Her dad is seriously pissed at the threat of a shitty Romeo and Juliet ripoff and hires a bounty hunter played by 'Leon', an actor named with as much commitment as this movie has to a message. The protagonist Inca by the name of Falco, shacks up with the daughter of the Chairman Oppressor, Diana (Amanda Peterson of Explorers). By that logic it follows that the subsequent 16-year fascist rule would fit the post apocalyptic bill.Īll of this doesn’t make the movie any less flat because it's quickly stepped over. It’s not a far stretch of the imagination to think that the CIA sponsored collapse of a hard won people’s democracy might be considered apocalyptic by the people who suffered under it. Consider for a moment the brutal repression that the people of that country suffered. In fact the more I think about it, this movie right down to the title is a barely subtle indictment of the US and corporate backed Chilean military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The indigenous population, referred to as “ Inca” at several points are subjected to poverty, toil and degradation in some kind of mine operated by the ruthless white elite. What quickly becomes obvious is that it is in fact simply a colonized South American country, and judging by the climate, southern Peru/northern Chile. Strangely, this post-apocalypse is quite remarkable in its complete lack of visual post-apocalyptic cues.

OK, I will assume that there was some kind of apocalypse, that it was an “inferno”, and this is after it. It cries out in the faces of the two characters: Here is this explosion/bike/car thing and I’m trying hard, but am I supposed to care? The single sentence of narration that opens the film “ the Southern continent, after the collapse,” may be the only on screen clue that there was any kind of apocalypse at all, whatever it was. As much as I like explosions and well rendered watercolors, this cover art is just dumb. However, if The Lawless Land is supposed to be post apocalyptic, or as the box claims “after the inferno of WWIII”, then color me disappointed. I love post-apocalypse movies mostly because I enjoy seeing how others envision the surviving social order and infrastructure after a nuclear (or some other) holocaust.

The lawless land 1988