User Reviews

One of the films in the Grindhouse Experience 2 is this Road Warrior wanna be rip off. Actually its one of many post apocalyptic action films made in the wake of Road Warrior. Its also a film I saw in the theaters when it came out.

Okay, but unremarkable this is the story of a world where water is all but gone and one person holds the key. Various factions fight for control of the girl and it all comes to a head in a rather large scale battle. There's some good action, passable performances and a tribe of midgets. Its not particularly taxing and is perfect for a mindless Saturday night.

Is it any good? I hadn't really seen it in 20 something years and bits of it stayed with me which kind of says something.

In a post-apocalyptic world, water is scarce and is the most sought-after commodity in the new desert-like earth. When a woman appears who knows where to get a large supply of water, an evil, Sid Haig-like baddie kidnaps and tortures her for the information. However, only one man can rescue the girl and help spread the agua to the masses – Stryker (Sandor), of course. So because it's post-apocalypse, everyone puts on their wackiest getup and gets in their junkiest car, and the battle is on. During the "Quest For Water", which isn't a sequel to Quest for Fire (1981), Stryker and his babes have to contend with many obstacles, including some Jawa-like pygmies. Will they live to hydrate again? Out of all the many post-apocalyptic movies that hit video store shelves in the 1980's, our personal favorites tend to be the Italian ones, such as 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and Escape From the Bronx (1983). Italian Post-Ap's (as we call them) (not really) seem to, generally speaking, have the most verve and pizazz. This doesn't leave a lot of room for snoozers like Stryker, which doesn't bring a lot to the table. We've probably seen more Cirio movies than anyone, and this ranks towards the bottom as far as what we've seen of his to date. He even repeated the formula again with Raiders of the Sun (1992), another Post-Ap slog, but that one at least has Richard Norton (Norton also played Straker – pronounced "striker"- in Crossfire, so they have that in common). Though on the bright side, here we have Steve Sandor.

While Sandor was unforgettable as Ollie Hand in Trained To Kill, U.S.A. (1973), here the character of Stryker has no real definition. We really get no sense of Stryker as a man or as a hero. On a scale for character development that we just invented, for the entire cast, not just Stryker, on a scale of 0-10, the CD scale for Stryker, the movie, is -5. That's right, negative character development. There's such a deficit, you end up owing the movie by the time the end credits roll. So in this particular wasteland, Stryker is just a generic dude with a beard.

Or perhaps more accurately, he's just another supposed action hero in the 80's named Stryker. Let us remember the aforementioned Richard Norton, as well as Lance Henriksen and Wings Hauser, among others. So you don't really rally behind Stryker, as much as you might do with, say, Steve Rally. So with the movie as a whole, we've really seen it all before, so it's not very engaging. And that's certainly true in this case, as Stryker the movie is especially Mad Max (1979)-y. The filmmakers really didn't even try to hide the fact that it's a blatant knockoff. But that's the problem: the lack of window dressing in that sense really hurts, and then boredom sets in. But in the positives column we have a cool score, and some neat violent bits, but those two things aren't enough to keep it all afloat, unfortunately. The movie is as dry as the climate it takes place in.

So pray the "nuc-u-lar" (as the narrator in the intro part clearly pronounces it) bomb never hits, if for no other reason than it would mean we would be LIVING inside the world of Stryker. And that would be the real catastrophe.

After the end of the world, water is in short supply. One woman has the key to the last fresh water on Earth, which is guarded by Amazons. She gets taken and tortured by an army of road warriors and only one man can save her. Stryker!

Cirio H. Santiago! Hello, old friend! We've watched so many of your movies, like Demon of Paradise, Wheels of Fire and The Big Bird Cage. Here, you'll take us to Armageddon and beyond!

Our heroine, Delha, is on the run from Kardis and his gang. Luckily, Stryker (Steve Sandor, the voice of Darkwolf from Fire and Ice and Orion on the 1990's Superman cartoon) and Bandit (William Ostrander, Christine) are here to help.

Delha has been trying to contact Trun, Stryker's estranged brother, to help defend her colony. But Bazil, one of his Trun's second-in-command guys, betrays them. Stryker is captured and tortured, but luckily he gave some dwarves water. So they come and rescue him just in time for the rest of Trun's soldiers to defeat Kardis and give everyone the water they need.

There is also an entire army of Amazons wearing football shoulder pads, because that's what you do in the future. Stryker goes more for the western look and he makes it work.

The beautiful Delha (luscious Andrea Savio) holds the secret to the location of a spring of water in a bleak and violent post-apocalyptic world plagued by drought. It's up to rugged loner Stryker (beefy Steve Sandor in sturdy stoic and two-fisted form) to protect Delha from a bunch of vicious thugs led by the ruthless Kardis (a nicely hateful portrayal by the chrome-domed Mike Lane).

Sure, this flick hasn't much of a plot and the characters are wafer thin, but fortunately director Cirio H. Santiago keeps the enjoyably mindless story moving along at a zippy pace, makes neat use of the desolate desert locations, and stages the lively and exciting action set pieces with considerable go-for-it gusto. Moreover, lots of stuff blows up real good, Savio bares her fabulously full breasts once during a nasty attempted rape scene, and both a tribe of helpful chattering dwarfs and a band of formidable warrior women in leather hot pants are tossed in for good goofy measure. The decent acting from the game cast keeps this movie humming: William Ostrander as the valiant Bandit, Julie Gray as the perky Laurenz, Monique St. Pierre as the fierce Cerce, and Ken Metcalfe as friendly old-timer Trun. Ed Gatchalian's funky-thudding score hits the stirring syncopated spot. Entertaining schlock.