Steel Frontier (1995)

Redundant and unnecessary.

Lack of good storyline.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Steel Frontier tries ever so desperately to be a stylish spaghetti western to the likes of High Plains Drifter but ends up being an embarrassment to the likes of Spice World. God, the way the actors were performing, they thought they were making the movie of the century. They all suck, and whoever wrote their dialogue is a moron. Ugh! This movie is Mad Max meets High Plains Drifter if it were directed by a retard. Nothing good exists within this cesspool of butt. Avoid.

I made it about 8 minutes into "Steel Frontier" before I turned it off. Then, glutton for punishment that I am, I watched some more the next day. Today I had to iron a pile of clothes, so I decided to finish the movie, and that was its own punishment. Here's what I don't understand: Robert Rodriguez and Shane Carruth each spent $7,000 on their debut features and created two remarkable movies. Yet here we have two directors with arguably way more money, and they churn out a huge, steaming pile of crap. Let me see if I can figure out the logic: "It's 'Road Warrior' but it's like a future Western. We'll get the cheapest 'actors' we can find, we'll have my mentally challenged cousin write the script, and we'll spend the budget on a bunch of explosions. We can't lose!"Seriously. I don't think even the MST3K guys could improve this. But if you insist on watching it, I recommend getting very drunk first.

It has to be said that this film is definitely one of the better "bargain bin" movies out there - I'd feel a bit cheated if I had paid £15 for it, but at about £1.50 I felt that I definitely got more than my monies worth. The film can't quite decide if it wants to be "Mad Max" or one of the Clint Eastwood "man with no name" spaghetti westerns, and as such is stacked with clichés from both. Even the manic loony who hangs out with the bad guys in "Mad Max" is there.That guy from "Blade Runner" also cops a good billing, although he only turns up at the beginning and the end of the movie.Favourite bit - for me the punch-up on top of the oil refinery - if you look closely you can see the "post-apocalyptic" rush hour traffic thundering past in the distance as the two protagonists knock seven bells out of each other.Get several lagers in, a few pizzas and sit back and enjoy what is ultimately lightweight but entertaining drivel.

If you take the films, Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome, and the movie Steel Dawn with Patrick Swayze, you will have a pretty good idea what the film is about. The only problems is, that the film lacks the production values of either, and represent mainly cheap copy of the former two. True, the film has plenty of action, but asks the viewer to suspend belief. No one can shoot a 50 Caliber Machine gun by holding it in his hand - and miss everything to boot, nor can you shoot at a group of people with an automatic weapon and miss the whole bunch. There is also a problem with poor editing, when the school bus flips over, it is easy enough to see the cannon used to do the job. And the lady driving the truck through it is superfluous, since she had more than enough time to stop the truck. If you are interested only in mindless action and violence then the movie is easy enough to watch. But don't expect anything on paar with Thunderdome, or even the somewhat cheap and tacky Steel Dawn.