Warriors of the Year 2072
| Warriors of the Year 2072 | |
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| Directed by | Lucio Fulci |
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| Music by | Riz Ortolani |
| Cinematography | Giuseppe Pinori |
| Edited by | Vincenzo Tomassi |
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Regency Productions
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| Country | Italy |
Warriors of the Year 2072 (Italian: I Guerrieri dell'anno 2072) is a 1984 Italian science fiction film directed by Lucio Fulci. The film is set in the 21st-century, where Romans have found a new way to handle criminals: by having them fight each other like gladiators on motorcycles on national television. The film was based on a trend of Italian cinema to develop stories of futuristic barbarians after the popularity of the films Mad Max and Escape From New York.
In the year 2072, set in a dystopia Rome, Italy, WBS TV's chief of programming, Cortez (Claudio Cassinelli), is fuming at the constituently high ratings enjoyed by a rival American TV show, 'Kill-Bike'. The show has features gladiatorial fights to the death on motorcycles, and has made a hero of a man called Drake (Jared Martin) the unbeaten champion. Cortez is all the more bitter because it was he who discovered Drake in the first place. WBS's current answer to the American show is 'The Danger Game', a simulation game showing the hallucinations of a contestant experiencing the approach of violent death. Fear, panic, and screaming at the extremely realistic simulations triggers a further increase in the intensity. Unfortunately for the station, even this spectacle fails to compete against the American show.
Cortez and his two female assistants, Sybil (Penny Brown) and Sarah (Eleanor Gold) receive a video message from the mysterious station boss, Sam, demanding that they recreate the formula of gladiatorial contest and set them back to where they began: in the Coliseum. Sam orders the WBS station, a sort-of flying saucer controlled by a computer system called Junior, to fly over there and initiate training of the future contestants who will be chosen from the Death Rows around the world. Meanwhile, Drake has been imprisoned for the murder of three men who killed his wife Susan (Valerie Jones) after they broke into his house, and he (conveniently for WBS) is now under the sentence of death for taking the law in his own hands.
Drake is brought to the training compound and a detector strip is seared into his wrist. There, he has to contend with the sadistic Chief of the Praetorian Guard, Raven (Howard Ross), and the hostility of the other future contestants. Some of them are introduced; Abdul (Fred Williamson) is an African-American Muslim extremist; Akira (Haruiko Yamanouchi) is a notorious Japanese serial killer; Kirk (Al Cliver) is a German-born robber/killer; and Tango (Tony Sanders) is a Latin American terrorist. Drake also meets an old friend of his from his WBS days, a deformed employee with a fiber optic eye called Monk (Donald O'Brien), who offers Drake some reassurance.
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