Stryker
Tags: cult, grindhouse film, violence

Plot synopsis:
After nuclear war has defoliated the Earth, survivors lives in colonies in a quest for water. A young woman named Delha is on the run from the evil Kardis henchman. She is rescued by Stryker and his young companion Bandit. She later finds herself trapped again by Kardis and resists torture to reveal where the location of her colony.
Meanwhile, Stryker and Bandit ambush a Kardis water tanker and drive in his fortress and manages to escape with Delha. Delha reveals that she has been trying to contact Trun, Stryker's estranged brother to assist in the defence against Kardis. Trun has been captured and buried by Kardis' men, but is rescued by Stryker. Trun has his lieutenant Bazil to gather his army, but Bazil betrays them leading Kardis to attack the colony.
Stryker is then captured and tortured, but is rescued by a group of dwarves whom he had previously given water too. After a final climatic battle, Trun's battalion defeats Kardis' army with help of Stryker and the dwarves.

Review: Here's yet another Mad Max inspired post apocalyptic outing from the glorious 1980's that depicts a parched and barren world inhabited by leather clad gangs (an odd choice of material to attire oneself with considering the scorching temperatures!) who drive around recklessly in armour plated cars and on motorcycles searching for the most precious commodity remaining on earth: water.Yes, fans of the genre may recognise the above plot as exactly the same as Giuliano Carnimeo's Exterminators Of The Year 3000 which was also released in 1983.
In fact, the miraculously fortuitous ending in both films is exactly the same to!
(I don't know which one was released first but considering the derivative nature of the Italian movie industry in the late 70's and 80's I would hazard to guess that Carnimeo's film was most likely 'heavily inspired' (ahem) from the film being reviewed here.Back to the film and oddly, it would appear that the producers of this, neglected to hire two always vital contributors in any film making process, namely a screen writer and a script writer (!!!) - well at least one could be forgiven for assuming this to be the case as this film has virtually no logical plotting nor character development (or even character definition for that matter!) and has scarcely any dialogue throughout!
The end result is a somewhat confusing affair with scene after scene of seemingly pointless car chases and shoot outs revolving around a (VERY HOT!) woman who is being pursued by just about everyone she encounters (including the films beefy hero).To be fair, as the movie progresses a plot of sorts is disclosed and there's even the trappings of a love story that begin to blossom!
On the plus side, the action sequences are competently handled throughout with some fair stunt work on display in a number of scenes and as previously mentioned, - males rejoice, for the heroine along with all of the other females in the cast, is absolutely gorgeous (and spends the entire film in some seriously sexy leather shorts!) Wey Hey!!!
Great low budget action flick!.
This movie, though often described as a low budget Mad Max or Road Warrior movie, is more comparable to Wheels of Fire.
It is low budget pleasure that features silly or nonexistent acting, crazy choreography, and a wonderful cast of actors and actresses you've probably never heard of.
Yet, this little gem is downright action packed fun, 1980s style!
The movie is set in a futuristic post-holocaust world that is largely made up of desert, dunes and rocky hills.
The plot ultimately involves a small community defending a secluded sanctuary - an underground water source - from a wicked tribe of Road Warriorish thugs.
Lots of crazy car chases, gun-toting warriors, cheap special effects (pyrotechnics), and stiff choreography during the fight scenes.One fella stands out as the main character, a roguish silent wanderer named Stryker on a personal mission.
But he's extremely suitable for his role, however, given the handful of actors and actress he is working with in this movie.
If you're not fond of the strong silent lead, you have a host of typically attractive 1980s female desert warriors, some donned in what appears to be football shoulder pads (sorta like Road Warrior).
The movie tries to build him up as someone foul enough to peak Stryker's persistent and stubborn indifference, yet, as a movie villain, he simply fails to impress the viewer as a credible threat to someone as collected and methodical as Stryker.I rate this movie 9 out of 10 because for a low budget flick, it packs a lot of action, shoot outs, and car chases.
One serious drawback to the movie, however, is the extremely boring set - desert.
Probably 95% of the film was shot outdoors in what appears to be nothing but deserts and dunes.
After watching this setting for about 5 minutes, the movie gets very claustrophobic and you get the distinct impression that all the different filming locations were done within a 5-minute walk of each other.
But the movie is really a little unpolished gem.
You have to love low budget antics to give this movie an entire viewing.
Lots of action and scantily clad girls, but little else.
It's the desert (well, actually, it's a gravel pit in the Philippines masquerading as the desert) They're fighting over water.
Once you get past the fighting over what appears to be only a few gallons of water, the plot of this post apocalyptic grindhouse flick becomes nonexistent, as entire reels of film go by with either not much happening, or several lengthy car chases and explosions and shootouts.
It's also rather difficult to learn anything about the characters when there is hardly any dialogue to the film.
Good looking girls in shorts, and good action in the first half hour and at the climax are about all this has going for it.
If you can turn your mind off and just enjoy the action scenes, this movie might be more watchable for that and the good looking half nude girls, but if you want more than that, look elsewhere.
I'm also a fan of William/ Bill Ostrander, so I was disappointed by his somewhat small role in the film, and by the fact that his voice was apparently dubbed for his few lines.
Also, this movie looks like it was filmed a year or two prior to its release, as Ostrander looks noticeably younger than he did in Christine, which was released only three months after this..
I might enjoy this movie if I saw again today on TV.
However, when my brother and I saw it in the theater (as part of a weeknight "crowd" of about 10-12 viewers) when it was new I thought it was the most terrible "Road Warrior" rip-off that could possibly be made.
What will you do?", after which ensued the only moment of silence in the entire movie.
That was about the only memorable moment in the entire movie for us, but we still talk about it sometimes when we are reminiscing and want a good laugh..
Yes, it is a blatant Road Warrior ripoff, yes, much of it is shot in a gravelpit, yes, it is poorly acted.
Yet it is entertaining, not a bad post apocalyptic story, water shortage and lots of heat, same thing as in the underrated, but much higher budgetted "Solarbabies".
Every once in a while, these cheesy grindhouse movies show good movie-making constrained by a non-existent budget.
Script, dialogue and acting ar all way substandard, although the camera-work is good enough.
But the whole thing is clearly a Mad Max rip-off and you can't look at it for more than, oh, half a minute without figuring it out.But after a while you start to wonder about the basic premise of the movie: a nuclear war has destroyed all the water in the world.
Obviously these people know why civilization needs water..
Whoever controls the water, controls the world!.
Steve Sandor ("Bonnie's Kids") is the title character in this routine "Mad Max" & "Road Warrior" inspired post-nuke sci-fi action flick.
Teaming up with another hunky hero, Bandit (William Ostrander, "Christine"), he decides to help out a lovely young woman, Dielha (Andrea Savio), with knowledge of a plentiful water source.
You see, in this world of the future, landscapes often consist of deserts, and water is hard to come by.
The villain who stands in everybody's way is a snarling despot named Kardis (wrestler / actor Mike Lane, "The Harder They Fall").This was the first of *seven* movies that Filipino exploitation icon Cirio H.
At first it seems as if we won't ever get to know the characters very well, but Santiago does save that stuff for the second half of the picture, when things slow down for a bit.
We even get a bit of romance.Santiago mostly concentrates on action and pace, and shows his audience a reasonably good time, with sex and violence aplenty.
The music, credited to Ed Gatchalian and Susan Justin, is occasionally hilariously bad, but mostly it's good, atmospheric stuff, with a heavy accent on percussion.
Costumes and vehicles are decent looking, but where the movie really works is the use of locations and the art direction.Sandor is not a bad actor, but he's just sort of taking up space here.
His character is generic and lacks personality.
Lane is an effective, amusing villain, and the supporting cast includes Monique St. Pierre ("Motel Hell") and Filipino exploitation mainstay Ken Metcalfe, who was also the casting director on this show.Not a terrible way to kill an hour and 24 minutes, but some people may prefer to just revisit the works of George Miller instead.Six out of 10..
There are periods in this film when no one speaks for like five minutes.
I can't get over how bad this film is, but I really enjoyed it nonetheless.I bought it .75 cents on EBay, and was surprised how entertaining it was.
This film has a certain comic book feel to it, although it borrows the same premise from Mad Max.Steve Sandor, the hero, is a big dude and handles the role well, but William Ostrander of Red Heat outshines him.
The villains were all laughable, and you knew Sandor would have little trouble defeating them The flashback scenes were the worst I have ever seen.A must have for the "It's so bad it's good crowd.".
So bad that is actually watchable.
I only write reviews of movies with low rating, which actually are not that bad.
Give them a chance!I love movies about apocalypse and post-apocalypse and that is why I wanted to watch this one, too.
It is a bad movie, but it is so bad that is actually watchable!
It is funny, though it was not suppose to be, and you can say that some action scenes are solid, too, as well as vehicles and costumes.
Acting is fine for some characters, but nothing special.
It is a Mad Max wannabe, and now while I am browsing IMDb I can see that director Cirio H.
Santiago made several more Mad Max wannabes!
He made Wheels Of Fire two years after Stryker, and I think that it is a best bad Mad Max wannabe of all, but you can read about it more in my other review.So, about Stryker, you may enjoy it if you like apocalypse and post- apocalypse.
Or if you want to watch something bad with friends so you can laugh - then, Stryker is the movie for you.
You need to look at it that way so that you can watch it to the end, like I did.
I can say I enjoyed watching it, it was so bad and unintentionally funny that I liked it.5/10.
Santiago, in my opinion, though I've only seen three of his films (where I can pretty well imagine what his others are like) hasn't made anything that's matched up to the exciting, sexy, entertaining, and downright cheesy, Naked Fist aka: Firecracker.
This was like a long dragging bore of a film, a pathetic reminder that these and other cheesy sci fi apocalyptic films existed in the eighties, with it's bad acting and script.
It's one of those films, you lose interest in, then switch back, after a few minutes have lapsed, or something you just watch blankly.
Situation: the good guys are helped by a girl who knows of the one last locations, where water is still to avail, only the bad guys are guarding it.
Oh did I mention, the film has bad acting.
Post apocalyptic crap..
Water may be power, but it's awfully boring.
In a post-apocalyptic future, people have banded together for survival.
The key to that survival is water.
A woman holds the key to the location of a vast water supply.
Water is power and the baddies want the power.
The woman is rescued (multiple times) by a man known as Stryker.
Stryker and his friends will battle the baddies for the secret of the water.Stryker is one of the countless number of films that looked to cash-in on the success of The Road Warrior.
There are lot of problems I had with the movie, but the biggest issue I had was Stryker is it's just plain boring.
The filmmakers attempted to take the search for gas in The Road Warrior and replace it with the search for water in Stryker.
The good guys save the girl, then they save Stryker, then they save the girl, and on and on it goes.
But the biggest bore of all comes in the form of lead actor Steve Sandor as Stryker.
Sandor's Stryker is so unappealing and so dull that it's hard to believe he's the title character.
Stryker is just a generic dude with a beard..
In a post-apocalyptic world, water is scarce and is the most sought-after commodity in the new desert-like earth.
When a woman appears who knows where to get a large supply of water, an evil, Sid Haig-like baddie kidnaps and tortures her for the information.
However, only one man can rescue the girl and help spread the agua to the masses – Stryker (Sandor), of course.
So because it's post-apocalypse, everyone puts on their wackiest getup and gets in their junkiest car, and the battle is on.
During the "Quest For Water", which isn't a sequel to Quest for Fire (1981), Stryker and his babes have to contend with many obstacles, including some Jawa-like pygmies.
Out of all the many post-apocalyptic movies that hit video store shelves in the 1980's, our personal favorites tend to be the Italian ones, such as 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and Escape From the Bronx (1983).
This doesn't leave a lot of room for snoozers like Stryker, which doesn't bring a lot to the table.
We've probably seen more Cirio movies than anyone, and this ranks towards the bottom as far as what we've seen of his to date.
(1973), here the character of Stryker has no real definition.
We really get no sense of Stryker as a man or as a hero.
On a scale for character development that we just invented, for the entire cast, not just Stryker, on a scale of 0-10, the CD scale for Stryker, the movie, is -5.
There's such a deficit, you end up owing the movie by the time the end credits roll.
So in this particular wasteland, Stryker is just a generic dude with a beard.Or perhaps more accurately, he's just another supposed action hero in the 80's named Stryker.
So you don't really rally behind Stryker, as much as you might do with, say, Steve Rally.
So with the movie as a whole, we've really seen it all before, so it's not very engaging.
And that's certainly true in this case, as Stryker the movie is especially Mad Max (1979)-y.
The movie is as dry as the climate it takes place in.So pray the "nuc-u-lar" (as the narrator in the intro part clearly pronounces it) bomb never hits, if for no other reason than it would mean we would be LIVING inside the world of Stryker.
One of the films in the Grindhouse Experience 2 is this Road Warrior wanna be rip off.
Actually its one of many post apocalyptic action films made in the wake of Road Warrior.
Its also a film I saw in the theaters when it came out.Okay, but unremarkable this is the story of a world where water is all but gone and one person holds the key.
There's some good action, passable performances and a tribe of midgets.
Dumb, but immensely fun 80's post-nuke sci-fi action junk.
The beautiful Delha (luscious Andrea Savio) holds the secret to the location of a spring of water in a bleak and violent post-apocalyptic world plagued by drought.
It's up to rugged loner Stryker (beefy Steve Sandor in sturdy stoic and two-fisted form) to protect Delha from a bunch of vicious thugs led by the ruthless Kardis (a nicely hateful portrayal by the chrome-domed Mike Lane).Sure, this flick hasn't much of a plot and the characters are wafer thin, but fortunately director Cirio H.
Santiago keeps the enjoyably mindless story moving along at a zippy pace, makes neat use of the desolate desert locations, and stages the lively and exciting action set pieces with considerable go-for-it gusto.
Moreover, lots of stuff blows up real good, Savio bares her fabulously full breasts once during a nasty attempted rape scene, and both a tribe of helpful chattering dwarfs and a band of formidable warrior women in leather hot pants are tossed in for good goofy measure.
The decent acting from the game cast keeps this movie humming: William Ostrander as the valiant Bandit, Julie Gray as the perky Laurenz, Monique St. Pierre as the fierce Cerce, and Ken Metcalfe as friendly old-timer Trun.
After the end of the world, water is in short supply.
One woman has the key to the last fresh water on Earth, which is guarded by Amazons.
She gets taken and tortured by an army of road warriors and only one man can save her.
Stryker!Cirio H.
We've watched so many of your movies, like Demon of Paradise, Wheels of Fire and The Big Bird Cage.
Luckily, Stryker (Steve Sandor, the voice of Darkwolf from Fire and Ice and Orion on the 1990's Superman cartoon) and Bandit (William Ostrander, Christine) are here to help.Delha has been trying to contact Trun, Stryker's estranged brother, to help defend her colony.
Stryker is captured and tortured, but luckily he gave some dwarves water.
So they come and rescue him just in time for the rest of Trun's soldiers to defeat Kardis and give everyone the water they need.There is also an entire army of Amazons wearing football shoulder pads, because that's what you do in the future.
Stryker goes more for the western look and he makes it work.