User reviews

Here's yet another Mad Max inspired post apocalyptic outing from the glorious 1980's that depicts a parched and barren world inhabited by leather clad gangs (an odd choice of material to attire oneself with considering the scorching temperatures!) who drive around recklessly in armour plated cars and on motorcycles searching for the most precious commodity remaining on earth: water.

Yes, fans of the genre may recognise the above plot as exactly the same as Giuliano Carnimeo's Exterminators Of The Year 3000 which was also released in 1983. In fact, the miraculously fortuitous ending in both films is exactly the same to! (I don't know which one was released first but considering the derivative nature of the Italian movie industry in the late 70's and 80's I would hazard to guess that Carnimeo's film was most likely 'heavily inspired' (ahem) from the film being reviewed here.

Back to the film and oddly, it would appear that the producers of this, neglected to hire two always vital contributors in any film making process, namely a screen writer and a script writer (!!!) - well at least one could be forgiven for assuming this to be the case as this film has virtually no logical plotting nor character development (or even character definition for that matter!) and has scarcely any dialogue throughout! The end result is a somewhat confusing affair with scene after scene of seemingly pointless car chases and shoot outs revolving around a (VERY HOT!) woman who is being pursued by just about everyone she encounters (including the films beefy hero).

To be fair, as the movie progresses a plot of sorts is disclosed and there's even the trappings of a love story that begin to blossom! On the plus side, the action sequences are competently handled throughout with some fair stunt work on display in a number of scenes and as previously mentioned, - males rejoice, for the heroine along with all of the other females in the cast, is absolutely gorgeous (and spends the entire film in some seriously sexy leather shorts!) Wey Hey!!! For fans of the genre this is certainly worth a watch but it has to be said that this is far from the best of its kind.

It's hot.

It's the desert (well, actually, it's a gravel pit in the Philippines masquerading as the desert)

They're fighting over water.

End of story.

Once you get past the fighting over what appears to be only a few gallons of water, the plot of this post apocalyptic grindhouse flick becomes nonexistent, as entire reels of film go by with either not much happening, or several lengthy car chases and explosions and shootouts. Most of the characters here are never even given names, let alone do we ever find out anything about them. It's also rather difficult to learn anything about the characters when there is hardly any dialogue to the film.

Good looking girls in shorts, and good action in the first half hour and at the climax are about all this has going for it. Its climactic battle between the Chuck Norris lookalike leader of one tribe, aided by the Keebler elves, against the other tribe led by one-handed Anton LaVey lookalike was reasonably exciting and well done, but it's a LONG wait for it. If you can turn your mind off and just enjoy the action scenes, this movie might be more watchable for that and the good looking half nude girls, but if you want more than that, look elsewhere. I'm also a fan of William/ Bill Ostrander, so I was disappointed by his somewhat small role in the film, and by the fact that his voice was apparently dubbed for his few lines. Also, this movie looks like it was filmed a year or two prior to its release, as Ostrander looks noticeably younger than he did in Christine, which was released only three months after this.

Yes, it is a blatant Road Warrior ripoff, yes, much of it is shot in a gravelpit, yes, it is poorly acted. Yet it is entertaining, not a bad post apocalyptic story, water shortage and lots of heat, same thing as in the underrated, but much higher budgetted "Solarbabies". Violence, nude babes and a decent score graces this flick, this is a drive-in classic. If you feel like slumming, you can do much worse than this. 5/10

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!

I might enjoy this movie if I saw again today on TV. However, when my brother and I saw it in the theater (as part of a weeknight "crowd" of about 10-12 viewers) when it was new I thought it was the most terrible "Road Warrior" rip-off that could possibly be made. One of the things I remember about it was that it was LOUD, and that there was almost no letup from the noise. Then came the moment when the hero was about to go off alone, and one of the other characters asked "Where will you go? What will you do?", after which ensued the only moment of silence in the entire movie. Into this someone in the audience inserted what is probably the loudest instance of public flatulence I have ever heard. The majority of the (bored) audience cracked up except the one preppy-looking guy who was there with the only cute chick (who also laughed) in attendance. He took that as his opportunity to stand up and tell her "Let's go!" and stalk off leaving her to look at us with a shrug and "Whatever!" look before getting up and following him out. That was about the only memorable moment in the entire movie for us, but we still talk about it sometimes when we are reminiscing and want a good laugh.

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.

Steve Sandor ("Bonnie's Kids") is the title character in this routine "Mad Max" & "Road Warrior" inspired post-nuke sci-fi action flick. Teaming up with another hunky hero, Bandit (William Ostrander, "Christine"), he decides to help out a lovely young woman, Dielha (Andrea Savio), with knowledge of a plentiful water source. You see, in this world of the future, landscapes often consist of deserts, and water is hard to come by. The villain who stands in everybody's way is a snarling despot named Kardis (wrestler / actor Mike Lane, "The Harder They Fall").

This was the first of *seven* movies that Filipino exploitation icon Cirio H. Santiago ("TNT Jackson") made with similar themes and stories. It's not particularly distinguished, and you soon see that the "story", such as it is, is often incoherent. At first it seems as if we won't ever get to know the characters very well, but Santiago does save that stuff for the second half of the picture, when things slow down for a bit. We even get a bit of romance.

Santiago mostly concentrates on action and pace, and shows his audience a reasonably good time, with sex and violence aplenty. The music, credited to Ed Gatchalian and Susan Justin, is occasionally hilariously bad, but mostly it's good, atmospheric stuff, with a heavy accent on percussion. Costumes and vehicles are decent looking, but where the movie really works is the use of locations and the art direction.

Sandor is not a bad actor, but he's just sort of taking up space here. His character is generic and lacks personality. Ostrander also does what he can with an under written role. Lane is an effective, amusing villain, and the supporting cast includes Monique St. Pierre ("Motel Hell") and Filipino exploitation mainstay Ken Metcalfe, who was also the casting director on this show.

Not a terrible way to kill an hour and 24 minutes, but some people may prefer to just revisit the works of George Miller instead.

Six out of 10.

....on a future Earth where it apparently....never rains anymore?

Now I'm only speaking for myself here, but if I was a girl (which I'm not), and my living environment was 99.9% large, hard, uneven, sharp, randomly strewn rocks, my first fashion choice wouldn't be a leather thong slit up to my hip bones. Of course, that's just how I roll, I'm a different breed of cat. Fortunately for the lucky ladies, none of them ended up with so much as a scratch on those long, shapely legs.

Which, of course, is the only redeeming quality of the movie. Normally, I'd complain that Monique St. Pierre should lose the football equipment, but with the advent of the internet, anyone can see her naked within 5 seconds anyway, so I actually enjoyed the novelty.

Full disclosure, I saw this as part of the "Grindhouse 2" collection, so I knew exactly what to expect, and got pretty much exactly what I expected.

Any "B" action movie fan will love this gem from our friend Director Cirio H. Santiago. It has your typical plot with water rationing where the good guys have the bubling blue spring and the bad guys will kill for it. Leading man Steve Sandor (Stryker) is quite good and his unlucky at love side-kick handsome William Ostrander (Bandit) is excellent as well. The lady's in the movie are quit e sexy running around unencumbered by a brassieres.

Pro Wrestler Mile Lane (Kardis) is a little over the top but does a credible job as the evil leader of the bad guys. Kardis, at 6'8" is an imposing figure but his head henchman (Orich) played by John Harris at 7'7" makes Kardis look average. Harris also went on to professional wrestling competing, I know, as Silo Sam in the 80's. Where else but in Stryker can you see 30 little people dressed as monks fighting against a giant? This is a must see as the movie never bogs down with the incredibly corny last minute, and some of the acting from the lady's, being the only mitigating elements. All in all a near classic a winner for sure.

Santiago, in my opinion, though I've only seen three of his films (where I can pretty well imagine what his others are like) hasn't made anything that's matched up to the exciting, sexy, entertaining, and downright cheesy, Naked Fist aka: Firecracker. That's one of my favorite karate films, like The Protector, that I like to treat myself to on occasion. This was like a long dragging bore of a film, a pathetic reminder that these and other cheesy sci fi apocalyptic films existed in the eighties, with it's bad acting and script. It's one of those films, you lose interest in, then switch back, after a few minutes have lapsed, or something you just watch blankly. The story all so, mirrors the one on The Exterminators Of The Year 3000, a much livelier and exciting pic. Here, water has dried up. Situation: the good guys are helped by a girl who knows of the one last locations, where water is still to avail, only the bad guys are guarding it. There. Oh did I mention, the film has bad acting. This is a film, which if your girlfriend went down to the video store, and came back with it, you would strike (r) her. Forget it. Post apocalyptic crap.

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

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.

Of course I had never heard about the 1983 movie "Stryker" from director Cirio H. Santiago prior to stumbling upon it here in 2024. And since it was a movie that I hadn't already seen, of course I opted to give it a fair chance. However, I wasn't exactly harboring much of any expectations to the movie, given its particularly cheesy-looking cover.

Writers Howard R. Cohen and Cirio H. Santiago put together a script where you have to bring out a magnifying glass in order to spot the storyline. There was no coherency to what passed as a storyline in "Stryker" and it felt like a heap of random scenes shot and given to director Cirio H. Santiago to piece together to make a movie. I have to admit that I found absolutely no entertainment or enjoyment in watching this movie. And sitting through 86 minutes of this garbage was a test of wills.

If anything, then I was left with a sense of 'this is what happens when you order Mad Max from Wish'.

Needless to say that I wasn't familiar with a single actor or actress who participated in this low budget movie. Nor were I particularly impressed with the acting performances that took place on the screen. But then again, the actors and actresses didn't have much of anything solid to work with.

This is most definitely not a movie that will find its way back to my screen a second time, ever. Nor is it a movie that I would recommend you to sit down and watch.

My rating of "Stryker" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.

A homage or clone (depends on your perspective) of Mad Max 2. A trashy and cheesy early 80s production look promising but Stryker cannot deliver fully - there are simply more entertaining and action packed B movies of that genre around. Some of the action and fighting scenes are rather funny (due awkward execution) and remind me of those very cheap made and lousy Italo-Western movies (not those good ones) of the 60/70s. At least Stryker provides us some action with a light tank - whereas water is of very short supply in this after WWIII desert (in one scene Stryker hunts of course a tank wagon filled with water) everybody seems got - by magic or other means - always access to a vehicle with a full tank and ammunition is also mainly used to torture air and rocks alike, only our heroes got some aim. After the curtain was closed I was rather relieved - the movie felt lengthy and that's in my opinion no good sign. Verdict: mildly entertaining and if your are an addict of the genre you may give it a try.

THE ROAD WARRIOR was a seminal sci-fi action flick that spawned endless imitators and ripoffs. Most well knows are films like SPACEHUNTER, CYBORG, TANK GIRL, or even big budget Hollywood films like WATERWORLD, DOOMSDAY, or TURBO KID (which is a loving homage to these knockoff films and not the originator of the genre). Lesser known are the Italian knockoffs, like 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS or THE NEW BARBARIANS. Even lesser known are the Roger Corman produced Filipino knockoffs, which are my personal favorites of all the post-apocalyptic warriors-of-the-wasteland knockoffs. In this one, the world's water supply has dried up due to some sort of apocalyptic event, which leads our hero, Stryker, to help a beautiful woman who knows where the last spring still exists, though guarded by fierce Amazonian warriors. From the writer of "The Unholy Rollers" and "Vampire Hookers" (and also several Care Bears episodes) and the director of HELL HOLE, NAKED FORCE, and CAGED HEAT II: STRIPPED TO FREEDOM, you know to moderate your expectations. However, director Cirio H. Santiago is an exploitation director who brings more flair to his low budget pictures than most. He's actually made my favorite low budget Max Max ripoff, WHEELS OF FIRE (that is unless you count CHERRY 2000 as a Mad Max ripoff, but I feel like Cherry is it's own special thing). Besides providing some solid action sequences, Santiago adds lots of little touches, like some highly entertaining Jawa-like creatures that are wonderful. He also gets the most out of his barren locations and makes them look truly bizarre at times. Overall, don't go into this expecting something on the level of THE ROAD WARRIOR, but if you have a love of cheesy sci-fi flicks you picked out at the video store because they had rad VHS box art, then you're in for a treat with this one.

This movie, though often described as a low budget Mad Max or Road Warrior movie, is more comparable to Wheels of Fire. It is low budget pleasure that features silly or nonexistent acting, crazy choreography, and a wonderful cast of actors and actresses you've probably never heard of. Yet, this little gem is downright action packed fun, 1980s style! The movie is set in a futuristic post-holocaust world that is largely made up of desert, dunes and rocky hills. The largest and most precious commodity in this world is water, and those in control of water sources control the most power. The plot ultimately involves a small community defending a secluded sanctuary - an underground water source - from a wicked tribe of Road Warriorish thugs. Lots of crazy car chases, gun-toting warriors, cheap special effects (pyrotechnics), and stiff choreography during the fight scenes.

One fella stands out as the main character, a roguish silent wanderer named Stryker on a personal mission. He's a satisfying lead, meeting every cliché of the strong silent type. His dialogue is scarce, and his ability to express emotion comes across as forced. But he's extremely suitable for his role, however, given the handful of actors and actress he is working with in this movie. If you're not fond of the strong silent lead, you have a host of typically attractive 1980s female desert warriors, some donned in what appears to be football shoulder pads (sorta like Road Warrior). The main villain, unfortunately, never gets any sort of identity, not even to the point of cliché. He's just a mean thug who can't talk without sounding like he has a mouth full of marbles. The movie tries to build him up as someone foul enough to peak Stryker's persistent and stubborn indifference, yet, as a movie villain, he simply fails to impress the viewer as a credible threat to someone as collected and methodical as Stryker.

I rate this movie 9 out of 10 because for a low budget flick, it packs a lot of action, shoot outs, and car chases. One serious drawback to the movie, however, is the extremely boring set - desert. Probably 95% of the film was shot outdoors in what appears to be nothing but deserts and dunes. After watching this setting for about 5 minutes, the movie gets very claustrophobic and you get the distinct impression that all the different filming locations were done within a 5-minute walk of each other. But the movie is really a little unpolished gem. You have to love low budget antics to give this movie an entire viewing. It's one of those movies you'll either love or shut off after the first five minutes.

This movie is rated R for violence and nudity.

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.