Let’s Talk About Pulp Cinema

"I don't care about the girl, I don't care about politics, I don't care about anything! I believe in nothing. I'm Hammer - The Exterminator!"

There’s a little known movie that I love beyond words and I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen it. Let’s take a look at the promo poster, so as you’re at least in the ballpark of what I’m talking about:

A Poster Speaks A Thousand Words

This was the very poster that decorated the outside of The Hippodrome (now sadly replaced with a Ryan Reynolds theme park or something). It’s Autumn 1982 and my buddy John and me, aren’t old enough to get in by quite some margin but one thing was for sure… it very much needed to happen. As luck would have it, things were pretty slack back then and if you chose to sit in the balcony, you had to go in through the side door - which meant you didn't have to go past the guy that owned the place, but instead, one of his henchmen. A fiver slipped into his hand was all it took to secure a seat among the Gods.

I mean, come on… you only have to look at the poster to know our folks wouldn’t approve. It even has that sexy little X certificate to prove it.

(Many films were seen this way including Private Lessons–you can guess what that’s about, The Devil In Miss Jones Part 3–which you can also take a good stab at, Porky’s-ditto and most importantly, The Evil Dead. I’d like to shake that man by the hand and buy him a drink).

I don’t think Pulp Cinema is actually a term anybody but me uses–people like to call them B movies–but when I do everybody knows what I’m talking about. You’re not there to lap up all that a Hollywood blockbuster has to offer (even though it costs you the same to get in, and I guess that same goes for book prices), you’re there to waste an hour and a half of your life on cheap thrills. Cheap they may be, but they are also guaranteed.

Bronx Warriors ticks everything box going:

Awful soundtrack created by a stolen keyboard that seemed to have warped in the sun. Check.

Muscular lead character that, because you’re 14, you actually want to be when you grow up. Check.

Badass weapons that look like they were made in a shed, because they were. Check.

Hand me the freaking popcorn Sammy Boy!

Let’s have a recap on the plot: It’s original title is I Guerrieri del Bronx, and as you can probably tell, it’s Italian made and directed by Enzo G. Castellari who is more famous for absolutely nothing at all-though he did try to fool you once by making a spaghetti western called One Dollar Too Many. It’s a good ruse and one I may have used before myself. It’s not your fault if people are too dumb to know. Bronx Warriors is similar in that it’s more or less (mainly more) an Italian remake of Escape From New York, which in itself was not the most blockbuster of movies to begin with. Castellari wasn’t a total loser though - he also once made a film called Inglorious Bastards (1977) which Tarantino then ‘used’ to influence his own version–choosing to cast Castellari himself as a German officer in it.

Castellari is currently 86–and wouldn’t that make a great podcast episode.

Bronx Law: Bats, Bikes, and Bandanas

Anyway, the plot: Ann is an heiress to an arms manufacturer. She runs away and finds herself in No Man’s Land (ie: The Bronx) where the only law is the law dictated by The Riders. There’s a gang called the Zombies and a gang called The Tigers and one called The Sharks (and another gang whose name escapes me), who may have borrowed a fair bit of influence from scenes in The Warriors movie, but mostly the two main characters are Hammer–a psycho mercenary sent to bring her home and Trash–he’s the big guy in the poster that we all wanted to be.

Commence fighting! Baseball bats, flamethrowers, horses, motorbikes, baseball bats, knuckledusters–whatever you can lay your hands on–and that’s pretty much it… or is it?

The producer of the movie, Fabrizio De Angelis (who also produced some of Lucio Fulci’s horror movies) had a vision, and part of that vision was a similar movie called The New Barbarians and a Bronx Warriors sequel called Escape From The Bronx.

Trash: The Hero We Got

But let me move on to my main man, Trash. He was played by Mark Gregory who was just 18 when he made this. Apparently he was a waiter (natch) and then got himself discovered in a gym, where he must have been working out pretty hard to look like he does by that age. All of the interesting facts about him are from much later. See, he made a movie called Afghanistan – The Last War Bus, couldn’t get any work at all after that (I’ve never heard of it), whereupon, he simply disappeared. A little research reveals that became a painter but then… in 2004, he became the victim of some scam and lost everything. On January 31, 2013, he took an overdose and ended his life. Uber fans can pay homage (and they do) at his grave which is in the cemetery in the Rome borough of Castel Madama.

Fans were left in the wilderness for decades over what happened to him, but the internet does what it always does and found a way. Here’s a video called The Hunt For Trash Is Over. Sad:

Life Doesn’t Always Pan Out…

Other great scraps of pop-culture irrelevance say that Castellari was so disappointed with how much muscle Gregory had lost when it came to shoot Escape From The Bronx, that he made him keep his jacket on for the whole movie. He must have lost it fast because Castellari has also stated all three movies were written, prepared and filmed in six months.

I also found out that Italian made films demand that 50% of any Italian movies must be made in Italy, so while they did shoot the movies in the actual Bronx, all of the interior shots had to be done in Rome to tick a tax box.

Isn’t it weird how a guy in a low budget movie can mean something to more people than you might think? I must have seen hundreds of similar movies and I’ve never known what anybody was called in them, let alone wondered what happened to them.

Movie critics are never kind to movies like this. They see no value in them whatsoever and to like even a few minutes of such a thing would destroy everything they ever worked for–which pretty much amounts to a pay cheque from a publisher with a reputation to lose somewhere along the line–but all it’s really led to is the death of pulp-movies. Cannon fodder. When was the last time you went to a cinema to see a pulp movie? Certainly not this century I would bet, but not so long ago, this was the sort of thing that populated the weeks in between big films… and those weeks could go on forever because there wasn’t a blockbuster along every five seconds like there is now and I miss it.

I really do. In a world that’s constantly falling apart, I still like to be exposed to movies where one man with a bandana can stop a war. Not because it’s realistic—but because it reminds us we still want to believe we can fight back.

EXTRAS!

Here’s The Bronx Warriors original trailer:

And here’s the trailer for Escape From The Bronx:

And if you’re feeling brave, you can watch both Bronx Warriors movies in full right here (with a little bit of internet magic):

And if you still haven’t had enough, here’s the trailer for New Barbarians… and the full movie: