Land of Doom

Yes there are a lot of bad films like this. Yet this still stands tall as a bad film even in bad company.

This is a junior high school level Mad Max/Star Wars rip off. This kind of hybrid rip off/inspired pulp filmmaking was done my Turkish filmmakers for years with a crazy energy to equal some of the most mondo of Japanese and Italian movies. Sadly, though this features at least one Turkish star in a minor supporting role, this movie's "creative" force Maris doesn't have much of a clue about how to choose or direct actors or how to stage a fight scene or do action. The two leads both have U.S. TV credits and can't sustain any interest in a feature, the stunts could mostly be performed by your grandmother and done just as well. The pacing is lifeless the costumes and almost everything about it seems fake and thrown to together at the last minute. There are some large scale explosions--most of which seem to be big gas explosions and they hold off the shots long enough that you can see the explosion didn't really blow anything up.

There is at least one scene of a bad guy screaming the hero's name in rage, so they don't forget to include that. The main villain is pretty skinny for a guy who is supposed to be a muscle man. He had a sort of Phantom of the Opera mask on half of his face and in his longest dialogue scene speaks with a lisp. Sadly this type of funny bad moment doesn't happen enough to make the film a guilty pleasure.

The real life locations in Turkey's Capodocia are fascinating and only occasionally seen on film, but besides that this is a wasteland on all other levels. Best so-bad-it's-good element is the hilarious end title song and generally awful music score. How director Maris managed to keep making films after this I don't know, I'd hope he got better, but I haven't seen any of the rest to say for sure. But this is really badly done.

I suppose the only other way to describe this film is to say it's the type of film CANNON did too often, only much worse than even the worst of those.

It's a waste because if he had just gotten some better actors and then let some real Turkish directors make the film it could have been fun.

Turkish pulp cinema is a vanished thing and this does give just a very small taste of what the world is missing. If you can only imagine this film done with energy and lots of stolen music from other films and even occasionally stolen footage you'd have some hint. Seek out the few remaining real Turkish pulp cinema. Sadly most of the films were destroyed to reclaim the silver used in the prints, at a time when pop culture films stopped being popular in Turkey

Of course this was a movie that I had never heard about. But as I happened to stumble upon the movie by random luck here in 2024, and it being a movie that I had never seen, then I would indeed sit down to watch the movie and give it a fair chance. Truth be told, though, I didn't exactly harbor any grand expectations to the movie, as it seemed to be a low budget apocalyptic movie that perhaps cashed in on something like "Mad Max".

"Land of Doom" was watchable, sure, but it was hardly an outstanding or overly memorable viewing experience. I definitely didn't feel that I had been missing out on a grand cinematic experience here by not watching the movie before 39 years after it was released. It wasn't as if writers Peter Kotis and Craig Rand put together a particularly extraordinary script and storyline here. It was a pretty generic apocalyptic wasteland type of movie.

The vehicle designs in the movie were laughable and very, very low budget. It was hard not to burst out laughing when you see the motorcycles on the screen, especially with those homemade Arts & Crafts modifications they put on them.

Hardly a movie that will grace my screen a second time, but I can now check the movie off of the watched-movies list.

My rating of director Peter Maris's 1985 movie "Land of Doom" lands on a four out of ten stars.

In a sort of Sweeded version of the Mad Max films, Harmony (who really dislikes being touched) and Anderson roam the Turkey landscape chased by an insipid ragtag group of post-apocalyptic 'ruffians' . Longing to have a budget as big as say a 'Hell comes to Frogtown' sequel this film is marginal more silly/awful than any such film(s). The bikes alone are utterly ridiculous, not to mention the do-it-yourself make-up, the worst Frenchman impersonation since Holy Grail (but unintentional this time) and make-shift Star Wars-esque creatures.

If I'm making this film sound good in any way, shape or film, I'm sincerely sorry. It's not even good as a drunken guilty pleasure film. And this was somehow based on a book, how??

I'm a longtime fan of cheezy foreign knock-offs of THE ROAD WARRIOR and such. Often times that kind of exploitive, badly dubbed, low budget trash makes for high entertainment. Sadly, LAND OF DOOM brings no such entertainment. It's the future again, and it's post-apocalyptic. The world is ravaged by plague and evil bandits (sound familiar?). A woman named Harmony and her rugged hero partner (she won't let him touch her) try to escape from the Land of Doom to a fabled paradise. Some overlord villain type, who wears a lot of fake chromed armor and studded leather, tries to stop them. The best part of the whole movie is the opening shot of a dawn over a bleak looking landscape, accompanied by some appropriate music- Harmony's explanatory narration begins and it's all down hill from there. Some creatures that look suspiciously like the Jawas from STAR WARS appear and some things explode. LAND OF DOOM is oddly short on the over-customized junk cars that usually roam the post-apocalyptic wastelands of these pictures. Naturally, all the dialogue is awful as are the attempts at sexual tension between our two heroes. Plague victims sport painted on sores and behave like zombies. Much more frightening is the ineptness of the production and the performances. The ending is left wide open for a sequel that never came. Over the end credits runs a horrid tune called "Harmony's Land of Doom" which tries to sound like a modern pop song, but is just as dull and low key as the movie. In short: skip it and rent 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS instead.

In a poisoned post-apocalyptic world, marauders destroy all the good that is left. Harmony (Deborah Rennard) survives a raid which devastates her village. She encounters wounded warrior Anderson who is being hunted by ruthless raid leader Slater. She distrusts him but joins him anyways.

This is a straight up B-movie. The acting is bland. Rennard lacks charisma. Usually, this type of movie would try to sex her up. I can give it points for making her functional as a post-apocalyptic survivor rather than a bikini-clad killer. She tries to be seductive in one scene and it is so awkward. There is barely any chemistry between the two leads. Mostly, I like the Turkey locations. The style is somewhat silly. I don't mind the simplistic plot. It's a bit boring but it's not the worst.