Post-nuke

1982–1990 · 9 films catalogued

Italian producers watched Mad Max 2 and made forty of them in five years.

Post-nuke films are Italian post-apocalyptic action pictures of the 1980s, shot cheaply in quarries outside Rome. Mad Max 2 (1981) and Escape from New York (1981) came out months apart and were both enormous in Italy. Roman producers responded the way Roman producers always responded.

The formula

A wasteland, which is a quarry outside Rome. A drifter with a modified car. A gang in shoulder pads and hockey masks. A settlement with a water supply worth defending. Somewhere in the last reel, a monologue about the old world.

The films

1990: The Bronx Warriors, Escape from the Bronx, 2019: After the Fall of New York, The New Barbarians, Warriors of the Wasteland. Enzo G. Castellari and Sergio Martino made most of the good ones, having already made most of the good poliziotteschi.

Why they are watchable

The budgets were tiny and the ambition was not, so you get a lot of practical vehicle work, real fire, and stuntmen taking hits that would not be approved anywhere today. The dialogue is uniformly terrible in every dub.