfen and Wisberg had for their script was never going to survive this sort of treatment and the result is a badly compromised film that still hints at what could have been. Interesting ideas bubble around just below the surface but Gilmore doesn’t seem interested in them, merely rushing on to the next set-piece and leaving ideas and plot threads dangling all over the place.

Today the film is important as an early example of a sub-genre that was going to be just about everywhere three decades later, but as entertainment it’s severely lacking. See it for that reason or for the occasional glimpses of what might have been, but even at a mere 65 minutes, it’s a bit of a chore. It would prove to be Gilmore’s last feature film as a director. He moved into television for a while in the mid-1950s before returning to editing, eventually cutting films like Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), Sweet Charity (1969), Airport (1970) and his final credit, The Andromeda Strain (1971).