In 2012 A.D., a plague-ravaged New York City carries the stench of The Omega Man all over it — but in a matte-painting/studio-backlot way — in The Ultimate Warrior. Newsflash: The future is dull and boring, so file this speculative-fiction snoozer under “sigh-fi.”
While cannibalistic street people lurk about, the dozens of survivors form a makeshift community within a city block junk-walled for reinforcement. Under the kindly watch of Baron (Max von Sydow, Flash Gordon), their ersatz mayor, the grime-faced men and women sustain themselves on vegetables grown on a rooftop garden and rations of tinned meat and powdered milk.
The film’s title refers to Carson (Yul Brynner, The Magnificent Seven), a bare-chested and high-waisted fighter invited by Baron to join their quaint neighborhood. Lured not by the offer of extra portions at mealtime, but by the promise of “cee-gars” to get his smoke on, Carson agrees. That’s good, because every post-apocalyptic compound needs an ass-kicker in its employ, particularly with the ever-present threat posed by the ginger-haired giant Carrot (William Smith, 1982’s Conan the Barbarian). Blood is shed, in the color and consistency of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup.
Eventually, Baron sends Carson on an Important Mission, but don’t get your hopes up. That portion — seemingly an afterthought — is even less interesting than everything before it. Then pushing age 55, Brynner is hardly the end-all-be-all tuffie promised — hell, he’s a fraction of the imposing figure he cut just two years earlier as Westworld‘s robo-cowboy — and that alone renders the very premise obsolete. The same could be said of its writer/director, Robert Clouse, continuing his long, slow slide from the (accidental?) heights of the 1973’s kung-fu classic Enter the Dragon to the dregs of DTV action. —Rod Lott