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In the future after the world has turned into a post-apocalyptic setting, Max Trace, a character from the movie drives around in motorized vehicles that are way faster than normal ones. In and around these activities, they never seem to run out of things to do as they can always catch his sister Arlie Wiesmeier’s romantic relationships with tournament fights to the death and idol Scott Baio’s lookalike Bo Parvin.
Everything shifts when Arlie is abducted by the bad guys Scourge (Avellana), and Scag (Daniels). With a newfound sense of goal and vengeance, Trace sets off into the badlands where in a bid to save Arlie, he confronts both men and Morlocks. During his travels, he makes a few allies in the form of the more composed Spike (Grovenor) and warrior woman Stinger (Banks), but the best weapons that Trace possesses are his superior jumping skills, and his flamethrower. He uses these fighting techniques the best. Best notify your next of kin, as this WHEELS OF FIRE shall contain things that explode!
When looked at from today’s perspective, the emergence of the home video market came with plenty of advantages for low-budget filmmakers. This market opened up in 1979 at an optimal time because they were the years when people were looking to create endless remakes, clippings, and spoof movies. Unsurprisingly, they aren’t all of the same quality, and like every other movie, some of them are good, some are bad, while others are simply average. Wheels of Fire (which is also called Desert Warrior and is very different from the Canadian Vindicator that was released the next year) is amongst the better mockbusters, so we have that to be thankful for.
Despite being a very competent cook, I still find his chops unbelievable, and those Italian ones are hard to top as well, it still appears like our old buddy Cirio put’s a very sincere effort.
Wheels of Fire is spectacularly shot and uses the Philippine locations beautifully. It also has everything you expect from a post-apocalyptic movie, such as the shooting, blowing things up, car chases, fighting, rampant nudity, amusing dialogue and explosives glued to cars. The fact that Trace’s main weapon is a flamethrower makes the movie cooler too and the variety of weapons is pretty good. Sure it isn’t deep but what do you expect, at least it is from the 80s.
This also marks the completion of our Jack S. Daniels collection. Having watched this movie, now we have seen and reviewed all five of the movies he appeared in. He is charming and fun to watch on screen. One of our favorite character actors, Jack deserves to be in more stuff, but we are happy for the work he has done.
As for our most important star Gary Watkins, he should have done more too as he had a great deal of potential as an action star, however, the market was pretty crowded at that time.
Although the filmmakers, from his clothes to his hair, tried to tailor him to Mel Gibson, he still managed to mark his individuality.
In 1990, Cirio returned to the post-nuclear genre with Dune Warriors, and in 1992, he directed Raiders of the Sun, which featured Richard Norton but included material from Wheels of Fire, featuring Jack S. Daniels, Henry Strzalkowski, and a collection of other movies set in the Philippines. These were all incorporated into a new set of footage that was edited into it. Finally, there was an atrocity called Water Wars, which was constructed from footage of all three of the aforementioned post-ap’s. This was Jim Wynorski’s last credited work and it best to stick with Cirio’s first and better of the three, Wheels of Fire.
May I dare to say that Wheels of Fire is not all that deep but somehow manages to be quite enjoyable? On the whole, it is not bad at all. It still managed to hold on to the “VHS vibe” and came off as a much better watch than many of the other movies from that genre.
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