2020 Texas Gladiators - the 80s film that failed to predict the future 

I love these Italian post-apocalypses; the technology to manufacture brassieres has been lost, but cosmetics and hair care products are readily available.

“Then pout and call me daddy” 😂

I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons, and thought we’d have underwater Sealabs by 2020! ☹️

I have prepared for the apocalypse: I have stored, in a secret location, a suit. I can hear what others would say, "oh no, the atomic war has destroyed civilization and we'll never find ways to grow food or get clean water or.... hey, check out that guy's suit. Not too shabby."

Did 4 years in Texas in the 90s when I was in the Army. Glad to see this movie got it right.

My post-apocalyptic film would be called "Post Coital Smoke" and would occur between the 2nd and 3rd Ultra Pornogasmic Wars. It would be a character-driven think-piece.

My post apocalyptic world would look like an 80s Italian B movie. Because that's what my world ALWAYS looks like anyway.

As a Texan, I have no idea what you're talking about. This depiction of 2020 looks pretty accurate to me.

I have a theory that all 80's post apocalyptic films take place in the same universe. And for that matter, that every movie of every B-Movie genera takes place in a shared universe within that film genera. This makes a lot of crossovers, in the movies that play in my heard, very fun!

"Don't shoot it's me!" RA TA TA TA TA. I don't know why that made me laugh 😅

If years of low-budget sci-fi has taught me anything, it's where would the future be without quarries? These days I tend to call these quarry warriors "quarriors". They spend a lot of time there.

My post-apocalyptic film would be set in a world where all weapons have been destroyed so people throw eggs at each other. Therefore chickens have become the most valued commodity.

A middle-sized city surrounded by a ring road like I-275 that acts as the de facto walls of the city. Constantly patrolled by a patchwork of militias consisting of former military, police and citizen volunteers. Other than a greatly diminished availability of different products and food stuffs and of course shortages life isn't really too bad. The city provides power and protection to surrounding farms. There is constant political intrigue and threat of conflict with surrounding city-states as they continue to try to secure whatever resources are available for their own populations by whatever means necessary, trade, negotiation, or conquest. That's just the backdrop though. The main plot of the movie would be protecting the power plants which lay just beyond the circle freeway. Under constant threat from marauders our heroes have secured several barges of coal from far upriver. If our heroes can successfully deliver the coal it will be a proof of concept that the isolated city-states can work together and they have agreed to form a larger government for all of their citizens benefit. There are those however that have come to enjoy their unquestioned power and will do anything to retain it. We will use a combination of roads, rails and rivers to deliver the coal in a high stakes thrill ride of action and adventure.

My favorite small budget post-apocalyptic film: A Boy and His Dog, starring young Don Johnson, from 1975.

I’m sad we never used the fashion that these movies predicted

My post-apocalyptic film would begin with a village that was under the control of a tyrant. The only reason the tyrant was in charge is because "HE," (She, or It,) was the only one who could defend the people from the "Dark Legion" that was in the mountains. A group of protagonists decide to seek out the legion, because the legion can't be worse that the asshole they have. After a number of events involving pyrotechnics and stunt men, our heroes find an underground complex with thousands of soldiers in suspended animation. As it turns out, their uniforms are rather dark.

You misunderstood what the Ranger meant by "we're all one race". He was pointing out that the 'Native Americans' are also Italian. Edit: Yes, Elizabeth Warren, like many people in the area where she grew up, had a false family story about Native American ancestors. You are not clever for pointing this out.

5:05 This made me laugh way more than i would have thought reasonable 🤣

George Miller's Mad Max trilogy set the standard for post-apocalyptic films so I find it hard to imagine any else.

My money's still on Max Factor. There's always makeup after the apocalypse.

Kevin Murphy: "Lumpy's hoping they'll wrap it up soon so we can catch the dozen consecutive airing of 'A Life Day Story' on TNT."🤣

These 80s post apocalyptic movies are truly something to behold. All over the place, tongue firmly in cheek. Kinda of enjoyable hot messes.

I remember watching this on Joe Bob's Last Call show on TNT. Probably one of the last eras where a movie like this could get shown on television.

I kind of want to see this movie, just to find out how that hilarious "Don't shoot, it's me!" [Blam][Blam][Blam][Blam] scene fits in.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, this is a pretty accurate portrayal of Texas in 2020.

Thank you! Please cover more Italian trash from the 80s -- sword & sorcery, post-apoc, etc

This looks amazing! It's like a bunch of 12-year-olds dumped out all the action figures in the toy chest and had them fight.

As a sci-fi and horror author with a penchant for B movies, I've always had a soft spot for the post-apocalypse setting, when done well. I've been considering an apocalypse brought on not by nuclear war, but by magic, with a heavy leaning into fantasy as a setting for a book.

I've loved this goofy flick since it was on UHF syndication, even if it is difficult to watch. As a bonus it was a sign for me to take it when a company in Austin offered me a job. (And Texas.... yeah, they didn't miss the mark by much.)

I would love to see a post apocalyptic time line.👍🏻

Have you the The Time Guardian from 1987? That's another one I loved as a child and laughed at as an adult. Not exactly Carrie Fisher's finest moment, but worth a watch. Another movie writen by those who thought we were all going to be screwed in the future.

The far, far future of 2020! Time to buy a new calendar.

Wouldn't it have been a great novelty if they had made the film in Texas? What I'm waiting for is someone to make the OUT OF THE ASHES series by William W Johnstone into a movie(s). Right now reading book # 14 ( TERROR IN THE ASHES) , the liberation of the UK by The Rebel Army from gangs, warlords and robe wearing cannibal mutants called The Creepies/ The Night People/ The Believers.

Bull from Night Court gone bad

I used to rent this every other week with The Class of Nuk'em High II .. I was not allowed to watch rated R movies... a tape that was UNRATED on the other hand.. well made me who I am today,, this brought back a food of great memories.. do you know the composer perchance?

Don't try to tell me what the Apocolypse looks like. I've been to Hull.

A timeline of apocalypses! Yes!

I clearly need to see this now, though personally I still wish New Barbarians had come to pass if only for the fashion and haircuts. Still, at least there's another 50 years to go before Lucio Fulci's Warriors of the Year 2072 can be proven inaccurate...

You are a great presenter. Great channel thank you

I remember seeing the box art of this movie when I visited my local video store (ah, the good old VHS days). I never rented the movie though. This is another good example of a poster that has nothing to do with the movie it's supposed to promote.

Colonel Klink, LOLOL!!!

I expect to see Al Cliver (Nexus in the movie) again in your future review of Lucio Fulci's 'Zombie', I presume.

I believed that the idea of post-apocalyptic Texas Rangers could be in an awesome film. I was wrong.

Colonel Klink’s dubbing veers from Scottish to South African,highly amusing.

I wondered what ever happened to peplum movies...they seem to have morphed into this....

Have you heared of The Orchid Cage? Now that's an interrestingly different post-apocalyptic novel.

You have to give it to the post apocalyptic men, they kept their gym memberships current

Thermal shields must use sonic screwdriver technology, neither works on wood.

Mayeeda Nexus sounds like a poncey Malaysian electric car...

The future is a very difficult thing to predict. For the simple fact will never be able to account for all the variables.

In my apocalyptic film, teenagers take over the world. Kind of like “Children of the Corn” but worldwide.

Actually a good time to do this movie since it starred the original Dr. Strange - Peter Hooten.

3:03 You know, you REALLY aren't selling your position very well, Colonel Klink.....

ALL Post-Apocalypse movies are in a eternal summer.....shirtless guys.....almost naked girls.......under a burning sun.

Italian Cinema: Di Sica, Fellini, Leone, ..... and this.

This is how Italians thought the US would look in 2020... No comment. BTW, the cheater there is the same actor as the TV version of Dr Strange. He also made a really awful movie with the director of Troll 2 and a "movie" with Bo Derek before "10" (and before she was 18, I believe). So, god help you if you ever star in a failed Marvel project.

Isn't one of the 3 rangers the bad guy from "Throne of Fire" as well?

As far as post apocalyptic worlds go, I guess it depends on whether you want it to be fun enough to make a movie worth watching about, or something truly distressing. What if you have a solar flare that destroyed all technology and we had to go back to 1700's/1800's lifestyle? No air conditioning, refrigeration nor TV or internet... all modern electronic comforts are all gone. You have to get a real job and grow your food in your back yard. If you wanted a "fun" apocalypse... hmm... what if people were taken over by their internal parasites, ie your parasites gain sentience, work their way to the brain and take control of your body?

I'm IN Texas in 2022, and it's nothing like this!

Do I have a post-apocalyptic film for you? Yes sir, I do. Take One Million Years BC except... Nope, that's Teenage Caveman. Skip the Dinosaurs, go straight for the Mutant Hell Ants. So, yeah, it'd still be a "Democracy Falls, Fascism rises" scenario but it'd be a Fascist Regime of Ants.... otherwise known as... ants. How big though? That's the interesting... That's Phase IV. OK, credible threat, semi credible creatures, ants the size of dogs taking over, for serious film cred, the Empire State Building... Oh... The Empire State Building of the Ants... Scrap all that, end the world... IN DARKNESS. Really saves on the setting as it wouldn't be a normal kind of darkness, it'd be the eating all the light kind, kind of like an Eldritch horror took up residence in the atmosphere or the Old Testament God got snitty again. In the end, it'll be saved by, or caused by, science.

So, which card game? Poker?

That’s not Colonel Klink. He has no monocle.

another fine re-run...lol

the Shape of Things to come and Panic in year Zero to name two early one's

Oof. This movie looks like what 2020 felt like.

The Police of the New World wears a Carabinieri commander uniform... Tipical Texas police uniform, I suppose...😁😸 By the way, I see some very familiar faces from these kind of movies...

Where’s Schultz?

3:02 Is...is the actor there responding to your riff without being edited? The Fourth Wall is failing! Run for your lives!

Great poster art though.

Wafer thin...hmmm. Send out Mr. Creosote and give him the wafer thin mint. This will destroy them.

Wouldn't you save Sabrina Siani?

Apocalypse Ciao :)

This looks amazingly awful, and I adore your review! You are so hilarious!

Another great review of what looks like a fairly mediocre post-apocalyptic film. With the exception of the Mad Max films, gasoline doesn't seem to be much of a problem for all the motorcycles and death cars out there. As for my idea for a post-apocalyptic film, this might seem convoluted but here it goes. A scientific experiment in teleportation goes horribly wrong, resulting in one-third of the planet's population "shifting" to a parallel dimension. A dimension where the dinosaurs did not die out. So, there would be room on this parallel Earth for this huge growth in humanity, but oh the horror! Meanwhile, life on the first Earth just got a monkey wrench thrown into the works by a "scientific incompetency".

… I dunno being from Texas…

My vision for "Epoxy Lips Now!" is a future where everyone who disagrees with Elon Musk has their mouth glued shut!

“We are all one tribe, one people.” Which I guess includes the bikers and the pseudo Nazis . . .

As with Star Wars, the Mad Max & Road Warrior success brought about a bunch of knock offs. In this one they had a sign written in bad English, aparently to make people think it was an American film.

humanity is gone and the other species have evolved to use the human stuff

You want an unusual apocalypse scenario, take a look at the TTRPG Feng Shui 2, or its cousin the card game Shadowfist. 97% of human life on the planet turns to dust after a bunch of angry cyborg apes detonate an experimental bomb designed to destroy the world's chi flow. They do it in order to overthrow the tyrannical UN world government that created them as super-soldiers, then decided that was a bad idea and switched over to using cyborg demons kidnapped from 69AD China via time travel instead. The ape leader is named Battlechimp Potemkin, his main lieutenant (and future Pope) is Furious George, and the punny names get worse from there. Honest to god don't understand why that IP hasn't been turned into a major Hollywood franchise, or at least a Netflix show that gets inexplicably cancelled - or not so inexplicably, given that the Ascended wouldn't like the exposure. Cookie for anyone who gets that joke. :)

a scottish birthday

Not as good as _Bronx Warriors,_ (1982- I think) it's sequel _Escape from The Bronx_ (1983-ish.....Which is crappier, but in the BEST way!) - and _2019 After the fall of New York_ (1984?) - This is more in league with Robot Holocaust (1987)......Or (shudder) Endgame (1984 - which is *not* a good thing.....Yeeeesh)

Not one of D’ Amatos best lol

The new world Order lacked a Dog. Preferably a german Sheperd.

3:15 Why is the Benito Mussolini wannabe speaking English with a Scottish accent?

Why so many apocalyptic movies? Because they're cheap, and the studio's accountants love cheap. Film in an abandoned factory, throw some junked cars and trash around, give the actors some ragged old clothes to wear and half thought out modified vehicles to drive, and you've fulfilled 99% of the genre requirements. And you've only spent a few thousand dollars on it all. Get the actors to run around firing blanks at one another, drive around a quarry or a sandpit chasing each other, have a woman take her top off once or twice, and you're guaranteed to make millions on the video store market.

Simpson did it,, Simpons precicted 2020,,, google Simpsons Cat Flu ,,, its all there :)

0:40 I wasn't living in Italy during the 80s, but I know from friends who spent time there that the first half of the decade was the continuation of s serious recession that left almost 20% of the population stranded below the poverty line and a lot of the rest hurting. They spent the back half of the 80s recovering from that, only to get socked with an enormous government corruption scandal in the early 90s, which had been ongoing for years before. TL;DR They had reasons to be gloomy, not least of which was Reagan's saber rattling dispute with the Soviets having them (and most of the world) on edge about a nuclear war.

1982's *BattleTruck* (Warlords of the twenty-first Century) is a better ride than this, fella! (actually one of the better (non-Mad Max) '80s post-apoc movies! - From New Zealand, I believe.) PS: Heyyyy, I found it! 😸_👍 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4JuTlRc1xww.html

😂

I think Street People is better than this.

I have a couple of ultra-cool post-app flicks that might tickle a few fancies here & there. First & foremost up is A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975). Yeah, most of you have probably seen it or at the very least heard of it. Whatever, it's a brilliantly mounted fully badass adaptation of Harlan Ellison's bull goose loony take on the World After the Big One Drops. A pre-MIAMI VICE Don Johnson plays "Vic", a hunter-scavenger ranging over the burnt desert hellscape of a Nuked-out American Southwest. He's always accompanied on his food-and-sex finding expeditions by his faithful telepathic--and endlessly wisecracking--terrier named "Blood". Perpetually unsated booty hound that he is, Don/Vic is oh-so-easily enticed by flirty-fishy "Quilla June" into the waiting maw of a wacked-out subterranean collective that looks to be inhabited entirely by hayseeds---as in hicks, rubes, rednecks, peckerwoods, et al. It seems that this particular community's utopian ideal of a resurrected America is a weirdly nostalgic and closely detailed re-creation of Rodgers & Hammerstein's OKLAHOMA!, sans the toe-tapping musical numbers. When he learns he's slated to be farmed out for "stud" purposes---you know, to augment the limited gene pool---Don/Vic manages to slip his shackles and, following a botched insurrection, escape upstairs to the surface world where there awaits a truly twist--and I do mean "twist" as in "twisted"--ending guaranteed to mind-zap even the most jaded viewer. I've watched this black comedy masterpiece something like--oh say--87 plus times, so believe when I say I can well vouch for its far-freaking-fantasticness. Oh, and as an added bonus the movie is set in--YIKES!--in the year 2024. But as a less drastic change of pace there's THE BED SITTING ROOM (1967), a great absurdist post-nuke send-up served up Brit-style that was produced & directed by Richard Lester (you know--that bloke who made a couple of fun movies with the Beatles, if you remember them). In this stylishly warped scenario civilization as we have long known & loved it has been vaporized, London has been flattened, most government functions other than the barely minimal have been shut down, weirdos of every stripe & persuasion prowl the ruins in search of whatever, and nobody dares utter the word "Bomb" for fear of invoking some arcane curse. But worst off of all, a frazzled Rita Tushingham---who lives in an abandoned tube train---has found herself to be SEVENTEEN months pregnant, and that's with no obstetrician or even a remotely qualified RN to be had. Moreover, for reasons not explored, human survivors regularly mutate into inanimate objects and common household appliances, as well as the occasional stray critter. For example, Rita's "Dad" turns into a parrot while "Mum" has morphed into a kitchen cupboard. (The British Home Secretary gets transformed into a wainscot; go look it up.) Meanwhile, Peter Cook & Dudley Moore are a pair of diehard coppers who hover overhead in the shell of a Black Maria that's been fabricated into a makeshift hot air balloon. With bullhorn in hand they exhort any wandering survivors they spot to "keep moving, keep moving"', ---apparently to offset the danger of them becoming targets in the (highly) unlikely event of renewed hostilities. The cast is filled out by Marty Feldman, Spike Milligan, Sir Ralph Richardson, Mona Washbourne, Michael Hordern, Roy Kinnear, and--well--some other people you've probably never heard of. If you're a Monty Python fan, or just enjoy VERY offbeat oddball forms of comedy & satire, you should definitely give this one a try. I've never been able to determine whether ERASERHEAD is a pre- or post-apocalyptic allegory. I have come to consider that the "apocalypse" in its particular case is not an external one--that is, not in the technological, political, or traditionally religious sense. Rather I think it might be an "internal" apocalypse as manifested in the ultimate corruption of matter throughout the universe. In which case Jack Nance's ultimate schlemiel "Henry" could represent a New Prophet , one who's cleaving a kind of passage through this glutinous mass that declares itself a world. But I don't know. If any of you have an opinion or interpretation on this very question, then please feel free to offer it.

*Threads* is one of the best films for this theme & *Kings of Horror* has it FREE now here on YT check it out