I'm going to tell you, guys, I literally know almost nothing about this movie, other than what I have picked up from the plot synopsis. Which is about two different groups of warriors or bandits, not totally sure which, who are battling against each other in a post-apocalyptic version of Texas. Which, sounds sorta interesting.
The only other thing that I do know about this movie is that this movie was released under a couple of different titles. One of them called "Year 2020: Gladiators of the Future". Another one I know being titled as "2020: Freedom Fighters". And the last, which I swear this title is too long for this movie, which is called "2020: The Rangers of Texas and Sudden Death". I'm not joking, that is what one of those titles is called. Honestly, I don't think I could even fit that last title, because I was barely able to fit "Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie" in my last Reaction & Review.
However, I'm going to watch the version that came out in the U.S. So hopefully, this will be pretty good. And the only way I'm going to know that, is if I shut up, and I push play, and I'm going to do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "2020: Texas Gladiators".
11 minutes later
Well, guys, I can tell you two things right now. The dialogue, so far, is complete shit. Nobody here sounds like a human being. It's as if the person who wrote this has never heard a human being speak in their entire life. And two, the sound-mix is horrible. I certainly hope that this movie will get better as it goes on, but right now, I'm beginning to have my doubts.
12 minutes later
So that guy shot her in the head with, I guess, what looks like some sort of modified sniper rifle. The motorcycle gang retreats, and her body hasn't fallen off and has laid there completely still on the gang leader's back as he rides off. Somehow, I don't think that's how body physics work, but I'm going to let that one slide.
13 minutes later
You know, I get this scene is suppose to be sad because our hero is now dead. But guess what? I don't care. I don't care because, this movie has not given me a reason to care about anyone in this movie so far, because all of them have been shallow and lifeless.
17 minutes later
All right. I gotta question, and this is a serious one. Is anything interesting going to happen in this movie? Like, at all? We are almost an hour into this movie and I have yet to be given a reason as to why anything is happening or why any of these shallow as shit characters are being slave driven against their will, or I should say 'were' since they are now making an escape. And yet still, I have still have no reason to care. Thankfully, there's still a little over a half an hour left, so maybe the movie might get interesting at that point. Doesn't have to be good. Just something interesting.
19 minutes later
You know, guys, at this point, I just want this movie to end. Our heroes just recruited a group of Indians with possibly the laziest fight in the entire movie. Then again, nothing in this movie has been what I would even call halfway interesting. This movie has been boring as shit and there's still ten minutes to go.
The Review
Well, guys, that was "2020: Texas Gladiators". I'm gonna shut that shit off...my god that was boring. Where to even start? Well, when in doubt, start with the writing.
I'm almost convinced that there was no script for this. Because there was nothing to work with here. None. The story here borders on plotless because we have no interesting characters to help give the viewer a reason to care about anything that's going on. You would think that a story involving a bunch of these warriors trying to back this town in a post-apocalyptic Texas would sound somewhat promising. Instead, we have characters who, first of all, almost every character in this movie goes nameless. None of these characters have any depth or personality to speak of, because, as I stated before, the viewers are given no reason to care about anything that's going on throughout the movie.
The only character names I can remember are Nisus and Jack. Jack has no character to speak of, and Nisus, who despite the fact is one of our leading characters, has no character depth as well. The closest to any motivation is that a bunch of soldiers are lead by this Russian general and they deem themselves as the World Order. And as soon as they take over the town along with it's people, that's where the story comes to a dead stop. Nothing happens beyond that and it renders this story completely meaningless. And the only reason I know that the main female character is named Nisus is because as soon as I stopped the movie, the credits were showing the cast list as it was scrolling up.
The only thing that Nisus had going for her was that she had a husband, whom we follow at the start of the movie, as he and a bunch of these warriors are killing these religious cults, and one of these warriors named Catch Dog, and no, and I'm not joking, that's his really his name, sees our female lead and attempts to rape her. But he's then stopped by our nameless hero and tells him that he broke the code and thus kicks him out of the group. And thus it follows him for a bit as he and a pack of survivors attempt to rebuild civilization in this small rundown town. The only thing he had going for him was that he had a wife and a small daughter. And as soon as he dies, and then it follows a different group of warriors inside this bar, but by the point our hero died, I just stopped caring because the movie refused to go into any depth of these characters, and I'm going to use the term 'characters' as loosely as I can at this point. Because no one here was given anything to work with, because there was no writing to begin with. The only way I could even suggest that there was a story was that someone, who instead of giving the cast any script to work with, decided to give them bullet points on what to do and say and tried to improvise everything that went on. And they failed at that as well.
And with that, I may as well go straight into acting. What acting? Nobody was given any kind of character to work with, so everyone in this movie decided to phone in their performances because none of them know how to improv. Not only that, but it seemed like the actors in this movie have never acted a day in their lives, because it literally sounds like the director of this movie decided to say that "You get one take. And if it sucks, screw it, then we'll just green-light it." While I'm on the subject of acting, there are also some actors who had to loop in their dialogue because I'm going to assume that some of the actors in this movie natively didn't speak English. One big example I can give is one of the Indians towards the end of the movie, where the actor is speaking but the person who dubbed over his line didn't match anything with the actor's mouth movements. However, I'm going to blame some of that on this movie being a bad dub, because when the U.S. was dubbing foreign films and television from the late 70's and early 80's, we did not care if our dubs were terrible. We just put it out there in hopes no one would see how bad our dubs were back then. So I'm going to cut the acting a little bit of slack.
I want to go back to writing, because seeing as how I mentioned the Indians, this movie refuses to give out any timestamps on how long certain events take place. Such as after the World Order takes over and Nisus has been sold off to slavers. Or how long it took our heroes to meet the Indians and try to recruit them, which I should mention, they try to recruit them within the last 15 minutes of the movie, which tells me that this movie does not feel finished. It seems to me that the people who worked one this movie tried to release it as fast as possible, which makes sense seeing as how this thing was, most likely, improv'd. It probably would've worked better if they did it one of two ways.
One. Expand the movie to about 30 minutes. Because maybe then they would've had more time to try and develop these lifeless characters and give the viewer any kind of reason as to why they are trying to take back their town from the World Order. I doubt that would've been possible, but still, it probably would've helped if the movie was almost 2 hours long. Or two. Put the scene with our nameless heroes trying to recruit these
Indians somewhere in the middle of the movie. That way, we wouldn't have to rush the fact that we suddenly have Indians in the movie with only 15 minutes to go. And I guess that's one of the other biggest flaws that this movie has is it's runtime. The movie is less than an hour and a half long. And after watching this, I totally see why this movie felt rushed. Because trying to cram all this stuff into an hour and 25 minutes doesn't help.
Now I could sit here for hours discussing all of the failings of this movie's writing, or lack thereof. But I need to move on and talk about the rest of this movie's problems. And I'm going to talk about something I don't think I've ever talked about, which is props. Well, first of all, the costumes here are cheap, however I want to talk about the firma shields. Because around the first half of the film, we see the Russian general's soldiers with these shields that literally look like if it was just tin foil shaped like a shield and nothing else was covering the middle, which it was. And we are told straight up that these shield are basically bullet proof, and yet the best that they could come up with was just tin foil shields with nothing else covering them. That's really all I wanted to mention in terms of props, but basically, the shields here look cheap as hell. Which, I totally understand that this was probably filmed on a low budget. And I'm curious to know how much it really was. If this movie cost more than $10,000 or even $20,000, then someone needs to be fucking ashamed of themselves, because there is no excuse for this movie to be this lazy with their props, and of course, writing among other things. But hey, I'm probably thinking too hard about that.
Now on to sound-mix. I mentioned at the start of this Reaction & Review that the sound-mix was horrible, and that's exactly where it stayed. Because whenever the actors are speaking, at times, you can barely hear what the actors are saying, almost as if they were whispering their lines, which probably happened a few times. It probably would've helped if the person in charge of the sound editing actually picked up the actors dialogue, but they couldn't even do that, thus we are left with moments where the sound is too quiet and the sound is too loud. Though to be fair, the latter doesn't happen too often. But still, the sound-mix is just pig shit. Speaking of sound, I need to cover sound effects, and that's mainly when guns have to be fired. For whatever baffling reason, the foley artists thought that adding laser sounds to whenever guns are being fired was a good idea. Now, that might not have been a bad idea if this movie were set in a futuristic setting. However, that's not the case. Instead, we have certain guns being fired and not a single one of them are laser guns. I don't know if it was suppose to give the filmmakers the idea that it's set in the future, or they wanted to just put it in there because it sounded cool. But either way, the sound effects here could've been done without the use of the laser shots.
I really can't talk much about special effects other than the firma shields sparking purple electricity and that also looked kinda cheap. The music really sucks because it almost feels like it's the same song being looped over while trying to sound different each time. But it's mostly the same, bland, 80's kinda techno music that really doesn't work here and it sounds like shit.
Ultimately, guys, am I able to recommend "2020: Texas Gladiators"? No. This movie sucks. I can't recommend it as a mindless action film. I can't even recommend it as film you could watch with friends on a bad movie night and make fun of it. This movie has nothing going for it. If you seriously have to watch it, it's on YouTube right now. However, I do not recommend doing it because it is an hour and 25 minutes that you will never get back.
And with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all in the near future. Peace.
Now I could sit here for hours discussing all of the failings of this movie's writing, or lack thereof. But I need to move on and talk about the rest of this movie's problems. And I'm going to talk about something I don't think I've ever talked about, which is props. Well, first of all, the costumes here are cheap, however I want to talk about the firma shields. Because around the first half of the film, we see the Russian general's soldiers with these shields that literally look like if it was just tin foil shaped like a shield and nothing else was covering the middle, which it was. And we are told straight up that these shield are basically bullet proof, and yet the best that they could come up with was just tin foil shields with nothing else covering them. That's really all I wanted to mention in terms of props, but basically, the shields here look cheap as hell. Which, I totally understand that this was probably filmed on a low budget. And I'm curious to know how much it really was. If this movie cost more than $10,000 or even $20,000, then someone needs to be fucking ashamed of themselves, because there is no excuse for this movie to be this lazy with their props, and of course, writing among other things. But hey, I'm probably thinking too hard about that.
Now on to sound-mix. I mentioned at the start of this Reaction & Review that the sound-mix was horrible, and that's exactly where it stayed. Because whenever the actors are speaking, at times, you can barely hear what the actors are saying, almost as if they were whispering their lines, which probably happened a few times. It probably would've helped if the person in charge of the sound editing actually picked up the actors dialogue, but they couldn't even do that, thus we are left with moments where the sound is too quiet and the sound is too loud. Though to be fair, the latter doesn't happen too often. But still, the sound-mix is just pig shit. Speaking of sound, I need to cover sound effects, and that's mainly when guns have to be fired. For whatever baffling reason, the foley artists thought that adding laser sounds to whenever guns are being fired was a good idea. Now, that might not have been a bad idea if this movie were set in a futuristic setting. However, that's not the case. Instead, we have certain guns being fired and not a single one of them are laser guns. I don't know if it was suppose to give the filmmakers the idea that it's set in the future, or they wanted to just put it in there because it sounded cool. But either way, the sound effects here could've been done without the use of the laser shots.
I really can't talk much about special effects other than the firma shields sparking purple electricity and that also looked kinda cheap. The music really sucks because it almost feels like it's the same song being looped over while trying to sound different each time. But it's mostly the same, bland, 80's kinda techno music that really doesn't work here and it sounds like shit.
Ultimately, guys, am I able to recommend "2020: Texas Gladiators"? No. This movie sucks. I can't recommend it as a mindless action film. I can't even recommend it as film you could watch with friends on a bad movie night and make fun of it. This movie has nothing going for it. If you seriously have to watch it, it's on YouTube right now. However, I do not recommend doing it because it is an hour and 25 minutes that you will never get back.
And with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all in the near future. Peace.
