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Released by: Severin Films
Released on: November 26th, 2023.
Director: Joe D’Amato
Cast: Al Cliver, Peter Hooten, Sabrina Siani, Daniel Stephen, Donald O’Brien
Year: 1983
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2020 Texas Gladiators – Movie Review:
Directed by none other than the late, great Joe D’Amato, 2020 Texas Gladiators offers a startling glimpse into a future now four years behind us. Here, after nuclear war has lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it, we meet a group of five men, with matching necklaces no less, who roam the wasteland helping those in need as best they can. These men are Nisus (Al Cliver), Catch Dog (Daniel Stephen), Jab (Harrison Muller), Red Wolfe (Hal Yamanouchi) and Halakron (Peter Hooten) and when we first meet them, they're saving a group of women from a rival gang going on a rampage, killing and raping some nuns and murdering a priest. Catch Dog decides he's going to force himself on one of the surviving women, Maida (Sabrina Siani), but the other four put a stop to his nonsense and kick him out of the group.
A few years later, the gang has broken up and Catch Dog has started up his own group of bad dudes while Nisus and Maida have fallen in love, moved out to the boonies and had a child together. It seems like a lot of the people in the area they've moved to, Nisus included, spend a lot of their time working at a mysterious factory, and that factory is something that Catch Dog and his new crew of bad dudes would like to mess around with. Thankfully, Nisus and his new pals are well-armed and have built up some pretty good defenses around the perimeter, all of which comes in handy when dozens of evil bikers show up looking for a fight.
Catch Dog and his crew can't quite make it through the factory's defenses, so they split, which is great for the good guys until a van-load of guys in Nazi-esque outfits show up with shields and machine guns, somehow deflecting bullets with those shields and making their advance pretty effectively. Nisus gets shot, but isn't fatally wounded, and he and the others take off while they still can. With the Nazi-esque guys having cleared the opening, Catch Dog's crew comes back and chaos ensues. Lots of people are raped and killed!
It turns out that the leader of the guys in the van is The Black One (Donald O'Brien) and he tells what's left of the survivors that he's in charge now and that they're going to use their resources to rebuild civilization the way he wants it to be. Nisus, not having been captured, wakes up and... gets captured while poor Maida gets raped by the bad guys. Eventually Nisus escapes and takes it upon himself to save the day and take out the bad guys, but it doesn't go well. Meanwhile, Halakron and Jab coincidently meet up with Maida and a big fight breaks out and the guys wind up getting arrested and forced to work in a mine. Red Wolfe shows up and springs them and they all work together to team up with some Native American tribesmen to defeat Catch Dog and The Black One.
Written by none other than George Eastman and featuring Second Unit work from Michele Soavi, 2020 Texas Gladiators, which is presented on this release completely uncut, is about as insane as you’d expect one of D’Amato’s post apocalyptic pictures to be. Gleefully exploitative and loaded with sex, violence and violent sex, the movie makes great use of its low budget, clearing affording every available penny to PVC, leather, garish makeup and hairspray. Light on actual plot and substance but loaded with explosions, the movie goes at a pretty nice clip, demonstrating solid pacing and good cinematography.
As to the performances, they’re realistically about as good as the ridiculous script will allow for. Donald O’Brien and Daniel Stephen are pretty amusing to watch as the bad guys, scowling their way through the movie and barking orders at their various underlings. Al Cliver is Al Cliver, dependable but never the most enthusiastic of male leads to have worked in the boom years of Italian genre cinema. Still, he’s fine here. Hal Yamanouchi, Harrison Muller and Peter Hooten are actually more interesting and entertaining than Cliver is, they do fine work here. Sabrina Siani, who was kind of a regular in Italian post-nuke and barbarian movies around this time, looks fantastic throughout, which is really the main reason she’s here as her character spends most of the time getting abused and tossed around.
Overall, this doesn’t really bring anything new to the post apocalyptic Mad Max cash in films that Italy was cranking out in the eighties but it gives you all the exploitative stupidity you could hope for, and on that level? Two thumbs up!
2020 Texas Gladiators – UHD/Blu-ray Review:
Severin brings 2020 Texas Gladiators to UHD in an HEVC encoded 2160p transfer framed at 1.85.1 scanned in 4K from the original negative, looking all sparkly fresh showing great detail and really nice color reproduction. Skin tones appear lifelike and natural, black levels are nice and deep and there’s plenty of depth to the image. Texture looks good here as well, and there’s fine detail noticeable in pretty much every shot, particularly in the close ups. There’s very little print damage here outside of the odd white speck here and there, and the picture retains natural film grain, as you’d want it to. There aren’t any problems with any noise reduction or edge enhancement, nor are there any issues with compression artifacts.
Audio options are provided in English language and Italian language 24-bit DTS-HD Mono options, with removable subtitles for both tracks available in English only. Both tracks are clean and clear and properly balanced. The score sounds nice and punchy and the sound effects have the right amount of kick behind them.
The only extra on the UHD is a trailer for the feature but the included Blu-ray disc, which also includes that trailer, features Shoot Me: The Real Story Of The Italian Texas Gladiators, which is an archival piece made up of interviews with Director Joe D'Amato, Assistant Director Michele Soavi, Screenwriter Luigi Montefiori and Actor Al Cliver. This seventeen minute piece covers how Soavi came to work with D'Amato after working with Argento and how they collaborated on a few different projects together, Montefiori's relationship with D'Amato, how D'Amato came to work with his producers and where some of the money came from to make his films, details surrounding the creation of the screenplay, who actually directed this thing, budgetary issues, arguments that came up on set, recollections of shooting specific scenes and how Montefiori kept working with D'Amato simply because he liked him.
Also included here is Gladiator Geretta, an interview with Actress Geretta Geretta where, over the span of eleven minutes, she covers how she wound up in Italy and how she got into acting after doing extra work in the United States, how she got her agent in Italy, how she landed her role in the movie, how she wound up doing more sci-fi than horror, how her on-screen persona developed, working mostly with Soavi directing her scenes, getting along with her co-stars and how she feels about the movie decades later.
Severin has also included the film’s entire soundtrack, all twenty tracks, on an audio CD as well as an insert card that has the poster art for the movie on one side and the track listing on the reverse. We also get some nice reversible cover sleeve art and a slick, spot-varnish slipcover.
2020 Texas Gladiators - The Final Word:
2020 Texas Gladiators is a lot of good, schlocky fun. It might not reinvent the wheel but it offers up loads of entertaining action and crazy characters and, if nothing else, it makes for a really good time at the movie. The UHD/Blu-ray edition from Severin Films looks and sounds quite strong and the extras are interesting as well. Recommended!
Click on the images below, or right click and open in a new window, for full sized 2020 Texas Gladiators Blu-ray screen caps!
