Stryker

In a post-apocalyptic world the world's water supply has dried up, but woman holds the location of the last springs being guarded by a group of female warriors. Stryker and company, along with the warriors go about stopping a warlord and his 'Road Warrior' gang.

Director Cirio H. Santiago's Stryker is another Mad Max 2 copy but with an American Western feel than most of the post apocalyptic films of 1983 including the similar, Escape from the Bronx, The New Barbarians, Exterminators of the Year 3000, End Game, 2019: After the Fall of New York to name a few.

The late TV actor Steve Sandor (with a handful of film screen credits, also the excellent voice of Darkwolf in Fire and Ice (1983)) looks the part as rugged, gun toting, cowboy hat wearing Stryker. Bandanna sporting William Ostrander is notable (incidentally also the voices Taro / Larn in Fire and Ice) as Bandit. Warrior women wearing old football shoulder pads and leather knickers, including Julie Gray, Monique St. Pierre and Andria Savio are all notable. Mike Lane's villain Kardis with hook hand is menacing but his minions have more interaction with the hero.

Howard R. Cohen's sparse script and Santiago's story is packed with slow motion shots, there's little people, 'Amazon' women, gangs, a tank, a tanker, cars, motorcycle chases, smoke grenades and shootouts across rugged terrain. The writers also pop in some flashback for good measure to try and flesh-out Stryker. The editing is disjointed and Ed Gatchalian's score, is more classical than synth, mostly piano and drums which is used sparingly throughout. Even though Sandor and Ostrander along with some of the female cast are highly watchable, in terms of production this probably on the lower end of scale of the post apocalyptic offerings.

Overall, if you enjoyed the aforementioned there's no reason not to indulge.

In a post-apocalyptic future, people have banded together for survival. The key to that survival is water. A woman holds the key to the location of a vast water supply. She's being chased by a roaming gang of baddies hoping to gain her knowledge. Water is power and the baddies want the power. The woman is rescued (multiple times) by a man known as Stryker. Stryker and his friends will battle the baddies for the secret of the water.

Stryker is one of the countless number of films that looked to cash-in on the success of The Road Warrior. Some are good (or at least enjoyable) and some are not so good. Stryker falls into the latter category. There are lot of problems I had with the movie, but the biggest issue I had was Stryker is it's just plain boring. I had the hardest time staying awake. There's little that held my interest. The plot is so unbelievably unoriginal. The filmmakers attempted to take the search for gas in The Road Warrior and replace it with the search for water in Stryker. In addition, the action is repetitive. The good guys save the girl, then they save Stryker, then they save the girl, and on and on it goes. But the biggest bore of all comes in the form of lead actor Steve Sandor as Stryker. Sandor's Stryker is so unappealing and so dull that it's hard to believe he's the title character. You'd be hard pressed to find a lead with less screen presence. What a wretched waste of time!

While searching here for a different movie with the same title from 1964, I was struck by the very real but opposite, and for me at least, even more terrifying worldwide environmental reality of human driven climate change, as described in futurist Jeremy Rifkin's latest book. Due chiefly to population growth, at the rate of a billion more largely indifferent dopes per decade since the early 1960s, this planet which we are rapidly killing is also rapidly drowning in melted polar ice. And among numerous other hazardous and permanent changes, Rifkin's planet will ensure that hurricanes and tsunamis will become more devastating than ever before to countless coastal communities.

Every once in a while, these cheesy grindhouse movies show good movie-making constrained by a non-existent budget. Well, this isn't one of those movies. Script, dialogue and acting ar all way substandard, although the camera-work is good enough. Nice scenery and the young men and women in this can't act, but they are very pleasant to look at in their ripped shirts and leather panties. But the whole thing is clearly a Mad Max rip-off and you can't look at it for more than, oh, half a minute without figuring it out.

But after a while you start to wonder about the basic premise of the movie: a nuclear war has destroyed all the water in the world. Uh, OK. So why does everyone have clean clothes, hair and tanks? Obviously these people know why civilization needs water.

I only write reviews of movies with low rating, which actually are not that bad. Give them a chance!

I love movies about apocalypse and post-apocalypse and that is why I wanted to watch this one, too. It is a bad movie, but it is so bad that is actually watchable! Yup, I enjoyed it at the end. It is funny, though it was not suppose to be, and you can say that some action scenes are solid, too, as well as vehicles and costumes. Acting is fine for some characters, but nothing special. It is a Mad Max wannabe, and now while I am browsing IMDb I can see that director Cirio H. Santiago made several more Mad Max wannabes! Wow, he was really persistent! He made Wheels Of Fire two years after Stryker, and I think that it is a best bad Mad Max wannabe of all, but you can read about it more in my other review.

So, about Stryker, you may enjoy it if you like apocalypse and post- apocalypse. Or if you want to watch something bad with friends so you can laugh - then, Stryker is the movie for you. You need to look at it that way so that you can watch it to the end, like I did. I can say I enjoyed watching it, it was so bad and unintentionally funny that I liked it.

5/10