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Surely anyone reading this site is familiar with Italian post-apocalyptic movies, and The Final Executioner certainly falls into that sub-genre, but it is a decidedly second (or perhaps even third)-tier entry. Just imagine 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) or The New Barbarians (1982) crossed with The Most Dangerous Game (1932) with a dash of The Rules of the Game (1939).

After the nuclear apocalypse, a class system developed. A privileged, non-contaminated upper class, and the radiation-contaminated masses. Presumably to do double duty as a really entertaining sport as well as cleanse the population of "undesirables", the rich invented a game: "The Hunt", where they let loose the unwashed masses and shoot them for fun. The upper, hunting classes consist of Edra (Costa), Louis (Miracco), Evan (Zinny), Melvin (?) and the flashy, mercenary-style hunter Erasmus (Muller). One day, a disgruntled member of the underclass decides to fight back. After the baddies kill his wife (Bonfantini), Alan (Mang) becomes intent on revenge against the hunters. Being an intellectual and having no fighting background, Sam (Strode), a former New York City cop, extensively trains Alan in the warrior arts. Will Alan and/or Sam wreak vengeance upon those snobby "hunters"? The director, Romolo Guerrieri, was a journeyman-type director, having worked in many different genres over his long career, delivering product to keep pace with the varying trends in Italian cinema. You'd think someone with his filmmaking experience would have noticed the weird, sluggish pace and nonsensicality of what he was directing. Perhaps he DID notice this, so he gave the film a lot of exploitative elements, plenty of sex, nudity, constant violence, shooting, chases, blow-ups and even rape. Amazingly, this film is still boring. It just goes to show, if you have zero character development, the audience cannot become interested no matter how much sleaze and violence you throw at them.

Thankfully, this does have most of the hallmarks of the Italian post-nuke world we've come to know and love: absurd dubbing, motorcycles and cars with crazy, "futuristic" appliances on them, unbelievably wacky costumes and the like. Interestingly, this also has a comment on the Italian class system, using the apocalyptic wasteland as a backdrop for it. Perhaps the filmmakers had Salo (1975) in mind, but the end product is junky and uninspiring.

But it does have a nice electronic score, and it is worth noting that the movie is called The Final Executioner, and there is a scene with a flamethrower, recalling the two Exterminator movies. Could that be a coincidence? Released by Cannon, the VHS in the U.S. was put on shelves featuring the memorable silver big box. If you're looking for a good example of Italian post-apocalypse movies, this is not a good example to start off with, but the presences of Harrison Muller Jr. and Woody Strode are among its redeeming qualities.

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The Italians get post-apocalyptic movies better than anyone else, because they realize that at best, they are just Western movies remade with cars instead of horses. The costumes, the dirt, the violence are all the same. They can even use the same sets - now rundown with age - from the 60's and 70's heights of the Italian cowboy era to become the Xerox Bartertown of their low budget epic.

Romolo Guerrieri had been around as a director for years, working in all manner of genres like the giallo (The Sweet Body of Deborah, La Controfigura), poliziotteschi (The Police Serve the Citizens?, Young, Violent, Dangerous) and, you guessed it, Westerns (he wrote Any Gun Can Play and wrote and directed Johnny Yuma).

After a nuclear war, society has been broken into two groups: the clean, uncontaminated elites and those they hunt, the people left behind who have been contaminated by radiation. At least 80 million have been killed for sport as this movie begins.

Alan Tanner tries to put a stop to this, as his wife has been selected to be hunted. He pays for it by getting shot and left for dead before being rescued and trained by ex-cop Sam (Woody Strode, who is pretty much playing the same role he played in Keoma). Together, they go against the system.

Footage from this was used in Giuseppe Vari's Urban Warriors and Vanio Amici's The Bronx Executioner, which should please you that even after the end of the world, some folks try to keep it green. In fact, Woody Strode's character is renamed Warren and is in the latter, with new footage shot for Margit Evelyn Newton's character.

Speaking of Margit, she was shooting this and The Adventures of Hercules at the same time, which she claims exhausted her and made her lose ten pounds.

Look, this isn't great, but a dude rides around on a motorcycle and has a samurai sword in an Italian wasteland. That's enough to get me to watch.

A defective human is trained by Woody Strode to turn the tables on a group of elite hunters who hunt people like him for sport in a typical Spaghetti Apocalypse flick that is slightly better and is sort of competent, but ultimately lags at times because the characters both heroic and villainous are lame. Actually there is an exception, Woody Strode is enjoyable, in fact he reminded me of Louis Gossett Jr in Iron Eagle before the lovable LGJ became a B. Movie staple. The training sequences are easily the best thing as Strode steals what show there is here. Aside from that it's the typical offering, more competent by Z grade standards, yet less ambitious or indeed goofy than others. Dubbing is of course awful, action is alright in a low expectations kind of way and the script is all leaden melodrama performed by non-actors (The previously mentioned Strode excepted) The Final Executioner then is probably better than 90% of most Italian Mad Max rip offs, as far as that goes, but it's not that much better.

* * Out Of 4-(Fair)

And here we have more Italian post-apocalyptic trash for masochistic fans of the genre. Kicking off with some stock footage of nuclear explosions and volcanoes (?), a monotonous voice-over tells us that society has been contaminated by radioactivity. Those free of the contamination now hunt the others for sport. It's an interesting premise and one that undoubtedly helped to influence THE RUNNING MAN.

Yes, we're in cheap B-movie territory here, and while this film is indeed poorly-made, it also turns out to be quite watchable and exciting at times. We are introduced to yet another violent society and watch as a group of helpless survivors are massacred in slow-motion by a cruel gang of armed men and women. The slow-motion is obviously intended to give this scene some kind of epic proportions, and manages to be somehow effective. Two survivors remain; our stony-faced hero, and his wife. Inevitably the two are captured, the woman is raped and shot dead, and the man shot and left for dead.

Thankfully, though, help arrives in the form of Woody Strode, the black actor who appeared in SPARTACUS all those years ago. Strode is still in fine shape for a man reaching 70 and shows off his mean fighting skills during the film's progress. His screen presence certainly makes the film easier to bear, as he stands head and shoulders over all the charisma-free non-actors filling the rest of the cast (incidentally, they're all a sweaty bunch of losers, I guess nobody really washes in the future).

From then on, our hero, played by William Mang, must build up his strength and his cunning to take revenge on the murderers and become the figure of the title. This involves running through a corridor of swinging sacks, crawling along a bridge covered in barbed wire and running through a pipe also filled with barbed wire. What relevance these moments have for later in the film I don't really know; he doesn't encounter any obstacles faintly resembling these at all when he finally takes his revenge. They are certainly amusing though. The latter half of the film sees Mang picking off the scum who did his wife in one by one.

The makers of this film ought to have some kudos for making each death scene creative, and not just standard bang-bang fare. One bad guy gets a knife in the stomach, another is blown up and an escapee is blown up by a booby-trapped motorcycle (amusingly the rider of the bike is seen to catch alight BEFORE the bike does!). In the end there are just two of the hunters left, a creepy miserable woman and an extremely flamboyant hunter, played by Harrison Muller, who likes to wear a long white scarf for some reason. Mang fights dirty and Strode turns up to save the day. They all live happily ever after. The end.

One thing that you cannot say this film is, is boring. There's plenty of action to keep things moving along, a lot of fist-fights and gun battles. The film is not particularly gory although there is some blood, and there is also a high dose of sex and nudity which seems somewhat surprising considering the genre which this film is in. Okay, so the acting is bad and the music is annoying, but fans of this trash would probably see these as plus points anyway (that includes me, sadly). THE FINAL EXECUTIONER is a fun, light and meaningless film which is a different way to spend an hour and a half, but is also quite forgettable.

Okay, we all know the post-nuke sci-fi action picture score by now. Well, here we go again. Once more what's left of society following a devastating nuclear holocaust has degenerated into total every-man-for-himself, kill-or-be-killed, survival-of-the-fittest barbarism. The callous, haughty upper class get their twisted sicko jollies off by hunting expendable contaminated poor folks. One team of contemptibly snooty wealthy scum nihilists, lead by vicious master swordsman Erasmas (a superbly hateful Harrison Muller) and arch bitch Idra (played to the eminently hissable hilt by Marina Costa), almost succeed in killing wimpy decent dude Allan (a likable performance by William Mang). Allan is saved and nursed back to health by tough, but tender-hearted ex-cop Sam (grizzled veteran macho man supreme Woody Strode in peak rugged form). Sam transforms Allan from a slow, clumsy pushover into a mean, fast, ultra-lethal fightin' machine through an especially harsh, painful and arduous bout of rigorous training. Allan, primed and ready to stomp some serious booty, tracks down the rich a**holes who nearly did him in and picks 'em off one at a time.

Basically just another rehash of that much copied and ripped off hoary old chestnut "The Most Dangerous Game," this spare, gritty, very ugly and ferocious little number gets by on the basis of its raw, no-frills, rough-edged brutality alone, unnervingly blurring the line between the good guys and the bad guys by depicting a grim future where violence and savagery are an everyday part of life. Although marred by a tepid opening third and an all-too-apparent two-cent budget, "The Final Executioner" does possess the right sleazy materials to measure up as a properly hard-hitting and two-fisted up to speed action item: Besides the copious nasty and often unsparingly grueling violence, there's also a generous sprinkling of sex and nudity, plus rape, torture, degradation and even voyeurism. Now, that's exactly what low-grade exploitation trash is all about!