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It takes off from the last image of Fellini's Roma, the leather-jacketed cycle gang circling the empty piazza as i gladiatori moderni della Città Eterna, out of which flows Lucio Fulci's funky satirical proposition of the New World Order as a battle of the networks. The Colosseum tarted up with Super Bowl lights is the axis of the futuristic vision, war has given free rein to the public's hunger for "pain, brutality and destruction" on TV. Holographic torture is no longer enough, the Global Vision sweepstakes now give clubs and swords to death-row inmates and turns them loose in garish arenas. "A pretty grim view of humanity," protests one of the control-room scientists (Eleonora Brigliadori). "Grim but true" is the computerized retort. Petri's The 10th Victim is the chief predecessor, Jared Martin's presence as a James Caan facsimile cements the Rollerball reflection. Fred Williamson on his scrap-iron chariot evokes not only the Spartacus gladiatorial school, but also the televised bloodletting of the gridiron. (Others in the lumpen proletariat include a Japanese warrior named Akira, a misshapen combatant with a surveillance camera behind his blank pupil, and a former technocrat gone Zen.) Fulci endows this Battle of the Damned with all the rotten TV effects it deserves, from epileptic strobe cutting to tinted filters and Wrestle Mania howling, and then throws in a melting face or two as a matter of personal style. "Champions can be fragile," says one of the corporate overlords, with eyes already scanning the horizon for RoboCop and The Running Man. With Howard Ross, Cosimo Cinieri, Claudio Cassinelli, Al Cliver, and Hal Yamanouchi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |