Warlords

Plot synopsis:
The film is set in China in the 1860s, during the Taiping Rebellion. It is based on the assassination of Ma Xinyi in 1870. In the beginning, there is a battle between loyalists and rebels, during which all of the loyalists are killed except Qingyun, the general. Qingyun goes to a village nearby where the inhabitants engage in banditry, being led by two men, Erhu and Wuyang. He offers his assistance in executing a raid against a rebel convoy. However, a loyalist army assaults the village shortly afterward and seizes the spoils for themselves. Around this time, Qingyun begins an affair with Erhu's wife.
Since the villagers are poor and starving, Qingyun convinces them to fight the rebels as an independent loyalist war-band. Erhu and Wuyang are distrustful of Qingyun, so the three of them perform a blood ceremony where, under the pain of death, they promise to care for each other like brothers. The war-band wins a series of victories. Qingyun becomes ambitious and prepares to attack Suzhou and Nanjing. However, the government becomes fearful of Qingyun's growing influence, and decides to deny reinforcements and provisions. As a result, the attack on Suzhou becomes a year-long siege.
Erhu attempts to kill the enemy commander by sneaking into the city in disguise. He is quickly captured, but to his surprise, the enemy commander was already planning on surrendering, and allows Erhu to kill him in exchange for sparing his troops from execution. However, Qingyun refuses to honor the deal and has the prisoners massacred. Erhu considers desertion, but Qingyun convinces him that the attack on Nanjing will liberate millions of innocent lives.
Nanjing is easily taken, and Qingyun, in return for his grand success, is awarded the position of Nanjing's governor. As Qingyun waits for his inauguration, he tries to make friends with other upper-class people. Erhu, however, has been jaded by the war, and does improper things such as handing out bonus pay without permission. Qingyun responds by arranging for Erhu's murder, fearing a loss of reputation with the upper-class. Erhu, as he dies, curses the name of a rival, not realizing that he was betrayed by his own brother.
Wuyang, having discovered Qingyun's betrayal and Qingyun's affair with Erhu's wife, reacts by killing Erhu's wife. On the day of the inauguration, Wuyang jumps out to kill Qingyun, but is unable to defeat him. It is then revealed, through a flash-back, that Qingyun's promotion was fake, and that the government's real desire was to murder Qingyun for gaining too much influence. At this point, a government soldier appears behind Qingyun and shoots him in the back. The government then frames Wuyang for the murder and gets ready to execute him. The film closes with Wuyang observing that "Dying is easy. Living is harder."

Tags: satire

Review:
Endless car chases, a hand-puppet mutant, and David Carradine Fred Olen Ray strikes again.
I sure hope the actors working in Fred Olen Ray's films are having fun when they're making them.
Because we, the viewer, sometimes have no fun at all.Enter WARLORDS.
Some sort of MAD MAX-inspired cheese that has really little point(except for blowing up a few cars, and displaying some of the cheapest effects since GHOULIES), WARLORDS is insulting to everyone's intelligence.
Anyone who finds this entertaining should go back to the hospital, 'cause you've gotta be sick to like this.Dawn Wildsmith, once married to Fred Olen Ray, is the damsel in distress, Sid Haig is the bad guy, there is bad chase music, a mutant sidekick, and caves.
What Fred Olen Ray movie would be complete without some cave footage(perhaps he is homaging EEGAH?)WARLORDS is probably no worse than all the other films that Fred Olen Ray directed that year, but this is hardly bragging rights.
When the measuring stick is this short, what's the point in playing at all?.
" How could Nuclear deterrence work if the men with the button couldn't give a dam ".
The star of this film " Warlords " is suppose to be David Carradine, (Kung-Fu) but I wonder if he regrets it?
I have not seen a movie this bad since 'Blair Witch.' The film is directed by Fred Ray who claims to know his craft.
Not after this poor offering.
The premise is of a post apocalyptic world where Dow, the hero (Carradine) wonders the land in search of his long lost wife.
With him as a companion of sorts is a mutant head in a box which talks, constantly complains and makes snide remarks.
Joining Dow is Danny (Dawn Wildsmith) a renegade woman who is constantly firing her guns and rifles, but can't seem to hit anything.
Sid Haig plays 'The Warlord' who with his menagerie of bare-breasted women, is as menacing as a loose tooth.
The warlord plans on recruiting a mutant army with the help of Ross Hagen as Beaumont, Fox Harris as the double crossing Colonel Cox and Robert Quarry as Dr. Mathers a veterinarian.
You might consider watching this film if you are totally bored out of your mind, which is what will happen to your head if you finish it.
To say this film is bad is an understatement.
The question remains, why did a fine actor like David Carradine do this film?
It has got to be the worse movie of his career.
*. Almost So Bad It's Good.
Yeah, it's dreadful.
If you see it in a video store, there will usually be some empty space on either side - the nearby movies have subtly scootched themselves over, for fear this movie is contagious.My favorite bit was the "mutants" who have become dependent on radium in the atmosphere.
Therefore, they have to wear gas masks with _radium in them_ in order to breathe.
The fact that this allows the hero to kill the same three guys over and over again is purely coincidental, I'm sure.
I can just imagine the director talking to these guys: "OK, after you get shot, we'll pan away for a second.
Run around the tent and attack again.
Then go the other way.
It'll be great"It's also rather amusing to note that, while civilization seems to have completely collapsed, silicone breast implant technology seems to have survived intact.
Either that, or it's an effect of the radiation..
brainless rubbish.
Surely someone like David Carradine would be smart enough to getting involved in this low budget rubbish.
This movie is the pits, low budget, daft story-line, a puppet mutant and a rip off Mad Max two.
It has a interesting side story, of an army officer who comes a likely Allie of the Heroes in this movie.
For someone who is a high ranking army officer, he seems to be a imbecile who couldn't even run a ant farm, let along an army.
Interesting at the start, it shows him coming out of what appears to be a white van, than a underground bunker.
Why is he alone, wouldn't there been other soldiers with him.
Later he shows up, appearing to have live in a desert for years, yet his uniform is in good shape, like it been iron the night before, and chances it was, its not even dirty or ragged for someone who sleeping in the desert for years.There is many boobs, even with the opening scenes of two babes been chase by bandits over the desert, when they catch them, rip off their tops, revealing their boobs.
There is another sense, with the warlord, were it appears one of the bandits is push into the front of the camera by one of the film crew.I only watch half the movie, when the puppet shows up, i had enough of this and switch it off in disgust, well i really fast forward to see if there was anything Elsa worth worthing.
There wasn't.Don't watch this movie, watching an ant crawling up the wall would be far better waste of time, than watching this brain dead, low budget, crap feast..
A horrendously awful late 80's post-nuke end-of-the-world sci-fi atrocity.
Leave it to the unsparingly pathetic Fred Olen Ray to spit out one of the worst, most hideously drab and annoying two-cent post-nuke sci-fi action snorefests to ever feebly limp its way across your TV screen.
A haggard, burnt-out, desperate hack actor for hire David Carradine assumes stoically rugged heroic duties as Dow, a cranky DNA-enhanced synthetic super warrior who wanders the arid, infertile nuclear fallout devastated desert lugging around Ammo, a gnarled, prune-like malformed talking head with spindly arms, a mouth full of snaggle teeth, and constantly rolling googly eyes who's forever ripping into Dow with an endless barrage of tiresomely witless caustic quips (Ammo's trebly, piercing tenor whine is pure murder on the ears).
You see, Dow wants to get both his hot honey wife (slinky minx Brinke Stevens) and a cowed, spineless gene-splicing scientist (meek Robert Quarry) back from the wicked, megalomaniacal the Warlord (grandly overplayed with trademark leering, lip-smacking élan by Sid Haig, who also served as 2nd unit director), a sleazy gun-running greedy mercenary (gravel-voiced Ross Hagen, who in better days directed the 70's grindhouse hoot "The Glove"), and the Warlord's loyal army of disfigured mutants (actually just a bunch of extras in tattered rags and dimestore gas masks).
Dow's aided on his brave mission by profoundly unappealing smartaleck distaff survivalist Danny (an insufferably peevish Dawn Wildsmith, Fred's buxom, blowzy redhead former real-life wife) and Colonel Cox ("Repo Man" 's Fox Harris doing his standard flaky in-his-own-singular-orbit shtick), who's an incessantly jabbering bicycle-carrying fruitcake.This is your characteristically substandard by-the-numbers dreadful Fred Olen Ray bilge, replete with flat, graceless cinematography, a grindingly trite cookie cutter script, a noisy, blaring, guitar-screeching trash-rock score, lousy sarcastic dialogue ("Would you slow down, I'm gonna be sick!," a captured lass yells to her abductors in a speeding automobile), lethargic pacing, slackly staged action (mostly crummy shoot-outs, uninspired car chases, and tired hand-to-hand fisticuffs, with a few brightly exploding cars saved for the pitifully unexciting "let's blow what's left of the paltry budget" last reel finale), deeply irritating and hopelessly unfunny sardonic, insult-laden rat-a-tat-tat banter between Dow and Danny, a light sprinkling of gratuitous nudity (perpetually topless B-picture starlets Michelle Bauer and Debra Lamb briefly appear so their shirts can get torn off to expose their bare breasts), no semblance of style, facility or distinctive individual flair to be discerned from the nondescript direction, disconcertingly over-familiar Bronson Canyon locations (Al Adamson's old shooting grounds, no less), slipshod editing, cheap, not-convincing-for-a-second (way less then) special effects (the cheesy matte painting at the start of the film is atrocious, while the laughable, rubbery phony puppet noggin Ammo takes the booby prize), and the sad, spirit-deflating sight of watching a handful of weary, washed-out veteran thespians embarrass themselves royally for the sake of a quick, easy paycheck.
So bad it's not even enjoyable on a something-for-nothing schlock movie level, this unbearably talky, hardly-any-story, skimpy-on-action, but heavy-on-tedium low-budget loser like nuclear war itself should be avoided at all costs.