It’s another Italian stock footage apocalypse! Culled from the most routine of public domain clips of black and white mushroom clouds, model cities getting blown away, and most inexplicably of all, erupting volcanoes and bright red lava flows, the beginning of The Final Executioner not only marks the end of the world as we know it, but also the most professional part of the film, too!
Thank god! Just bring on the narrator for 20 seconds of exposition explaining the crazy illogical world that rose from the ashes so that we can get on with watching the stud decked out in black leather and white scarf bad assing around the wasteland just like was promised on the poster!
Society has been divided into two groups! One is the wealthy elite who were untouched by the contamination! The other is what the narrator (same voice as the guy who dubbed our hero, Alan) somewhat unsympathetically referred to as “human flotsam” and who are considered “target material.” He also helpfully mentions that “the hunt” is an “entertaining method” of getting rid of these poor radioactive rabble. Sure it sounds insensitive to all the poor folks trying to just scrape by in the wasteland, but do any of us really want to live in a world where rich people are bored?
It is obviously a pretty sweet set up what with all the running, screaming, shooting, and friendly wagers the rich people put on the hunt (Erasmus bets Edra his prized and trashy-looking white rifle with the thermal scope that he can get more kills than her), but then a second apocalypse happens! The contamination is over! And computer whiz Alan has the proof! So he and his woman have their elite status revoked and are shipped out into the wasteland where they will be hunted down! Come on, Al! If you’re aren’t a team player, you better be ready to update your LinkedIn profile!
Out in the wasteland, rich people like Edra live in run down Italian villas, somehow outfitted with fully powered advanced communications and surveillance equipment. From her control center she and her gang can make and recieve radio and video transmissions and look at the secuirty cameras covering their compound. They can even track their dogs by the transponders on their collars. Don’t be fooled by their fancy gadgets though. They still dress like refugees from a bad Italian Mad Max rip off.
Studded leather and headbands never go out of style in the End Times! Just like slow motion never goes out of style during dull action sequences! But what if I hate slow motion? Are there any lazy effects I can enjoy, too? Sure! Our white scarfed post-apoc dandy Erasmus has a motorcyle chase with one of Edra’s henchmen where the film is noticably sped up to try and trick us into believing they weren’t going 15 mph during the scene! This is an apocalypse for everyone!
Alan and his woman are caught by Edra and her gang and instead of killing them, they make Alan watch while they rape and kill her. Then they drag him behind a jeep before shooting him in a river and leaving him for dead.
Woody Strode (who also appeared in the exact same footage in Bronx Executioner!) saves him, nurses him back to health and puts him through a rigorous tranining montage of climbing through tunnels, scooting underneath barbwire and running through fire.
But how can a person be trained to run through fire? By having Woody beat you up and dunking your ass in a muddy pond several times before pulling your wet shirt over your head and pushing you into the fire! Damn, that will surely come in handy when Alan launches his assault on Edra’s fortress, right? (Hint – while Alan realizes Woody is right that fire will confuse the thermal sensing scope, he also realizes that he doesn’t have to set himself on fire to take advantage of that. Thank goodness for that flame thrower he had hidden in the woods!)
While Alan’s attack on Edra goes about like you would expect with him picking people off one by one and using tricky tactics to confuse his adversary, like any great warrior, he also improvises when the need arises, like when he threw a pillow at the bad guys. (I have to assume that was improvised because the film did not show any pillow fights between him and Woody.)
Woody appears a final time to save the day and deliver the movie’s closing remarks about how it is time to renew a dream and that he and Alan were joining forces for a new beginning. He even proudly showed off the silly looking badge he was wearing that not even a five year old would buy at a dollar store because of how fake it looked.
Bland and unimagintive at best, The Final Executioner is what you worry about your Italian post-apocalyptic movie being. Lagging way behind such radioactively resplendent efforts like Rush, A Man Called Rage, Exterminators from the Year 3000 and 2020 Texas Gladiators, it settles in with such ground zero garbage like Urban Warriors. Other than the flamboyant wardrobe of Erasmus and the ickiness of Edra’s young brother being excited for the opportunity to get his first rape under his belt, there isn’t anything memorable, good or bad, happening here. Perhaps the most telling thing about The Final Executioner is that the movie that borrowed so much of its footage a few years later, Bronx Executioner, is a much more entertaining effort.
© 2021 MonsterHunter
“Italian stock footage apocalypse” should be a category on itself. Ah, the days where the VHS covers were so full of blatant lies! Look at those unnatural biceps, the only thing missing is a chopper with a searchlight.
I especially loved the giant oversized boxes like the silver MGM/UA ones for stuff like “The Ice Pirates” and “Jungle Raiders” and of course the Wizard Video ones. It’s a shame my kids will never know the thrill of renting a 20 pound VCR and blurry copies of “Dawn of the Dead” and “Faces of Death”.