Doomsday Reels: Exterminators of the Years 3000

The Exterminators of the Years 3000 (1983)

The Director

Guiliano Carnimeo (as Jules Harrison)

The Actors

Robert Iannucci (Alien), Luca Venantini (Tommy), Alicia Moro (Trash), Fernando Bilbao (Crazy Bull), Beryl Cunningham (Shadow), Luciano Pigozzi (Papillon)

The Trailer

The Cause

Ozone Depletion

The Story

"Was I really an astronaut? Oh, sure! One of the best. I've been to Mars and Venus but that was before the ozone disappeared an the Earth turned into a hot potato." - Papillon

The Rundown

In honor of 31 Days of Horror I am going to keep my Doomsday Reels columns on theme this month, doing movies that are available through Shout! Factory's Scream Factory imprint. In the interest of doing more of them I have decided to bump my publishing schedule from bi-weekly to weekly for the month of October so check back next Monday for an extra column.

The release of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was a boon to the Italian film industry. They'd been chugging by on Star Wars and Dawn of the Dead cash-ins for years and along comes this movie that doesn't require much of anything for sets or costumes. Just find a desert, get some old cars and weld shit to them, scatter some junk around, and dress everybody in mismatched wardrobe covered in dirt and voila! A movie is born.

The Mad Max ripoff is a time-honored tradition of cinema and they've basically never stopped happening since the 1980s. I could probably spend a year going through just this type of movie alone but today I'd like to focus in on one of the more enjoyable of what I like to call Angry Mack movies: The Exterminators of the Year 3000.

It's the year 3000, the ozone layer is gone and Earth is a burned-out wasteland full of opportunistic raiders and hard-luck losers just trying to survive. Water is the coin of the realm in this harsh new world and it's getting more and more scarce every day.

A young boy named Tommy, who lives in an enclave of peaceful survivors, stows away on a tanker truck headed for a hidden store of water so that he can search for his father who went out in search of the water some time ago. Unfortunately the tanker attracts a group of raiders led by the tyrannical Crazy Bull and his sadistic henchwoman Shadow. Only Tommy manages to escape the attack alive and runs onto an overturned car where our protagonist Alien has been trapped since the opening when he used said car to chase down someone who had stolen his futuristic super car and wrecked.

Alien is a capable wasteland warrior and a loner who looks like a cross between Martin Kove and Terence Hill. He has a souped-up armed car called The Exterminator and is armed with a laser pistol and an unnecessarily futuristic looking bolo.

Tommy and Alien form a loose partnership. Tommy will tell Alien where the water is if Alien helps him get a tanker truck load of it home to his people.

Exterminators has all the hallmarks of an Italian film (actually a joint Italian-Spanish film) from the 1980s. The costumes are silly, almost everyone is overdubbed, the dialogue is absurd (Crazy Bull continously calls his men "My merry mother grabbers!" and Shadow at one point calls someone "Honey Parrot."), and the plot is driven by a need to show as man weird set-pieces as possible rather than forming a cohesive narrative.

For example, Tommy has a robotic arm but we don't find this until he has been tied to two motorcycles and had it pulled off as he's dragged behind the other one. This piece of information is given to us as an "okay, we didn't actually show a child being mutilated."

Later in the movie when Alien and his old flame/rival Trash have gone to the place where the water is kept, they discover a mysterious religious cult of horribly burned men in trash bags who defend the place. What they are or why they're there is never explained.

There's also not much of a point behind the movie. The entire plot is just "get the water and go home" and there's not much divergence from that path. The movie has very little of substance to say beyond an ongoing subplot between Trash and Alien where she tries to convince him to stop being so selfish and help others. It sounds more significant than it actually is.

The film's devil-may-care approach to substance works against it from a narrative perspective but from a style perspective it works gangbusters. Half the reason this movie is so enjoyable is that at the end of the day the film-makers did more to make it fun than anything else. This sentiment does backfire at the end when the film concludes with a horrifically bleak moment only to pivot into a sickeningly happy ending that makes no actual sense. A thing just happens for no reason and everyone cheers.

Aside from the cavalier spirit with which the film carries itself and its charming design aesthetic, Exterminators sports some excellent action sequences. Obviously borrowing from The Road Warrior's harrowing third act, Exterminators features some surprisingly great stunt scenes with vehicles. I think a couple bits may have even been lifted by George Miller for Mad Max Fury Road.

There's a million and one Angry Macks out there but allow me to separate a bit of wheat from the massive pile of chaff. Exterminators of the Year 3000 is worth your time and if you're a lover of doomsday cinema as I am you're probably gonna love it.