Land of Doom

Plot synopsis:
The film opens with Harmony running away to hide in a cave while her village is attacked by the raiders. Inside, she finds a wounded survivor named Anderson, whom she obviously despises. Eventually, she agrees to travel with Anderson in search of food and shelter. On the road, they are captured by a bounty hunter named Dempster, sent out by raider commander Slater. He ties Anderson to a tree and attacks Harmony after she tries to escape.
Hysterical, Harmony kills Dempster with a rock and threatens to leave Anderson to die. He convinces her to let him go so he can get them both to a rumored safe haven, though he doesn't know where it is. They take Dempster's motorcycle and ride until it's out of fuel. They walk until they come to a fortified ruins where a group of insane, diseased cannibals offer them something called "deer meat". Harmony asks to use the outhouse, where she finds a pile of bodies and is almost attacked by one of the cannibals. When she gets back to Anderson she warns him about the meat, throws her food bowl at the cannibal and ties him up.
On the road again, Harmony senses two cannibals are following them, so they hide in the bushes. She sneaks away and is discovered by one of the cannibals, who she then scuffles with. Harmony sneaks up behind Anderson and scares him to be funny. He becomes enraged and they argue. They continue their journey and are ambushed by a mob wearing tattered clothing concealing their faces. It is revealed that they have the plague and after the fight it over, Anderson and Harmony argue again. They decide to camp and find high ground to stay the night.
In the morning, a loud bang followed by a rumbling surprises the two awake. From the edge of a cliff they observe raiders attacking a nearby village. Anderson recognizes Purvis, one of Slater's maniacs, standing on a hilltop with some others. The villagers try to repel the raiders in a gunfight. Many die in the battle, until the raiders break through the fence, swarming into the village through the hole. Anderson and Harmony try to sneak into the area during the battle to steal a motorcycle. They attack an injured biker and steal his motorcycle. While they are escaping on the bike, Purvis recognizes Anderson through his spyglass and sends troops after them.
The raiders almost catch up with the fugitives, so Anderson attempts to ride down into a steep valley, but they follow. Anderson then ambushes the raiders, shooting one. The fugitives try to escape back uphill until Harmony jumps off of the bike, causing the raiders to split up while chasing them.
Anderson stops to check his fuel and is captured by Purvis. He tries to joke with Purvis, stalling until Harmony can rescue him. She sneaks behind Purvis and holds him up with a branch and a small pistol. The two leave him frozen in place, afraid to move because of a rattlesnake sliding over his boot. Back on the road, they find a man stuck on a boulder while a pack of rabid dogs circle below. Anderson scares the dogs off and the traveler climbs down. Orland and his puppy accompany Anderson and Harmony for a while. After saying goodbye to the man and his puppy, they ride away, only to be captured by the raiders. Orland witnesses their capture and follows the truck carrying them.
Anderson and Harmony are brought before Lead Raider Slater, in a cave used as the raider's headquarters. Slater thinks he can have Harmony, so he tries to win her over with the promise of riches and sex, but she just spits in his face. She gets free and grabs a lead pipe and attacks the raiders as Anderson, still held by burly raiders, and concubines look on. She tries to defend herself, but they overpower her, ripping some of her clothes off. Purvis returns and threatens Anderson because of the snake. Slater pushes Purvis down and orders him to take the captives to the cells.
Meanwhile, Orland is still following the truck tracks. He leaves behind his bike and puppy as he races to catch up with the raiders. From the top of a cliff he sees the raiders' outpost. He returns to his bike, but can't find his puppy. While searching for her, he falls into a hole, landing in a small tomb. He finds his puppy there, but is also attacked by a group of strange-speaking dwarves.
Anderson and Harmony are chained to a rock wall, hanging over a fire. Purvis comes in to announce when Anderson is to be executed. They unchain both prisoners and bring them to Slater. Harmony is then chained to a beam set across a roasting fire. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Orland jumps into the cave and begins firing a flamethrower. In the ensuing chaos, Anderson attacks Slater, who runs away and hides behind a tapestry. Anderson grabs a gun and helps Orland kills the rest of the raiders. The three then escape through a secret door while Purvis and others follow them through the fire. They arrive at the dwarves' amory and Orland explains what is going on.
The cloaked dwarves lead the three to a secret hatch above the raider camp, where they begin to shoot at the men, who return fire. The three escape are about to escape when, Orland remembers seeing an oil tanker earlier and lights it on fire. They escape during the confusion caused by the oil explosion. They destroy all the raiders' fuel reserves and escape on foot. Purvis and his raiders emerge from the smokey wreckage and he leads them in a search for the trio. Orland finds an abandoned trucks and hotwires it. Raider bikers chase after the truck, shooting at it. They come to a bridge and find the midgets helping them keep the raiders at bay. The three makes it safely across the bridge just before the truck explodes, destroying the bridge and blocking the raiders from following.
Orland decides to stay with his new dwarf friends and his puppy. He sees Slater chasing after the other two and starts running and yelling for Anderson and Harmony. They both look back to see what's wrong and discover Slater is still chasing them. Anderson explains,"Here we go again!" as Orland catches up to them and they all start running up the hill as the credits roll.

Tags: murder

Review:
It's not the end of the world!!
Oh right, it is...
Yep, you guessed it, it's the end of the world again.
Must be time to dust off the leathers and bring out the dodgy motorbikes.
the main character here is a LADY.
And she can fend for herself!
But just in case she can't, she finds an injured Calvin-Klein model to watch over her.
How novel, eh?
The planet is a wasteland, survivors are mostly plague-infested psychos or Ewok-resembling dwarfs..
isn't it fortunate that the two most attractive members of each sex alive find each other?
Now they can start the human race anew and make lots of lovely babies together that are just as pretty as they are..
but first, there's the small matter of a mad gang to defeat.
You know the sort: attacking the few settlements that are remaining, setting all the buildings on fire, indiscriminately killing the men while assaulting the women, spraying gunfire everywhere while riding on their souped-up Harleys..
you get the picture.
The leader of this rabble is a guy with a really DEEP VOICE who wears a mask all the time.
Is it a symbol of his power, or maybe he has an embarrassing birthmark underneath it?
Against such odds, our heroes can't help but get captured, but just as it seems things are at their bleakest..
an eccentric old man, who has a whole pound full of dogs, enters the film out of left field..
and promptly gets busy with a flamethrower.
Can the three desperadoes escape the clutches of these maniacs with appalling body odour and no fashion sense whatsoever?
All will be revealed..Well actually no it won't, because the ending doesn't resolve anything.
Perhaps a sequel was in the pipeline?
Some hope, there isn't much here to give the likes of Mad Max a run for its money.
True, there are a lot of bizarre elements here that make the film almost strangely compelling, but then you pull back and realise how shoddy the action scenes are and the lack of anything approaching clear plot direction.
True, I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but I did at least hope for a little more entertainment.
You may have a few laughs out of pure incredulity while its on, but is it really worth investing 90 minutes of your life for a few small pleasures like that?
Shoop shoop, Land of Doom....
Land of Doom definitely has one of the better titles going for it in recent cinematic history, but that's about all it can muster.Take your normal plot.
Let's use some symbolism, and have it be a puppy.
During the movie, you watch the puppy grow.
There are exciting parts, like when the puppy chases some squirrels around, or sad parts, where the puppy whizzes on your favorite Duran Duran album.
By the end of the movie, the puppy has become an adult dog, hopefully soon to spawn other puppies, AKA sequels.Land of Doom, unlike a normally aging dog, is basically a set of drunk dogs, wandering aimlessly, bumping into walls, and not only whizzing on your Duran Duran albums, but also the Mona Lisa and all vestiges of modern civilization.
By the end, instead of a healthy, happy dog whom you love, you're stuck with a brain dead puppy who is busy chewing off its own tail.
Pathetic, yes.
But that's Land of Doom.Don't see this movie.
Seriously, it just wants your soul.
I mean, it doesn't even actually end.
You know how a movie reaches the point where you know the big climatic fight is about to begin?
In Land of Doom, that moment arrives, the heroes run away, roll credits.
Thanks, movie!Slight redeeming factor: Jawas.
There are Jawas in this film.
Also, the end theme is so the exact opposite of a titular song for this movie that it has to be heard to be believed.
Rating 1/10 - My eyes!
My poor eyes!.
"The Road Warrior" meets "Star Wars" plus crap.
I'm a longtime fan of cheezy foreign knock-offs of THE ROAD WARRIOR and such.
Often times that kind of exploitive, badly dubbed, low budget trash makes for high entertainment.
Sadly, LAND OF DOOM brings no such entertainment.
It's the future again, and it's post-apocalyptic.
The world is ravaged by plague and evil bandits (sound familiar?).
A woman named Harmony and her rugged hero partner (she won't let him touch her) try to escape from the Land of Doom to a fabled paradise.
Some overlord villain type, who wears a lot of fake chromed armor and studded leather, tries to stop them.
The best part of the whole movie is the opening shot of a dawn over a bleak looking landscape, accompanied by some appropriate music- Harmony's explanatory narration begins and it's all down hill from there.
Some creatures that look suspiciously like the Jawas from STAR WARS appear and some things explode.
LAND OF DOOM is oddly short on the over-customized junk cars that usually roam the post-apocalyptic wastelands of these pictures.
Naturally, all the dialogue is awful as are the attempts at sexual tension between our two heroes.
Plague victims sport painted on sores and behave like zombies.
Much more frightening is the ineptness of the production and the performances.
The ending is left wide open for a sequel that never came.
Over the end credits runs a horrid tune called "Harmony's Land of Doom" which tries to sound like a modern pop song, but is just as dull and low key as the movie.
In short: skip it and rent 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS instead..
The turkey from Turkey.
In a sort of Sweeded version of the Mad Max films, Harmony (who really dislikes being touched) and Anderson roam the Turkey landscape chased by an insipid ragtag group of post-apocalyptic 'ruffians' .
Longing to have a budget as big as say a 'Hell comes to Frogtown' sequel this film is marginal more silly/awful than any such film(s).
The bikes alone are utterly ridiculous, not to mention the do-it-yourself make-up, the worst Frenchman impersonation since Holy Grail (but unintentional this time) and make-shift Star Wars-esque creatures.If I'm making this film sound good in any way, shape or film, I'm sincerely sorry.
It's not even good as a drunken guilty pleasure film.
And this was somehow based on a book, how??.
Nice scenery the kind of film THE TURKS did better themselves.
Yes there are a lot of bad films like this.
Yet this still stands tall as a bad film even in bad company.This is a junior high school level Mad Max/Star Wars rip off.
This kind of hybrid rip off/inspired pulp filmmaking was done my Turkish filmmakers for years with a crazy energy to equal some of the most mondo of Japanese and Italian movies.
Sadly, though this features at least one Turkish star in a minor supporting role, this movie's "creative" force Maris doesn't have much of a clue about how to choose or direct actors or how to stage a fight scene or do action.
The two leads both have U.S. TV credits and can't sustain any interest in a feature, the stunts could mostly be performed by your grandmother and done just as well.
The pacing is lifeless the costumes and almost everything about it seems fake and thrown to together at the last minute.
There are some large scale explosions--most of which seem to be big gas explosions and they hold off the shots long enough that you can see the explosion didn't really blow anything up.There is at least one scene of a bad guy screaming the hero's name in rage, so they don't forget to include that.
The main villain is pretty skinny for a guy who is supposed to be a muscle man.
He had a sort of Phantom of the Opera mask on half of his face and in his longest dialogue scene speaks with a lisp.
Sadly this type of funny bad moment doesn't happen enough to make the film a guilty pleasure.The real life locations in Turkey's Capodocia are fascinating and only occasionally seen on film, but besides that this is a wasteland on all other levels.
Best so-bad-it's-good element is the hilarious end title song and generally awful music score.
How director Maris managed to keep making films after this I don't know, I'd hope he got better, but I haven't seen any of the rest to say for sure.
But this is really badly done.I suppose the only other way to describe this film is to say it's the type of film CANNON did too often, only much worse than even the worst of those.It's a waste because if he had just gotten some better actors and then let some real Turkish directors make the film it could have been fun.Turkish pulp cinema is a vanished thing and this does give just a very small taste of what the world is missing.
If you can only imagine this film done with energy and lots of stolen music from other films and even occasionally stolen footage you'd have some hint.
Seek out the few remaining real Turkish pulp cinema.
Sadly most of the films were destroyed to reclaim the silver used in the prints, at a time when pop culture films stopped being popular in Turkey.
Gets a 10 because "Land of Doom" comes around every decade.
Sure its cheap, harebrained and badly overacted.
But its also the Rosetta Stone of Mad Max 1980's movies , Scripted for now long forgotten movie audiences (Turkish, American & Euro).
That are now faced with crises upon crises finding little solace in bloated budgeted and just as badly acted films that now get the media corporate stamp of approval of an IMDb 8.5 ,but oddly never a 7 or 7.5 Enjoy the Land of Doom for what it is and what its not.
This movie is a rare look into the ancient 1980's .
Movies of this type used to stock the particle board shelving of now long dead & paved over Video Rental Stores stocked with thousands of VHS scrolls of now long forgotten gems like Land of Doom.How many times will this movie be resurrected from the dead , maybe a dozen times a decade on late night antenna T.V?Its really worth a watch if you are privileged to see it once again.
A less than million dollar budget & Puffy-hairdo leather clad Road Warriors of the Anatolia Highlands .
The Age of Reagan Innocence will never be forgotten..
More studded leather than you can shake a stick at!.
A low budget but good-looking US/Turkish MAD MAX 2 rip-off in which the hero this time is a woman who has a pathological hatred of all men - that is until she meets the charming and courageous male lead Anderson, who of course comes to make her love him.
It's cheesy stuff to be sure, and although it follows very closely in the steps of MAD MAX 2 it cannot come close because the budget and cast and crew just aren't skilled enough.
Although lacking, this American production (making a change from the usual slew of Italian imitations) has its moments and offers up plenty of action fun for undemanding fans.Director Peter Maris (who incredibly also directed the PHANTASMAGORIA horror video game back in the mid-'90s which was pretty popular) knows his roots but his direction, although he tries, is nothing above average.
At least the film is in focus and well-lit at all moments, something that can't be said for those B-movies at the lower end of the spectrum.
When somebody can create a near-professional look out of an almost-amateur production, they deserve credit.We're off to a good start with a well-choreographed attack on a small village by a gang of pillaging outlaws, who proceed to murder all the men and rape all the women.
The only person to escape is Harmony, a man-hating female warrior armed with a nifty crossbow (which I don't think she actually shoots anybody with).
Harmony is played by Deborah Rennard (A.W.O.L.), although it's clear her future lies more in the likes of American soap operas such as DALLAS.
However, Rennard invests Harmony with a feisty hard edge, and is definitely someone you wouldn't want to mess with.
It's good to see such a strong female role in a world in which the women are most often helpless victims (cf.
any number of slasher films from the past two decades).At this point we are introduced to the myriad of villains, who all like to wear black hockey masks in the style of Jason Voorhees and who quite possibly have cornered the market in studded leather, as seemingly each and every one of them is dressed in this particular style of homoerotic outfit - sounds familiar huh?
The chief villain is Slater, and we know he's the boss and not somebody to be messed with as he's got a mask on his face and a bionic arm to boot.
Sadly the acting of these delinquents is pretty bad, but not the worst I've seen.
The bad guys ride around on modified bikes with huge plastic fins at the front, vehicles also ripped from MAD MAX 2 except on a much smaller, cheaper scale.Harmony escapes from their clutches and makes her way to a cave in the mountains where she discovers the mortally wounded Anderson.
He teams up with her for a long trek across the mountains in search of a new land, and soon forget about his apparently serious injuries!
Anderson is played by Bruce Campbell look-alike Garrick Dowhen, and although he's not up to the jolly charm charisma that Campbell would bring to the role, Dowhen does fine as a low-rate imitation.
Thus begin the many adventures that the pair have, forming a close bond all the while.Oh, and did I mention that the Jawas from STAR WARS make a surprise appearance too?
What this film has to recommend it are mainly the authentic mountainous locations - filmed in Turkey no less!
- which really give it a nice background on which the action can play out.
Obviously this was shot out in the desert outskirts somewhere, and the frequently wonderful scenery adds a lot to the enjoyment of this movie.
It's particularly impressive in a scene in which Rennard senses that she's being watched, and that eerie feeling successfully transfers to the viewer as well.
There's plenty of light action to pass the time too; none of it is particularly violent (apart from those head-smashings!) or stylish but it's fun enough in a limited way.Sadly, where this film also lacks is in the special effects department - there aren't any.
Most of the effects are limited to bloody make-up jobs on the various injured parties or gun-shot victims.
One memorable scene shows a village exploding many times in which the explosions are repeated and shown from different angles.
I guess it's pretty cheap to buy explosives and blow the heck out of a run down shack somewhere, but still at least this gives the impression of a big budget.
The biggest example of this film's lack of budget comes at a scene where Anderson and Harmony are captured by the villains, who knock them off their bike by stretching a rope across the road.
Obviously stunt actors couldn't be found for this stunt so we simply hear the sound effects instead.The movie is gore-free, apart from a singular brief moment of somebody having his fingers chopped off with an axe.
The biggest disappointment of all comes in the anti-climactic ending, though, so steel yourselves for it.
It very much looks like either things were left intentionally open for a sequel (which never happened) or that they just ran out of money filming suddenly and had to finish it quickly.
I have to say that it's unforgivable to end a movie in such a way, with most of the bad guys surviving and the good guys making a hasty getaway.
Surprising too, but in a bad way.
However, I am an undisclosed fan of these MAD MAX 2 rip-offs, so LAND OF DOOM will nonetheless get the thumbs up from me, as I enjoyed it in a mindlessly watchable way, although it's far from the best of this particular genre..
Deer Meat?.....
For some reason never explained, half of the earths population go mad and decide to wear leather for the rest of their lives.The others are either really bad European cannibal actors, or the posh one from AWOL (or Lionheart), and some bloke who is acting about ten years younger than he should be.These leather clad people pillage villages and just run about being downright rotters.Having seen Mad Max and any other post apocalyptic movie before 1985, the heroes go on a quest to defeat the uber-leather villain.
We can single this guy out because he has the wild hair and a mask.It's pretty vile stuff, with no one really having a clue whats going on, just riding round with some weird frame on their bikes and cars looking foe something thats never explained.The writers couldn't have had a clue either, because the ending is just awful.The only reason why this film did not get a one from me is because it keeps you guessing as to how people are clean shaven and also how the lead keeps her hair looking so god....