Endgame (not the Samuel Beckett one)

When I was young and still living in Portslade-by-Sea my dad worked in London and used to bring back the Evening Standard and I used to turn straight to the film listings at the back. One film caught my eye as it always seemed to be playing: "Endgame".

This never takes place in the film

It was the poster: a giant muscular man wearing a spiny knuckle-duster gives a fascist salute. He also wears an American football helmet and shoulder pads. Seen from beneath he has one foot raised, his boot pressing down on to a net full of pathetic looking captives. Behind him a super-charged beach buggy roars into the air and behind that is a jagged shard of sky-scraper, so you know all this is all properly post-apocalyptic.

I was reading 2000AD every week. This seemed like 2000AD had come magically to life. I was aching to see it but London might as well have been the moon and besides it was an 18 so I knew it was never going to happen. I'd been burnt on Jackie Chan's The Big Brawl a couple of years earlier.

I forgot about "Endgame". Until yesterday when I noticed that it was on Amazon Prime. To be honest it's a film I should have seen when I was eleven.

Its very 2000AD. It starts as The Mean Arena, moves into The Cursed Earth and there's even a smattering of the Judge Child by the ending. Of course this is just because 2000AD were ripping off the same films as director Joe D'Amato, so Mad Max, Death Race 2000 and Damnation Alley then.

Al Cliver as Ron Shannon (cool name, bro) is undefeated in the Endgame - basically The Running Man - which is sponsored by a dietary supplement called "Life Plus" so you get a lot of flaccid consumer satire. It starts with the best scene in the film as Shannon's Endgame opponents stride menacingly out tiny caravans and lurch menacingly towards the camera like holiday makers whose chemical toilet wont flush. None of them are dressed anything like the man on the poster. During Shannon's perfunctory dispatching of his opponents he encounters Laura Gemser, uncharacteristically fully clothed, who is a psychic mutant. She wants Shannon to help her and a load of other psychic mutants to get to...somewhere else where its apparently alright to be a mutant. Shannon is to get a box of gold for his trouble, so he agrees and sets about putting together a team: a one eyed man who runs a gym, a ninja called, er, Ninja, a big fat disagreeable man and Karnak (cool name, bro) his last opponent in the Endgame arena and whose life Shannon spared. They hate each other but he's on the team regardless.

They travel about, meet some fish-men and blind monks and Shannon teaches a young mutant how to murder people for gain. Ninja, fat bloke and eye-patch all die. At the end Karnak reveals his true colours and he and Shannon go at each other, and freeze-frame just before they punch, like Rocky III which came out the same year.

Was it worth waiting thirty five years to see?

No, not really. It didn't really live up to the poster. Al Cliver galumphs around like his joints need oiling and tackles emotional scenes like an Easter Island moai. You can see the lichen growing over face and neck. Laura Gemser, or Moira Chen as she's is styled here, is telepathic so almost every shot of her shows her standing there, saying nothing, while dressed as a medieval nun. There are no memorable baddies and there are no memorable set pieces - excepting the bit where Karnak twists Fatty's head off while he's in some stocks and his hands stay in the same place. Its badly dubbed, the script isn't even good-bad and the print I saw looked like it had been buried in the garden for a few years. Where it should have stayed, helping the roses grow.

I should have seen it when I was eleven. Its hard to believe that any grown up ever spent money going to see this. But then they made more than one Deathstalker film, so who knows?

Oh, and its set in 2025. So "SOMETHING SOMETHING BREXIT SOMETHING"