Deathlands : Le Chemin du retour

The acting is good, Traci Lords and Vincent Spano are in it, and the red head is a knockout!

It's a Sci Fi where the hero kills the bad guy.

It's action adventure.

Film Fans,

Okay, it's not like the book. Surprised? It never is like the book.

Enjoy it for what it is.

What do you expect Die Hard?

You try and a make a movie with two name actors for under a million, go ahead, see what you come up with.

Farside has a little more juice behind it than this piece by Stanton but she has less time to tell the story.

I really liked the way that the red haired mutant kept calling Spano (the Ryan character) lover. So warm in today's PC world. Refreshing.

But the restrictions of television were evident in the romantic scenes.

In 2084, a nuclear war wasted Earth, making the sky red of chemicals and the former United States of America becomes Deathlands. Breeds of mutants and half-mutants share what was left on Earth with humans. The vile of "Front Royale" is ruled by a good man, but he is killed by his wife Lady Rachel Cawdor (Traci Lords), and his evil son Harvey Cawdor kills one of his brothers and blinds one eyes of his fifteen years old brother Ryan, who escapes. Twenty years later, the one-eyed leader Ryan Cawdor (Vincent Spano) returns to "Front Royale" with his girlfriend and half-mutant Krysty Worth (Jenya Lano), his human friend and specialist in weapons JB Dix (Cliff Saunders) and the teenage mutant Jak Laurent (Nathan Carter) to face his brother and his stepmother.

"Deathlands" is another entertaining post-apocalyptic story à la "Mad Max" and probably a pilot of a show. In spite of the bad reviews, I found this low-budget movie very reasonable and in the end I liked it. The lead character Ryan Cawdor recalls Snake Plissken, from "Escape from New York" and "Escape from L.A" and the red-haired Jenya Lano is very gorgeous. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Deathlands – Terra em Fogo"("Deathlands – Earth on Fire")

Well, I've never read the book or anything, but it's probably a given that it's better than this clunker of a movie adaptation. The film suffers badly from a low budget and just silly villains. Let me get this straight: 100 years after a nuclear war, and these uneducated, primitive survivalists will let two nutcases "rule" them like a king and queen, when any one of them could shoot the "rulers" in the head if they so chooses to? Yeah, right.

Some groovy editing work can't save it. This is just a poor movie, and should never have been made. Really, really bad.

having read many of the deathlands books i was happy to see this listed on the show guide for the movie channel. having endured the massacre of the premise and actions of the lame cinematography and the inane dialogue, (everyone talked like they were addressing a primary school class) i reflected on the time at my deathbed when i would be wanting these two hours back.

When I heard that there was a movie based on one of my favourite book series, I had to see it. Sadly I have to say I needn't have bothered.

I understand that in the land of low budget films, changes have to be made to stay under the salary cap. A few tweaks to certain events or the storyline which are relatively subtle are fine. But when a story is already set out, like that of Deathlands: Homeward Bound, these changes just lead to disappointment. Where was Doc, and that girl Lori Quint who was with them in the novel? Could they not afford to pay the actors? They didn't even mention the MAT-TRANS systems from the novels, but I won't dwindle on that. It's better unmentioned then completely changed, like Jak for instance. What was going through the screenplay writers head when he turned the albino youth into a raging mutant.

I thought the acting was quite good, not how I imagined but that's understandable. Except for J.B, but that's probably because his character is so different to that of the novels.

The sets were impressive and I was delighted to finally see a "wag" portrayed outside of literature.

The soundtrack was great, fit the theme perfectly. The camera work however didn't live up to that standard, the angles and movements just didn't seem lively enough. Some of the effects were completely unnecessary, such as the chemical haze, which I don't believe was in the books at all, it just gave the film a dull and dreary feel. I actually enjoyed the intro more than any other part of this film.

All in all it was mildly entertaining. It has that never meet your heroes mentality about it, although I remain hopeful that one day, a fully fledged well budgeted series based on Deathlands is made. I give it four out of ten.