Land of Doom

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??

Director: Peter Maris Cast: Deborah Rennard, Gerry Dowhen, Daniel Radell

Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller. Throw in a bunch of explosions, more cool leather costumes than you can shake a stick at, some awesome Turkish desert locations and rad-tastic old cars outfitted for combat Mad Max style and you can see how this one hits all the right notes... so long as you look at it from the proper skewed, underdeveloped perspective. Its hilarious.

Land of Doom is dumb in every way a movie like this should be dumb, but it's pretty entertaining if you're in an undemanding mood and hankering for leather, explosions, flamethrowers and guys with metal arms and face plates. Deliciously low budget . I had fun with it. 6/10

Yep, you guessed it, it's the end of the world again. Must be time to dust off the leathers and bring out the dodgy motorbikes. But get this.. the main character here is a LADY. And she can fend for herself! But just in case she can't, she finds an injured Calvin-Klein model to watch over her. How novel, eh? The planet is a wasteland, survivors are mostly plague-infested psychos or Ewok-resembling dwarfs.. isn't it fortunate that the two most attractive members of each sex alive find each other? Now they can start the human race anew and make lots of lovely babies together that are just as pretty as they are.. but first, there's the small matter of a mad gang to defeat. You know the sort: attacking the few settlements that are remaining, setting all the buildings on fire, indiscriminately killing the men while assaulting the women, spraying gunfire everywhere while riding on their souped-up Harleys.. you get the picture. The leader of this rabble is a guy with a really DEEP VOICE who wears a mask all the time. Is it a symbol of his power, or maybe he has an embarrassing birthmark underneath it? We never find out. Against such odds, our heroes can't help but get captured, but just as it seems things are at their bleakest.. an eccentric old man, who has a whole pound full of dogs, enters the film out of left field.. and promptly gets busy with a flamethrower. Can the three desperadoes escape the clutches of these maniacs with appalling body odour and no fashion sense whatsoever? All will be revealed..

Well actually no it won't, because the ending doesn't resolve anything. Perhaps a sequel was in the pipeline? Some hope, there isn't much here to give the likes of Mad Max a run for its money. True, there are a lot of bizarre elements here that make the film almost strangely compelling, but then you pull back and realise how shoddy the action scenes are and the lack of anything approaching clear plot direction. True, I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but I did at least hope for a little more entertainment. You may have a few laughs out of pure incredulity while its on, but is it really worth investing 90 minutes of your life for a few small pleasures like that? I say it is not. A 3/10 from me.

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.

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