Endgame / Bronx Lotta Finale (1983) -****
In the episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” built around The Day Time Ended, there’s a host segment in which Jonah and the Bots sing the praises of concepts— which is to say the tendency of filmmakers operating in the lower strata of fantastical cinema to cover for the shallowness or underdevelopment of their ideas by cramming lots and lots of them into a single picture. The all-time grandmaster of the technique was probably Sirio Santiago (have a look at Future Hunters if you doubt me), but it was in Italy during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that it saw the most sustained and widespread use. That’s how we got a ripoff of The Omen that was also a ripoff of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s how we got Hercules fighting space robots, Emanuelle dodging cannibals, and mad scientists building indestructible slasher killers for the Greek Orthodox Church. It’s how we got a caveman movie that’s also a cannibal movie that’s also Europe’s shoddiest-ever Biblical epic, which occasionally takes time out from its already hectic schedule to steal a set-piece or two from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then of course there’s Joe D’Amato’s Endgame. Although Endgame billed itself back home as a bogus sequel to 1990: The Bronx Warriors, it actually bears that film no more than a general esthetic resemblance. And my God, does it ever feature a lot of concepts! What’s most remarkable, though, for a product of an industry that had always been maniacally focused on copying somebody else’s hit, is that the two films which Endgame reminds me of most hadn’t yet been made in 1983. The easiest way to describe this movie’s core premise might be to say that it’s a cheaper, trashier take on The Running Man that turns into a cheaper, trashier take on Children of Men (albeit with very different reasons for smuggling someone beyond the reach of a murderous authoritarian government).
It’s the year 2025, and civilization as we know it was mortally wounded half a lifetime ago in a global nuclear war. It isn’t dead yet, though, and for residents of the city-state of New York, it’s still possible to maintain some semblance of a pre-apocalyptic lifestyle. There’s still a functioning government, for instance, although it’s a military oligarchy the character of which is best indicated by the fluorescent pink SS thunderbolt badges that adorn the gas mask helmets worn by the gendarmerie. A consumer culture is still in evidence, complete with mass-media advertising. (Endgame is eerily prescient about the real 2025 on exactly one point: the most heavily promoted product is a dodgy-sounding health supplement whose pitchmen make fantastical and patently dishonest claims on its behalf.) And there’s still broadcast television. The most popular show by far in the New York TV market in 2025 is a sporting event called Endgame, in which post-apocalyptic gladiators hunt each other across the city’s more blighted regions, fighting to the death for cash and prizes.
An Endgame match is just beginning as we join the action. The quarry for this contest is seven-time winner Ron Shannon (Al Cliver, from Waves of Lust and 2020 Texas Gladiators), who has proven equally adept on either side of the crosshairs. He will be pursued by three hunters, each one a veteran with multiple kills to his credit. Woody Aldridge (Bobby Rhodes, of Flight from Paradise and Hercules) is big and strong, and an expert knife-fighter. Gabe Mantrax (Alberto Dell’Acqua, from Battle of the Amazons and After Death) is a master of karate, his skills belying his unimpressive physique. But all savvy Endgame viewers have their eyes on Kurt Karnack (George Eastman, from Rabid Dogs and After the Fall of New York). Shannon and Karnack were boyhood friends in private life, and are arch-rivals in the Endgame arena. The one time they ever went up against each other as hunter and prey previously resulted in the sole declared draw in the history of the sport. This is going to be the ultimate grudge rematch, in other words, and the Endgame color commentator (David Brown) is practically giddy with excitement.
Meanwhile, in the hellhole neighborhood chosen for the Endgame arena, a woman named Lilith (Laura Gemser, from Reflections of Light and Interzone— but she’s using her “Moira Chen” pseudonym here, so you know she’ll be keeping all her clothes on) is skulking about, dodging various sorts of peril. There are the Pariahs, for starters— the homeless, downtrodden hyper-poor who are the only people desperate enough to try living in that war-ruined part of the city. One assumes that those guys don’t often see a woman with all her hair and teeth, an unbroken nose, and no trace of scrofula, and Lilith becomes a target for gang-rape as soon as they notice her. But she’s also the object of a search by a squad of the aforementioned SS soldier-cops, which were set on her by Colonel Morgan (Gordon Mitchell, of She and Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks), one of the lower-ranking members of the junta that rules New York. It’s unclear just what this is about right now, but Morgan’s superiors are gravely concerned for the outcome.
Naturally Shannon’s path will cross Lilith’s over the course of the match. Indeed, that seems to have been the woman’s intention all along. She represents an extremely secretive consortium of people whom the government doesn’t like one little bit, and she wants to hire Shannon on their behalf to smuggle some fugitives out of the city. Ron isn’t interested at first, but he’ll change his tune a little after he finishes with Woody Aldridge and Gabe Mantrax, only to get maneuvered into a killing box by Kurt Karnack. Lilith, it turns out, is a mutant possessed of acute telepathic abilities. Since Karnack doesn’t see her as anything more threatening than an unexpected close-quarters spectator to his triumph, she could tell Shannon mind-to-mind what the hunter is up to, enabling him to improvise a counter-ambush without the risk of revealing his own position. That’s worth committing to a dangerous future job, and Shannon is indeed successful in turning the tables on Karnack with Lilith acting as his eyes. Surprisingly, though— and much to the annoyance of the home audience, I’m sure— Shannon stops short of killing his old friend once he has him decisively beaten. He annoys that commentator, too, by cutting short the post-game interview to follow Lilith deeper into the ruins.
Lilith meant to take Shannon to meet his prospective employers, but Morgan’s goons get to them first. By the time the pair reach the site chosen for the introductions, there’s nothing left but a pile of bullet-riddled corpses. No, wait— the killer cops missed Professor Levin (Dino Conti, from Devilfish and You’ll Die at Midnight) and a young boy by the name of Tommy (Christopher Walsh). If there had to be just two survivors, it’s good that those guys in particular made it, because Levin is the mastermind of the whole undertaking, while Tommy is foremost among the fugitives whom Shannon is supposed to smuggle. The boy, like Lilith and indeed all of Levin’s refugees, is a psionic mutant, but his mental powers are orders of magnitude greater than the others’. It is the professor’s belief that mutants of this sort represent the next step in the evolution of our species, and that their innate sensitivity to everyone else’s brainwaves makes them the ideal seed population for restarting civilization on a more humane basis. For instance, Levin has never known a mutant to inflict violence of any kind on another living thing, even in self-defense. After all, what’s the point in hurting someone if you’re going to feel their pain as if it were your own? The problem is that the New York junta agrees with Levin— only they see the mutants as ecological competitors to be stamped out before they can attain the numbers or power to resist effectively. The professor has made contact with a less bloodthirsty community far from the city, where the mutants could live in peace, and he has further arranged for a helicopter from this haven to pick up his refugees at a particular spot in the countryside, on the afternoon of December 25th. (Joe D’Amato knows filmmakers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.) That chopper will also be carrying the considerable fortune in gold bullion with which Shannon will be paid. That sounds good to him, and the badass for hire accepts the commission without further ado.
Mind you, there are plenty of hazards out there beyond the city limits, known and unknown alike, so Shannon takes it upon himself to hire some subcontractors. For starters, he knows he wants Bull (Gabriele Tinti, of Caged Women and Beaks: The Movie), whom I take to be the head coach for the whole Endgame program. Bull, meanwhile, recommends a promising new recruit called Ninja (Hal Yamanouchi, from Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals and Warriors of the Year 2072) and a retired Endgame champ by the name of Kovack (Mario Pedone, from Daughter of the Jungle and Blue Island), who now serves in the private army of the lamest warlord in all the wasteland. And Kovack, once he’s come onboard, points Shannon toward Kijawa (Nello Pazzafini, of Ator the Fighting Eagle and Ironmaster). That aging palooka might not look like much, but he’s a master knife-thrower with the fastest reflexes Kovack has ever seen. With the band thus assembled, Levin packs Lilith, Tommy, and the others into an armored van for a dimestore approximation of The Road Warrior’s climactic tanker convoy. En route to the rendezvous, the mutants and their mercenary escort will face blind brigand monks, a contrary breed of mutants who are evolving backwards through phylogeny, and pursuit by Colonel Morgan and his forces. But they’ll also have help from a most unexpected quarter: Kurt Karnack, who is determined that nobody gets to kill Ron Shannon but him.
It looks like I have a new favorite cheapjack me-too We Have Seen the Future and It Sucks flick. I began to suspect as much just from the opening credits, which, if you know your actor aliases, promises an absolute dream cast for a 1980’s Italian exploitation movie. Seriously, the only way D’Amato could have done better on that front is if he’d found someplace to squeeze in Sabrina Siani and Giovanni Lombardo Radice, too! I hesitate to describe any of these people as good actors (although Gabriele Tinti has occasionally surprised me with his range, if nothing else), but every one of them has a certain cockeyed charisma that makes them a pleasure to watch— and naturally the effect is multiplied by putting them all together the way Endgame does. Indeed, that’s true even of the performers who are cast wildly against type, like Al Cliver and Laura Gemser. I would never have hired Cliver to play a world-weary warrior who’ll do the right thing for the right price, but he turns out to be kind of good at it. George Eastman is scene-stealingly strange as always, Tinti shows himself starting to age into what men of his generation used to call a tough old bird*, and Hal Yamanouchi continues his underappreciated winning streak as latter-day Italian action cinema’s best omnicompetent man of few words.
The real joy of Endgame, though, is how much seemingly unrelated stuff it throws at you, and how well it manages to make most of it sort of fit together. Mind you, a lot of this movie’s sub-premises and sub-sub-premises are dumb, like the supposedly devolving mutants whose settlements look like the world’s junkiest adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Given what’s supposed to be happening here, I’ll accept ape-mutants, lemur-mutants, shrew-mutants, and even lobe-fined fish-mutants, but bird-mutants, frog-mutants, dog-mutants, and goat-mutants are right out! Others are hackneyed, like the go-nowhere conceit that Tommy is a post-apocalyptic stand-in for the Baby Jesus. And yet others start off intriguing, but get undone by sheer carelessness, like when Tommy (who, you’ll recall, is supposed to be psychologically incapable of harming anyone even in self-defense) saves the day by giving Colonel Morgan and his men the Full Carrie White without seeming to suffer any ill effects. But then we’ll get something like the ongoing, intimate enmity between Ron Shannon and Kurt Karnack, which astonishingly culminates in a Rocky III coda nearly equal to the original. We’ll get the recurring plugs for Lifeplus during the phase of the film devoted to the titular bloodsport competition, positing that not even nuclear Armageddon will suffice to break Americans of their addiction to snake oil. We’ll get the blind monks, who owe their unexpected military prowess to the captive mutant whom they force to beam his high-ground view of the battlefield into all of their brains. A compelling mix, all in all, of clever but undercooked ideas, unabashed nonsense, and unabashed nonsense that somehow works in spite of itself.
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