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BATTLETRUCK
aka
WARLORDS OF THE 21st CENTURY
Rating:  ½
USA/New Zealand. 1982.
Director – Harley Cokliss, Screenplay – Irving Austin, John Beech & Harley Cokliss, Story – Michael Abrams, Producers – Lloyd Phillips & Rob Whitehouse, Photography – Chris Menges, Special Effects – Jonnie Burke & Kevin Chisnall, Production Design – Gary Hansen & Kai Hawkins. Production Company – New World Pictures.
Cast:
Michael Beck (Hunter), Annie McEnroe (Corlie), James Wainwright (Colonel Straker), Randolph Powell (Judd), John Ratzenberger (Rusty), Diana Rowan (Charlene), John Bach (Bone), Bruno Lawrence (Wired Willie), Kelly Johnson (Alvin)
Plot: After the Oil Wars, civilization has splintered up into small self-sufficient communities. Suddenly across the countryside comes Colonel Straker, ruthlessly smashing and enslaving each community underneath him with his armoured battletruck. When the mysterious motorcycle-riding Hunter rescues Corlie, a woman Straker keeps as prisoner, Straker swears vengeance.
If there weren’t a Mad Max 2 (1981), it is unlikely there would have been a Battletruck. The likenesses between the two are often tedious – both films have plots where a small democratic petrol-hoarding post-holocaust community is holed up by a motorized warlord and are saved by an archetypal Eastwoodian Man With No Name. The Mad Max film was always really a Western where the the post-holocaust landscape substituted for the Western frontier. And Battletruck reveals the Mad Max genre’s debt to the Western more so than ever – it is hard not to read motorbikes for horses, or James Wainwright’s villain as a ruthless land-baron. There is even a scene where the hero is wounded and must bite the bullet.
Unlike most of the Mad Max 2 clones, which sold themselves on their action content, the action here is somewhat pallid. Certainly the battletruck looks great – and has a breathtaking slow-motion end going over a cliff – but the film is distinctly lacking in slam-bang heroics. This often consists of little more than a handful of aerial shots following motorcycles as they buzz across the barren Central Otago (New Zealand) countryside. Battletruck does have it over many of the Mad Max clones in that there is a modicum of plot and depth to the creation of post-holocaust society – the images of people eking a living look quite believable, rather than most of the Mad Max imitators, which just set out to be comic-book action films and paid no regard to the background of the worlds they took place in.
James Wainwright gives a performance that captivates whenever he is on screen, although Michael Beck lacks much heroic stature. Bruno Lawrence, on the other hand, gives a very silly performance.
Director Harley Cokliss is a potentially worthwhile director who has always hung around the genre never quite having had a major hit. Cokliss debuted with the well-considered children’s film The Glitterball (1977) and has turned out occasionally passable films such as this, Black Moon Rising (1986) and Dream Demon (1988). Cokliss may well be known more known for the films he did not direct than those he did – the aborted Thongor in the Valley of the Demons sword-and-sorcery project in the late 1970s and for The Empire Strikes Back (1980), for which he served as second unit director. In the 1990s Cokliss has virtually disappeared from screens, eking out a bare subsistence with tv work for sword-and-sorcery shows such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-9), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001) and The New Adventures of Robin Hood (1996-8); a handful of children’s fantasy tv movies – The Ruby Ring (1997) and An Angel for May (2002) – and the occasional action film such as Malone (1986) and Pilgrim (2000).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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