Land of Doom

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.

Deborah Rennard and Garrick Dowhen make their way across a nuclear-war-devastated landscape as they search for a rumored paradise. There are rapists, cannibals and evil motorcyclists who wear black leather studded with shiny metal, as well as the odd Venetian mask for them to encounter. Why is it that leather-clad motorcyclists always survive, and there's plenty of gasoline?

It's shot amidst the weird, weathered, rocky deserts of Eastern Turkey, which certainly has the look of a devastated landscape. It's odd to think this was once prime farming land, fought over by conquerors for three thousand years... which is why it looks that way.

It's a pretty bad movie, but TCM added a bit of humor by noting that Miss Renard is a man, and Dowhen is a woman.

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.

Plenty of reviews to the quality of the movie already that are pretty accurate.

One classic part was where the guy drove the motorcycle off the cliff. He makes a face like "oh no" and you see him jump off and the bike goes over... to explode of course. But the the shot back up and he has fallen over the cliff and is just hanging on, where he was on the ground several feet behind it.....

And no one has commented on the pants the star wears. What's with the giant black V think that looks like a big thong on the outside? It made her backside look pretty big.. And then there was the cave girls. The villain has four women in slightly skimpy clothes we only see briefly.... but they really needed MORE clothes. Obviously someone doesn't understand the idea of background scenery in sci-fi.

A few people knocked the music, but the last 15 minutes or so during all the fight scenes the music was very inspired, if you like cheesy action stuff. Bit of batman, intro to baywatch, maybe a little A-team or incredible hulk fight scenes. The composer did a good job ramping it up to try to give it some energy, needed since much of the fight scenes were dumb at best.

And then there's the theme song that plays at the end. It has lyrics including: "talkin' bout, warriors of rape, of death and hate, killing for fun" "cannibalists, living amidst, are hunting man" How can you not give that a thumbs up. If you search it's available on u tube with a whopping 8 comments. Maybe go there and add one...

Anyway, have to upgrade this from a 1 to a 2 for the music in the last 15 or 20 minutes. The music achieved the fun cheese that the rest of the movie was never able to...

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.