Audience Member
The trailer for this on YouTube is just hilarious and this movie is an epic cheese ball that hides itself by saying its like the Mad Max films.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/30/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Can't we all just get [i]beyond[/i] Thunderdome?
[i]Raiders of the Sun[/i] is one of those low-budget, crappy little piss-ant movies that would be completely lost to time if it weren't for cultophile dumbasses like myself. It's one of approximately 82,496 films directed by Cirio H. Santiago, the prolific Filipino filmmaker who did such wonders for the Filipino film industry that they named him president of the Philippenes Film Development Funds, even if all he did was single-handedly make the country the home of virtually every women's prison film in the '70s. Santiago's seemingly prolific output actually only consists of about a half-dozen films, each of which being remade, sequelized or featured in another dozen films apiece.
Santiago is also responsible for the [i]Bloodfist[/i] series, which should be all you need to know.
[i]Raiders of the Sun[/i] takes place in a post-apocalyptic future involving a plague or radiation or something hastily constructed by the narrator at the last minute to explain why everyone is wearing shoddy clothing and wandering around the desert. The lead good guy is Brody, played by Richard Norton, an actual martial artist (he was in several Hong Kong action films) who lends an air of credibility to the action if not the acting. Brody wanders around the desert trying to start a revolution against some evil-doers led by flinchy badass Clay, who wears football shoulderpads painted black.
Meanwhile, another plot involving a young guy looking for his young wife, who'se been abducted by a guy named "Hoghead" (Rick Dean) takes shape, and eventually the two come together in a series of explosions. Not that anything really blows up, mind you, but there's lots of explosions and people that are nowhere near them falling down in reaction to them. Good fun, especially considering that the main McGuffin of the film is gunpowder, the one substance everyone talks about conserving because they have so little.
Of course, it's not like there's much to explode. Most of the "buildings" are particularly unconvincing, and you can plainly see that the "concrete blocks" they're supposed to be composed of are, in fact, strong cardboard. They even wobble when people fall down. It's pretty entertaining, though not as much as the villains' garb, which consists of football helmets covered in black masking tape.
The future, as it turns out, involves items entirely purchased at a dollar store. Neat.
There's loads of stupidity in [i]Raiders of the Sun[/i], and anyone who likes incompetent cinema should find something here to appreciate, whether it be Brody's shock that his love interest speaks the natives' bizarre language when it's clearly Spanish, bizarre threats like "I'm going to clock your ass" (!?) or just plain people falling down when they're not getting shot at. If you've seen [i]Dune Warriors[/i], you can probably even spot footage you've already sat through.
Sure, [i]Raiders of the Sun[/i] is, by all evidence, a terrible movie, but the acting's not too bad and it moves well enough, and even has a small army of midgets with axes, something no post-apocalypse movie should be without. You can spot the cliches coming a mile away, from a gratuitous love scene to several bits where minor characters defy the bad guys at gunpoint and are rewarded with a blood squib in the chest. There's not really any reason to watch [i]Raiders of the Sun[/i] unless you really, really, really need to see a crappy direct-to-video post-apoc flick, but that's a good enough reason for me. I'm dumb that way.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
01/25/23
Full Review
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