The "surf nazis" are a kind of biker-punk gang who live in a post-cataclysm Los Angeles. They have swastika marks on their faces and clothes and go by the names of famous Nazis, ie. "Adolf" and "Mengele". They are barely seen to surf, and the scenes in which they do seem uncannily like they were filmed by someone else, for something else... and somewhere else. They barely even go to the beach.
There is some rubble and abandoned buildings around the surf nazis, as you would expect in a big city after an earthquake. But there are also some interior shots of domiciles that look like they could be in "Better Homes and Gardens". Did the earthquake miss them?
The movie's lack of consistency with its locations means it fails at creating a believable world, post-apocalyptic or otherwise.
There are other gangs in the movie, and ones that seem like they might have been a little more interesting, like a group of young skateboarders who call themselves "the earth surfers - riders of the hard wave". A character who comes out of left field is the African-American mother of a young man who was supposedly killed by one of the surf nazis.
There is also barely any violence in the film, or effects of any kind, though there are a few flashes of bare breasts. The movie has one undeniably violent scene toward the end, where a girl is hit with a speedboat. The collision isn't particularly bloody, but then we see her decapitated head floating in the water.
However unrealistic, at least it gave me something to write about here in an otherwise boring film. It took me until the end of the movie to realise that the surf nazis were supposed to be the bad guys. The film is an alleged exploitation classic. It's statements like these that the word "alleged" was invented for.
