Ravagers (1979)

There was a moment in the last third of Ravagers where it threatened to become interesting. Richard Harris (Strike Commando 2) had survived the post-apocalyptic wasteland and made his way to a ship where there was plenty of food, electricity, and even clean clothes. Given a tour by the always welcome presence of football/film legend Woody Strode (Spartacus, The Final Executioner), Harris is let in on the dirty little secret of the boat.

Is this the fabled New Genesis that everyone is searching for? Have people finally started having children again? Or is it something darker? Maybe they’ve got a little Soylent Green situation going on. Or everything is being powered by the blood of mutants. Heck, maybe the apocalypse never even happened at all and everything been’s leading to some awesome twist ending! Except that Ernest Borgnine was second billed in the credits and we haven’t seen him yet.

Ernie was a screen legend of course, appearing in all manner of films (From Here to Eternity, Marty, Super Snooper and The Opponent) and with him appearing along side Harris and Strode, Ravagers has a cast it doesn’t really deserve, but I wasn’t holding out much hope that Ernie was going to deliver the awesome reveal that this movie frankly needed to elevate it from the average armegeddon flick it barely achieved throughout its duration.

So it is that when it comes out that Ernie’s character Rann is just the iron fisted leader of the boat people and he jails those who want to leave the boat, you just settle back into your seat and wait for the inevitable invasion of the boat by the Ravagers and console yourself that you’ll likely get to see people shot, slashed and chucked into the ocean until the boat somehow explodes. (One of the benefits of being a strictly routine genre movie like this is that all of that expected mayhem occurred just like you imagined it would.)

The first hour of Ravagers is very effective at conveying the hopeless tedium of what it must be like to survive the end of the world. Crappy weather, always searching for food, avoiding the murderous gangs of thugs that always form once civilization collapses, and most trying of all, weathering the inane babble of your sexy wife whose gorgeous hair seems to be the only thing completely unaffected by the cataclysm that wiped away everything of the modern world. (Except apparently shampoo, conditioner, hair dye, and curling irons.)

If Richard Harris’ Falk character had ever watched one of these apocalypse movies before, he would know that hiding out at the abandoned refinery with a sexy wife is just asking to become the embittered widower who grimly trudges through the ruined countryside while spurning the advances of the next sexy babe who inevitably starts traveling with him. (This Falk guy does better after a nuclear war with the ladies than most of us do now and we have the advantage of being able to use deodorant and pay for a hot meal!)

After finding his wife’s body, he tracks down the Ravagers and kills one their leader was particularly close to. The head Ravager takes this personally and launches an obsessive hunt for Falk that consumes and drives the rest of the film.

None of this is remotely interesting and while Harris is an acting legend he just isn’t that compelling to watch, his character being fairly unlikable to the point I wasn’t sure why I should be rooting for him to do anything other than to get wherever it was he was going to so everything would just end. (He and Borgnine’s arguement at dinner about hope and whether staying on the ship was really living is what passes for fireworks in an otherwise drearily low key affair.)

Besides encountering Strode and bickering with Borgnine, Harris alos runs into a crazed Art Carney who’s still guarding some type of NASA rocket installation! If there’s one thing about a journey across a destroyed America you can count on, it’s the random encounter that provides nice visuals (dirty old rockets and other space empherma are effective symbols for a hopeful future that will never be), but little else.

I should have guessed that Ravagers was going to be unremarkable in the extreme when the opening credits played out over an average looking matte painting of a destroyed city. The movie tries to do so little, that while there isn’t anything memorable or exciting happening, there also isn’t anything absurd or funny going on either. I don’t know whether it was because Richard Harris was such a great actor or not, but I couldn’t tell whether he was morose and crabby because his character understood the pointlessness of his existance or just because he was shooting a grubby and dull sci-fi movie in Alabama.

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