2020 Texas Gladiators

Joe D'Amato and George Eastman split the directing on this one, a post-nuke picture wearing a spaghetti-western hat: a band of good-guy rangers guards a settlement in the irradiated future, one of them sells the others out, and a fascist warlord in the Mad Max mould rolls in to enslave what is left. It is built entirely from parts of better films, the leather and the wasteland from Miller, the ranger-gang honour code from a hundred Italian westerns, and it moves at the brisk, careless pace of men who have made forty of these. Eastman also plays the chief villain, snarling, which he was always good at. D'Amato at least points the camera competently, which in this cycle is not a given. Bottom-shelf apocalypse, honest about it.