The Semiquincentennial Movie Project is an ongoing celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. During the course of this project your humble blogger is choosing a movie a week to represent each of the 50 states in the Union, as well as a movie scheduled for 4th of July weekend that will represent the nation's capitol, Washington D.C. The order of the weekly entries will coincide with the order of each state's entry into the fold (although, not necessarily coinciding with the date of their entry into said fold).
Week #39: Colorado -
Details about Colorado:
State bird: lark bunting
State flower: Rocky Mountain columbine
State tree: Colorado blue spruce
Additional historical trivia:
It's one of four states that intersect with each other. The other three are Utah, New Mexico and Arizona (which this same trivia piece will appear...)
Combining acrophobia, claustrophobia and gephyrophobia... the Royal Gorge Bridge is one of the highest suspension bridges in the world.
The Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King's The Shining is in Estes Park.
Colorado is the only state to actually say "No" to an offer to host an Olympics.
In 1904 Colorado had 3 governors on one day. Alva Adams, a Democrat, won the election, but it transpired that he had cheated. His opponent James Peabody was installed as governor, on the condition that he immediately resign and give the office to his lieutenant governor, Jesse McDonald.
Famous people born in Colorado: Lon Chaney, Ken Curtis (Chester on Gunsmoke), Tim Allen, Ken Kesey (wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Jack Dempsey, Jello Biafra and U.S. Presidential candidate John Kerry.
America 3000 (1986):
It's the year 3000. (duhh).
The Fraus occasionally go out into the wilderness to capture Plugots (men). They don't need men to establish their society, what they need them for is to perform manual labor, such as doing the heavy lifting. Of course, they also need them to help carry on the population, which is why the men they capture are classed as "Machos" (laborers) and "Seeders" (and if I need to tell you what that means they are for, you are reading the wrong blog...)
Our main hero/narrator is a Plugot named Gruss (William Wallace), who acts as the narrator of the story. Gruss doesn't particularly care for his options of being either a Macho OR a Seeder (although from looking at the Fraus, I'd be OK with being a Seeder, I think...)
A companion of Gruss, Korvis (Chuck Wagner), hijacks a horse and makes a getaway and Gruss jumps on the horse with him to take advantage of the situation. The two boys manage to escape the Fraus because they head into an area called "the contams", which I gather is an area that is still (900 years later, note!) a danger zone from the radiation from that ancient nuclear war noted at the beginning, and the Fraus have a law that says they can't go into the contaminated areas. A sign they pass indicates that this area was once a part of Denver.
Once they get to a point of safety, they start scrounging to survive. Of course, among the things they take that they "need to survive" are a top hat (really) and a children's ABC book (really! really!). And also, later it is revealed, a pristine copy of a vintage Playboy... (Hey, I know which I'd snag first...) They also hook up with a tribe of neanderthals who aren't much smarter than their neolithic ancestors. They only grunt and hoot, and have no real coherence of cooperation. Witness when they try to ambush a Frau food train. They would be lucky if they came away with a Snickers bar, the way they attack. But they do manage to seriously wound the leader of the Fraus, basically a "queen" called for purposes here, a "Tiara" (I'm not making this up!)
The Tiara, Reya (Camilla Sparv), makes it back to camp, but being mortally wounded she passes on the Tiara crown (no pun intended) to her daughter, Vena (Laurene Landon), which doesn't exactly sit well with her other daughter, Lakella (Victoria Barrett). But Lakella, at least as a front, accepts her mother's decision and vows to follow the new Tiara.
By the way don't miss out on the significance of the attempt to heal Reya just before she passes into the great beyond. One woman, labelled a healer, brings out an old fashioned first aid kit (you can tell by the red cross emblazoned on it... and this thing is not even slightly rusty, considering it's probably a leftover from the days before the nuclear war... remember, 900 years ago...) The Fraus chant "red cross... red cross... red cross..." like its some kind of mantra.
Meanwhile back in the contaminated remains of Denver, Gruss and Korvis get together and organize a raid on the com of the Fraus. Mostly to get the Machos and the Seeders free, but also to gather up some of the stockpiles of food. They make their escape chased by Fraus.
At this point the movie starts to get whacked out (it wasn't already?) Korvis is hit by Vena with her primitive but effective crossbow gun and falls into a cavern.
He is saved from death from the arrow because it (conveniently) gets lodge into the children's book he was still carrying... In the cavern, lo and behold, he stumbles upon an ancient bomb shelter left over from pre-nuclear war. He finds the bunker stocked with 80's standards of a pinball game and a stand up version of the classic Centipede game (typical 1980's entertainment still being used ind 2100?). He also finds a cache of, (thankfully), laser rifles that would seem to be more fitting for 2100.
This primitive man (by comparison to a modern 21st century man) almost ridiculously figures out how all this advanced technology works in a matter of minutes, reading the instructions for operating them and making the things work well. (Remember, earlier in the film he struggled with comprehending a child's ABCs book... I guess one of the side effects of nuclear fallout included making comprehension increase exponentially...)
Outside the bunker, now dressed in the gold radiation suit he found in the bunker, Korvis meets up with one of the slave men, who mistakes him for the legendary messiah the people have been waiting for; "the Prezee-dent" (Don't ask!) But it gives Korvis an idea.
More ridiculous stuff happens, including a scene where Korvis informs Vena that he wants to meet her one on one in the contaminated zone. This involves him first convincing her that he is the coming of the Prezee-dent. To get her to do this he rigs up a fireworks display, accompanied by a recording played on a genuine 80's boom box. And, the funniest scene occurs when the music he plays is a recording of Tschiakovsky's 1812 Overture! This is humorous in more ways than one. the obvious being the standard 4th of July theatrics associated with Tschiakovsky's piece (and if you are not American you may be unfamiliar with this tradition), but also the fact that the Cold War enemy that the Americans fought during that nuclear war were Russians... I point out that this movie did come out in 1986, prior to the end of the Cold War in the 90's, but it's still funny.
Much of the movie doesn't make much sense if you really think about it from a logical standpoint. For one thing, supposedly if a woman gives birth to a male child, they throw it away. So how do we get men in the first place, then? After 900 years, if there are no women giving birth to boys that are left alive, where do those Plugots come from? For that matter, where are the women the Plugots are repopulating with in their own encampment? Also, the fact that these women are looking for the coming of that messianic Prezee-dent, whom they are constantly referring to as a "he". If these women are so all-fired down on males, why is their potential "god' a male? And the biggest one is how do any of them have any idea how to perform in bed (so to speak) if there is a separating line between the male and the female societies and neither have contact except when Fraus capture Plugots?
Note:I'm willing to overlook the fact that, as some reviewers I read pointed out, the women of CE 3000 somehow have a way to keep their hair in perfectly coiffed 80's hairstyles, even though it doesn't seem like the have beauty shops in their camp.
This is the problem with quite a number of the kinds of films that I watch simply because they are done by whack jobs who are just cranking out films to crank out films. Sure, they're entertaining on one level, but many of them require you to leave your brain at the box office counter before going in to watch them.
Cannon Films, the producers of this film and numerous others, had a reputation creating movies that were just based on a single concept with no real idea of logic or transparency. There is a great documentary, made in 2014, that delves in the Cannon mythos: Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, that gives a lot of insight into the kind of stuff that the duo of Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, the two behind the film company, put out.
America 3000 had a budget of $2 million and, let's be honest, about half that probably was spent making all those Fraus look like they just came from the hairdressers. The special effects budget had to be pretty minimal, except for the Tschiakovsky fireworks scene. I can't find any details on how much money it made on ticket sales. It couldn't have been a major blockbuster, since I only found it by snagging a four movie set which included as it's other titles Arena, Eliminators and The Time Guardian, none of which I had ever even heard of. (The second half of the 1980's all, and I would bet all of them were lucky to have even one week at drive-in theaters, and probably no major theater venues...)
With the exception of Chuck Wagner, who had a recurring role on General Hospital in the early 80's, and Laurene Landon, who shows up in a lot of the same kind of schlock movies like this, it's probably a good bet you've never seen any of the cast in anything else. (Yes, Camilla Sparv won a Golden Globes as Best New Actress in 1967 for her role in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, but I've never met anyone else who has seen it...)
But, be that as it may, if you like low-budget schlock as much as I do, this one could be a hoot. It's worth a look just for the scenes that feature "Aargh the Awful" (a prehistoric neanderthal the Fraus keep in a cage for entertainment and training purposes).
Until next time, drive safely, folks,
Quiggy
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