1990: The Bronx Warriors

• Directed by Enzo G. Castellari
• October 29, 1982 (Italy)

It is the far off the year of 1990 and the Bronx has been declared a No Man’s Land with it now being ruled by rival gangs.

That’s about as far as I can get with 1990: The Bronx Warriors. Seriously. I watched this from beginning to end and I have no idea what exactly I watched. I’m not sure who precisely the main villain is or much of anything. The story starts off with a girl escaping a boarding school (I think) and running off to the Bronx. And after that it kind of meanders around. You don’t even get why she’s important enough to anybody until like 2/3 or so of the way in.

Apparently Anne (Stefania Girolami) is the 17-year-old heiress of the Manhattan Corporation and because of that she’s slated to be the next CEO of the Manhattan Corporation. (They name the corporation a great deal in this movie.) What is the Manhattan Corporation? Somehow they control the Bronx though I’m not sure how or why or how they even make money or derive influence from that. But they do.

Seriously. What does the Manhattan Corporation do? Why are they so powerful? Why was Anne (who barely gets named) running from her upbringing? And why does everybody have a code name and not an actual name-even it seems the people OUTSIDE the Bronx? One of many questions you’ll have after watching this.

This is a low budget Italian science fiction action film. And it certainly has plenty of action but a coherent plot? Keep moving. It does not fashion itself to look like a cheap Mad Max film but rather a bargain basement version of Escape From New York minus the ticking clock element or why everybody cares about the area in this particular scenario.

And the gangs that control the Bronx are some weird cross between those in Mad Max, Escape From New York, and the characters from A Clockwork Orange along with those from a very bad Blaxploitation film. And it is all topped off with an inexplicable touch of glam rock imagery. The things that come from Europe…

And then it just feels like an ending. They didn’t have any more film reels left to use so that was it. A little dubbing for American audiences along with the best actor/actors they could find (in this case actors Vic Morrow and Fred Williamson) and we have a movie. And it was certainly a movie. It ticks all the boxes.

1990: The Bronx Warriors is like a slow-motion train wreck. You don’t want to look but you can’t keep your eyes off of it. There is just something hypnotically terrible about this movie. I don’t think they were purposely making anything bad. They genuinely thought this was going to be a quality effort, but it’s not. The dialogue is bad and there is little logic to what happens. It is structured and written like something produced by a child.

1990: The Bronx Warriors is just bizarre. Or is it bizarrely bad? Either way I don’t know. It has a plot that makes virtually no sense. It just meanders around until they’re done. Unless you want to see something truly bad you can keep moving.