Original
Title:
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World Gone Wild
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Alternative
Title(s):
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N/A |
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Year
of Release:
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1988 |
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Duration:
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90 minutes PAL VHS. IMDB clocks the US version at 95 Minutes. |
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Country
of Origin:
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Tagline(s): |
50 years after the end of the
world, the only ones left are nuked-out, zoned-out burnouts. The
wildest adventure of all is about to begin. - US Cinema poster
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Reviewed
Version Rating:
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Review: |
No points for guessing how this one starts then. The explaining voice-over is accompanied with a black screen. This was sufficiently long enough to make me check that there wasn’t a problem with the video. Not a great start. Putting it simply, the war was 75 years ago and lasted for 15 years. Now the world's a wasteland and it doesn’t rain, even though there are still some clouds (that’s lucky for the filmmakers). There’s not much water to go around, but in one village in America called "Lost Wells", the water continues to flow and the people are happy. Cue the squawking guitars of the film's title track played over some out-of-focus graphically-altered acts of violence in a vain attempt to create a James Bond-style opening. The music is pretty average rock but quite suitable and entertaining enough.
The
town of
 How Angie was choosen to be the school teacher we will never know.
Right on
time, a little truck slowly pulls into town dragging an old wrecked
helicopter.
Unfortunately, the helicopter is just for image and is used to carry
around
Derek Abernathy (Adam Ant) and his men. How Adam Ant ended up here is
anybody’s
guess. He’s quite a famous singer here in the
    'When qhoir boys attack'
Enter the
Hero of the film, or more precisely the scriptwriter’s hero,
as there's
another character later on who the studio obviously wanted for all the
publicity, etc. More on that later. Enter Ethan, who magnificently
manages to
kill one of Derek’s men by flicking a hubcap off the ground
with a mangled old
stick he seems to carry everywhere. There's a brief standoff, but The
Ant
(from now on I’m calling him The
    Deadly Frisbee!
Ethan and
the teacher head off in his car to what’s left of the
nearest city to find
some muscle for if The Ant comes back. Driving through the wasteland,
they pass
old battle zones with marauding cannibals (a surprisingly under-used
convention
of wasteland PA’s). The nighttime city is full of your
typical marauding gangs.
Interestingly, a truck with armed and gas-masked officials turns up and
slowly
starts handing out small jars of water at gunpoint to people with
coupons. One
family with a new baby doesn’t have any coupons so are turned
away. “No coupons,
no water,” claims the lead official.”
You’ll go to hell for this!” replies the
father. “We are already there.” is the
official’s sharp response. A biker turns
up to steal some water and one of the officials turns on his superior.
A fight
breaks out and the renegade official turns out to be George, yes
George,
another superbly awful name for a lead PA character. George (Michael Paré) is the hero
that
Ethan came to find, a hero who supposedly doesn’t know he is
one yet. The story
goes that Ethan raised George and taught him everything he knew. The
offer of
an endless supply of water from Lost Wells is all that George needs to
join the
team. George, Ethan and the teacher are about to head off when the
biker turns
up and attacks George. Luckily, the offer of water is much more
interesting to
him than revenge and he soon joins the group.
  Hundreds queue for water. Where and how do you get the coupons? That will forever remain a mystery.  
The final
destination in town is a trip to a gunfighters' gambling show to pick up
a
couple of extra men for the group. How Ethan predicted that the outcome
of the
scene would be to have two extra men on the team I have no idea. A big
crowd is
watching the gunfighter on stage. It’s a bit of a ruckus,
with a topless girl
dancing on stage. One guy volunteers for the shoot out and is promptly
shot by
the cowboy-dressed star of the show. Ethan sends George on stage,
pointing out
another man hiding behind a curtain. George is about to become the
gunfighter's
9212th (see, I do make a few notes while watching
these) victim, but
he shoots the curtain thus revealing the trick to the show and killing
the real
shooter who was hidden there. The crowd is incensed and chase the fake
cowboy
and the tough black bodyguard, Nitro, (who is hilariously dressed in a
purple
leotard) down the street. Soon enough the cowboy (who turns out to have
blanks
in his gun) and Nitro join the group and they all head off to Lost Wells.
 
On the way
they stop at the site of an old battleground to pick up some of the
conveniently abundant weaponry. A group of half-naked cannibals attack
the
group, who easily see them off, with one cannibal getting a grenade in
the
mouth, giving all the characters a good laugh, except for the school
teacher.
At this point I should admit I didn’t learn all the character
names, it just seemed like a pointless chore while watching. You should try it.
One of
the cannibals, the only one to be wearing clothes and a
  Grenade in the mouth. Grenade goes boom.
Finally,
they reach Lost Wells. The townsfolk are hiding and scared. Ethan is
soon to
put them at ease. “These are not the bad men. These are our
bad men!” Finally,
we get to see Lost Wells' water supply. It’s a small mucky
puddle, about a meter
wide. I’m sure in the script it must have said a fresh
running spring, but I
guess the budget could only provide a puddle. Nonetheless the recruits
are
ecstatic and decide that the town is worth saving from The Ant, who we
catch
preaching biblically to his men in a bizarre cutscene. Originally, Ant
was
supposed to read from an L. Ron Hubbard
book, but the scientologist's got wind of this and threatened a
lawsuit,
resulting in its removal from the film. Alternatively, The Ant is now
seen
reading from "The Wit and Wisdom of Charles Manson".
  It's a puddle. The towns water supply is a muddy puddle!
Time now for the
training montage. Towns folk learn to use hubcaps as deadly Frisbees,
Ten Watt
collects snakes and scorpions for his camouflaged pit, and the whole
town works
together to make a wall of trashed cars. Impressively, they make a wall
three-cars high that actually goes all the way round the village, unlike in
other
PA’s when the film makers tend to only make one side and
cover this with dodgey camera angles. A helicopter shot reveals
the extent of the operation. Not bad.
 
Round about this time
George makes his play on the school teacher, who knees him in the crown
jewels,
but we know she likes him really. To show how really far from humanity
these
people are, the teacher keeps a picture of Steve McQueen in her
caravan, yet
nobody knows who it is. She just liked his face. Bless. Later on the
biker
tries to rape the teacher. George runs him out of town. Pissed off, the
biker
heads to see The Ant and change sides. It turns out that The Ant
didn’t know
about the water supply at Lost Wells. Needless to say, the biker soon
has his
balls chopped off and The Ant heads off to the village.
    Cannibals love to wear flags.  
The next morning The
Ant rolls into the village with about 50 men all on matching
motorcycles (there
must still be a dealer somewhere and a petrol station). Unfortunately
for The
Ant, the whole thing is a trap. His gang is allowed to drive right
into the
village, then the exits are sealed and the fight begins. Being the
part of the
movie that everybody was waiting for, it’s not too bad. The
leotard guy uses a
gun made from an engine block etc etc. Somehow The Ant manages to
escape with
three or four of his men. Ten Watt heads towards the dead bodies for
lunch, and
gets a warning that he should only eat The Ant's men.
The town celebrates and Ethan jokes about the puddle drying up to see if the "bad men" now want to stay with the village to help through desire rather than just greed. They all pass the test so it’s happy days. In the evening, George has just about managed to seduce the teacher when The Ant strikes back. Starting with a few well-thought out fireworks to alert the village, The Ant piles on with a fresh group of men. This time he’s desperate to kill George. Why he singles out George is anybody’s guess, but as I said before he's supposed to be the hero. Ten Watt is captured, giving The Ant a chance to show off his acting range. Right in the middle of the fight, George and Ethan decide to have a heart-to-heart. People are fighting around them while Ethan talks rubbish about it not being his fight or something. This guy must have taken way too many drugs by this point. As usual, I like to at least keep at least some of the ending under wraps, but needless to say George and The Ant get into hand-to-hand combat and a few small side plots get cleaned up, such as a young girl whose mother was kidnapped at the beginning getting her revenge.   Where did Derek get his eye patch?
Of course, the film
could quite easily end there but this is a PA movie after all. For some
reason
Ethan has decided that life just isn’t worth living. Now that
he has helped
save the village he has nothing left to live for. His chosen method of
euthanasia? Fire! Luckily for him, and the rest of them who have just
all risked
their lives for a puddle, the heavens open and the rain starts to fall
(see Stryker, Exterminators
of the Year 3000 and many others) for the first time
in 50 years, saving him from his fiery death and giving him a reason to
live.
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Ultimately this
could have been so much more.
The filmmaking seemed very laid back and formulaic, yet there were
moments
where things moved along nicely. Unfortunately, these promising moments
are far
outweighed by a paint-by-numbers plot. My PA allegiances are split
here,
because the filmmakers tried to follow all the PA conventions, but you
can tell
that this film could have been so much more if it had taken its own
route. In
the end it’s distracting enough, but mostly forgettable.
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Alternative
Versions:
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None that I
know of, although IMDB lists the US version as 5 minutes longer than my
VHS version. Most likely this is down to approximations. Additionally there probably
still exists an original
edit in a forgotten store room somewhere with the Scientology reference
still
in place.
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Cast
and Crew Facts etc:
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Catherine Mary
Stewart (Angie) was Maggie in The Last
Starfighter. |
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Quotes:
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“These are not the bad
men. These are our bad men!” Ethan. |
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Connections
With Other PA's:
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Michael Paré (George) goes on to star in Lunarcop (1994 IMDb) . Surprisingly there isn't any other connections I can find. Very Tenuous link: Rick Podell (Exline) was in one episode of Cheers alongside John Ratzenberger (Cliff) from Battletruck. |
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Critic's
reactions:
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From the two
reviews I have found at the
Washington Post and the New York Times it looks like it never received
much
praise. Nobody took much notice, which is reflected in its poor box
office receipts. |
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Regular
Movie Goers Scores:
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Typical B-movie fluff that's entertaining enough in its own way. |
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For
the PA Collector:
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Plenty of fun and a few unusual ideas. Enough stupid things happen to make it a worthy watch. Definitely one for the collection.
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Purchase
Point:
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Links
/ External Reviews:
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“Mad Max mania is the guiding force behind ''World Gone Wild,'' which opened Friday at the Warner theater and was greeted by only a curious few. At the very beginning of this standard-issue post-apocalyptic nightmare, a group of machine-gun-toting choirboys arrive at a desert commune full of over-the-hill hippies and proceed to mow down almost everyone in sight.” Washington Post"World Gone Wild could be subtitled "Script Gone Bad." A futuristic western, it plunders good movies ("The Magnificent Seven," "The Wild Bunch") and bad ones ("Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome") with equal ineptitude.” http://www.themoviemark.com/badmovies/worldgonewild.asp “At some sort of
rave there's a guy in the crowd wearing a
leather jacket and panties. There's no further explanation, and we
never see
the guy again. I have no idea what that was about, and I don't care to
explore
the issue.” http://www.laurencejuber.com/hope/worldgonewild.html An interesting account
of how the title song made it into the film. |
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Countries
Released:
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US, |
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DVD
Release Info:
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Not available at the moment. |
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Actual
Budget/Guessed Budget:
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Probably cost
less than two million, although
there are quite a few characters and I'm sure some of them, especially
the
Ant, got paid quite a bit. Mostly filmed in what was probably a
junkyard's back
yard. |
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Media:
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| Box Cover(s): |
UK Pal VHS Box (Click to Enlarge)
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Advertisement
Poster(s): |
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Press Cuttings etc: |
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Screenshots: |
More Here |
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Trailer: |
Wanted |
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| Comments: | Post your comments here - World Gone Wild |
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Movie |
World Gone Wild |
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Year: |
2087 |
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Civilization
Ended via: |
Nuclear War |
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Hero Name: |
George Landon |
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Beefed up
vehicles: |
Not really |
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Crazy Gang: |
Yes/religious(ish) |
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Gang
leader/villain name: |
Derek Abernathy |
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Other memorable
names: |
Ten
Watt/Exline/Nitro |
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Shoulder pads: |
No |
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Scenes filmed
in a quarry: |
No |
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Lasers or
bullets: |
Bullets |
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Swords: |
No |
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Water Shortage: |
Yes |
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Petrol Shortage: |
No |
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Food Shortage: |
No |
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Bubble Domes: |
No |
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Mutants: |
No |
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Nakedness: |
Brief
dancing/dead toplessness |
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Synth music: |
Some |
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Stupid/Ridiculous
Ending: |
Yes |
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Miraculous rain: |
Yes |
