This gets off to a pretty good start, with your standard early 80s montage of society collapsing (well done, it should be said), then some John Carpenter-esque music playing as three prisoners are taking off to a camp, throwing us right into the action. (Apparently there were scenes setting up the action which were cut out but I think they were right to get straight into it, with only quick flashbacks for Steve Railback and Olivia Hussey but they set up everything you need to know.)
There is some campy (excuse the pun) fun at the prison, with Noel Ferrier and Michael Craig excellent as wardens, Steve Railsback hamming it up hilariously as a resistance leader, Lynda Stoner showing off her bare arse in the shower, Olivia Hussey looking terrified, Roger Ward as a sadistic guard, Gus Mecurio as a castrated guard, Carmen Duncan being nasty. All the actors play their roles in exactly the right styl for this sort of thing - intense Railsback, reminding me of a communist militant captured by the Nazis, beautiful flower Hussey out of her depth, scenery chewing pirate acting from the villains etc.
And, you know, some of this was pretty good - the satire, the Most Dangerous Game set up, the quality of the cast, some of the delirious excesses (a werewolf, the most hilariously inappropriate stand-in breasts for Olivia Hussey during her shower scene). There are bits of over the top violence I didn't mind - Roger Ward's sadistic guard deserved to have his hands cut off, Michael Craig deserved to blow up, the werewolf deserved to be cut up, the cowardly vicious prisoner... well you didn't mind him being tortured. And of course the prisoners taking over the camp and slaughtering all the guards at the end was justified.
But other stuff just felt plain mean - the pretty girl beaten up by Roger Ward at the beginning (Oriana Panozzo) - she didn't deserve that, and the film lingers over her pain. Ditto the brave prisoner (Bill Young) who is part of the escape. Most of all there is the horrible scene where Carmen Duncan captures Stoner, then rapes her and stabs her through the eye with an arrow. I will go along with Trenchard Smith's claim the movie is "only" satire for the most of this movie's running time - but not for these scenes. These scenes have a black heart. And there are far too many of them. (Though it must be said when I watched the movie for the third time, in 2015 on the big screen at the Astor - they bothered me less. Maybe because I knew they were coming. But still, they are not satirical and funny, it is sadism and catering to that market.)
Olivia Hussey's performance is an interesting one. A pretty actress, she looks absolutely terrified throughout the film (apparently this was her emotional state during filming too). She does some kind of empowering things - zipping up Gus Mecurio's dick, chopping off Roger Ward's hands, stabbing Carmen Duncan - but remains scared all the way through. Still, it's sort of a journey.
Seeing it on the big screen in 2015 made me appreciate the quality of the photography and the North Queensland locations. However it did show up a lack of logic in the action sequences - characters run around with little rhyme or reason, baddies are ridiculously bad shots with their guns.
In the end, I look on this as a partly fun futuristic violent satire, with a really, really mean side.
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