EQUALIZER 2000(1987)
There's a scene in an episode of Spaced where Simon Pegg and his friends escape being beaten up by playing finger guns like schoolchildren, both sides pretend-shooting at each other with make believe machine guns and blowing their opponents up with invisible hand grenades.
Equalizer 2000 is that, basically. Grown men with fake weapons running around and shooting at each other for ninety minutes. Whooping like Red Indians (sorry, Native Americans) and yeehawing like confederate soldiers, baddies run up hills or get into car chases, while goodies do their best to look sexy and tough. And
then run up hills and get into car chases.
Set in post-apocalyptic North Alaska, 100 years after a nuclear war has left the earth nothing more than a desert, a "blistering, relentless sun" beats down on the "scorched, arid desert" and oil is the most sought after commodity.
So, yes. We're in Mad Max rip-off territory again. Pitifully cheap Mad Max rip-off territory actually. Minimal, badly spoken dialogue, cars with random bits of spiky metal welded to them, sexy leather clothes for the women, and American Football shoulder pads and motorcycle helmets for the men.
The oil is owned by a bunch of baddies, rather handily called "The Ownership", and a band of rebels are out to restore peace and justice by taking it for themselves. Oh, and there's a tribe of Native Americans (Inuit?) led by a Filipino called Firewall and a band of nasty traders featuring a very young and bearded Robert Patrick (Terminator 2, The X-Files, True Blood) with a nice line in Yankee civil war uniforms.
All round hero type, Slade (fighting on the side of The Ownership), leaps into action when his father is killed by the rebels and is immediately captured. He escapes, helps a sexy rebel girl out of a spot of bother from Robert Patrick's band of outlaw types, is taken in by the very trustworthy rebels, and decides to become one of them for some reason. Using his welding and metalwork skills, he takes a newly designed machine gun and turns it into an even bigger, sexier, more futuristic and completely impractical machine gun. The titular Equalizer 2000.
After witnessing Slade blowing a load of The Ownership away with his new toy, the main bad guy decides he wants the ridiculous, cumbersome weapon for himself and everybody shoots at each other and sets each other on fire again. After repeatedly stating they won't get involved, the bizarre Inuit/Filipinio/Native American tribe suddenly decide to help out at the most opportune moment, making the bad guys lose, the good guys win, and throwing all the weapons on the fire as some kind of symbolic gesture.
E-2000 is basically just one long gunfight with intermittent interludes for flamethrowers, grenades, bows and arrows and spears. It's a fourteen year old American boy's wet dream, the only let-down being the clearly insufficient screen time given to the sex scene and a complete lack of boobies. But still. Guns, guns, guns.
Not that it actually matters, but nothing makes any sense either. We've already been told that the earth is relentlessly hot, so why are people so concerned about getting through the winter? Also, for a desert wasteland, the amount of lush, verdant forestry and towering grassy hills is really quite surprising, and although there might be a paucity of oil, there's certainly no shortage of make-up and hairspray for the ladies.
If it's bad special effects and continuity errors you're looking for, then step this way. Low speed car chases end when the car in front jumps over a superimposed matte painting of a crevasse. However, instead of following the car over the slender gorge, the baddies decide their cars obviously aren't up to it and give up. Mind you, with the amount of spikes and junk metal covering their vehicles, it was probably the right move in the long run. The girl in sexy leather trousers runs up a hill with nothing in her hands but when she gets to the top she's suddenly grasping a massive box of ammunition. And in one of my favourite moments, when the hero is surrounded (and remember, this is a world where NOBODY runs out of ammo, EVER), a baddie with a big machine gun chooses a novel manner of attack, preferring to try and beat Slade over the head with it rather than, I don't know, maybe just fucking SHOOTING HIM WITH IT?
The film is littered with random, generic military orders. Highly complex strategies such as "fall in", "fall out", "fall back", "retreat", "attack", and "pincer movement" are casually strewn around the dusty set as much as the many clearly wooden machine guns that bad guys pretend to use in the middle of gunfights while the music score blares away in the background, sounding like someone playing a Casio keyboard after watching a Rocky movie marathon.
Accidentally hilarious, noisy and cheap.
5/10
