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After the 80s, most low budget filmmakers shifted from producing Mad Max imitation films and began working on Ninja movies. However, producer and director Curio H. Santiago is determined to make it a point not to abandon a genre. For this installment, we get to see outlaws from the wasteland attacking a remote village who later get assistance from a group of warriors who teach them how to fight back. So this film is not only a Road Warrior copy, but it also highly resembles the plot of The Magnificent Seven, which was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The 7 Samurai. Roger Corman himself tried to cash in on this twist with his movie Battle Beyond the Stars and the plot even made it into an episode of Battlestar Galactica titled ‘The Magnificent Warriors’. What I mean here was that Mad Max meets The Seven Samurai was not a matter of ‘if’ but a matter of ‘when’.
It is peculiar, but the film does not begin with a normal narration. We will later learn that this occurs some two generations after a nuclear war. Nevertheless, let’s begin with a blast. An army of evil villains assaults with artillery a haphazard village. William (Luke Askew) is the name of the warlord who heads this army, and he is hunting for water. There is not a lot of water in this town, but after he interrogates one of the villagers, they learn that the village Chinle has a great deal of this valuable element. In between machine gunning the remaining villagers, his soldiers are showering the town with rockets and then, spinning in a different direction, look for more water. William orders a group of his men to capture Chinle while he and the rest of the soldiers forage around for additional supplies. Um, is it not water one of the most invaluable resources? Why not take the entire battalion and move to withholding ton Swat they could easily go ‘foraging’ from a safe place after taking the ‘blood’ water.
Credit must be given to the lads, who he assigned the task of capturing Chinle. It is fortuitous that they managed to capture the village in the manner they were ordered to. Instead of annihilating the residents, they ‘secure’ the area.
This is the initiated strategy with no rational explanation. And so in The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven movies, the bandits had to rely on the village for food, if they simply rode in and slaughtered all the farmers, there would be nobody to sow and gather crops in the coming planting and harvesting season. So it was important to have those villagers subjugated but breathing. Although in Dune Warriors the town of Chile seems to have a spring of endless water, and the last time I checked, there is no need for farmers to grow or pick water, and these people are supposed to be spared for what reason exactly. At the beginning, William had his men massacre an entire village before learning they didn’t have water, and for some reason, he does not strike the rest of them. All of the ‘sparring’ of Chile does enable the heroin of the story some time to escape and seek warriors to help liberate the village. This is Val, played by Jillian McWhirter, a charming blonde who tells her fiancé, “Luis, don’t you want to see something of this world outside this valley?”
Luis, played by Henry Strzalkowski, is the son of Reynaldo, which is Joseph Zucchero, the village councilman, and they are both a father and son pair of treacherously two faced sleazebags.
When William’s soldiers capture the town, these two idiots do their utmost to persuade the inhabitants to swear fealty to him, and Luis does nothing to stop Val’s failed sexual assault. Val’s brother, on the other hand, tries to help but gets shot in the process. After her brother dies, and the villagers remain indecisive, Val decides she needs to find help somewhere else, and so one night, she stealthily steps out into the darkness.
These Jawad wannabes are in pursuit of Val who is in an unarmed state. However, just before they get a chance to catch and… eat her? Before they get a chance to capture her and do whatever it is that an angry pack of desert dwarfs would do with a young girl, Michael (David Carradine) swoops in to save the day. His form of extraction involves just flailing his arms while shouting, “Get out of here.” While I must admit that this method is effective, Ben Kenobi pretending to be a krait dragon to scare off Tusken Raiders was, by far, much cooler. Before Val sets off to free town, she inquires Michael if he knows a place where she can recruit fighters for her goal, and Michael is quick to reply that frit own is the perfect spot.
In Freetown, two men are seen jousting on motorcycles which demonstrate two very telling things; one, these men are crazy fearless, and second, Curio H. Santiago is a fan of George Romero’s Knightriders. Later at the local salon she goes to John (Rick Hill), Dorian (Blake Boyd), and their friend Ricardo (Dante Verona) in hopes of collecting their aid but before she can one of the patrons at the saloon spots John and Dorian and accuses them of being conmen who swindled his entire town. This resulted in a bar fight while the two tried to escape by jumping on Michael’s truck. Once Val explains their assistance was needed and the endless supply of water was given as a reward, the four agreed to help her. While driving to Chile, they bump into Michael’s friend, Miranda (Maria Isabel Lopez) who is another warrior of the wasteland and now constitutes our Magnificent…um…five?
Our fighters perform a phenomenal night assault which anticipates effortlessly defeating the soldiers occupying Chile, but John and his pals do not receive the warriors’ welcome they presumed they would. These warriors try to do something good for the villagers but unfortunately, Luis and his father have been working tirelessly convincing the villagers to submit to William’s rule.
To his fortune, Val’s dad gives a heart pumping inspirational speech about St. Crispin Day, enough to stir the villages into battle and so John and his friends begin to train these poor farmers for war. Oh, and by training for war, I mean mostly teaching them how to use their farming tools for fighting with staffs.
This is an issue that crops up in a lot of movies that aim to use medieval technology against modern ones. In Star Wars, using a sword against a laser blaster is ludicrous but then again their swords are made of energy and they possess The Force, whereas in films like The Sisterhood and Masters of the Universe, this guy attempting to fight a gun with a sword definitely looks stupid.
What is apparent is that it’s not just work and training for the residents of Chile because we also have Luis getting jealous of Dorian who is pursuing Val and, being a cowardly weasel who Luis is, we know how this is likely to end. As expected, she never really loved Luis, not that him being arranged with a woman to pacify two feuding families was an advantageous situation in the first place. But it’s not all the romance that blooms as we also get a John and Miranda tryst but that is of course quickly forgotten when she dies.
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