America 3000 (1986)

Follow the president! 

Director

David Engelbach

Cast

Chuck Wagner - Korvis

Laurene Landon - Vena

William Wallace - Gruss

Sue Giosa - Morha

Steve Malovic - Aargh the Awful

I first laid eyes on the "glorious and most epic" video cover for the 1986 movie America 3000 on Cinemassacre's Rental Review of "Crazy VHS Cover Art." Actually, I never heard of it until then. 

Just looking at the poster for America 3000 calls to mind many often deservedly overlooked shelf-warming VHS tapes from the old days of video rental stores. All those obscure, low-budget, z-grade films like Ricky, My Pet Monster, Rad, Up the Academy, and those Dorf movies with Tim Conway made me wonder "when did this come out?" and "was this ever in theaters?"

Incidentally, I've come up with a list of movies to watch and review based solely on the video covers I remember seeing at California Video at the Lincoln Square Shopping Center - the video rental store in my old Bay Area neighborhood. These are movies I wasn't able to rent because I was either too young or just not interested. The cover images still somehow remain in my memory. 

The titles I came up with include Eating Raoul, One Crazy Summer, Can't Buy Me Love, House [aka Ding Dong Your Dead], April Fool's Day, The Company of Wolves, Teen Wolf 2, Opportunity Knocks, D.A.R.Y.L., The Dirt Bike Kid, and Explorers among others. 

America 3000 takes place in Colorado, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland once called the United States. It's 900 years after a nuclear war, referred to as "The Great Nuke." Humanity, or what's left of it, lives in stone age conditions among a few tidbits of the past such as stereo systems, fireworks, verbiage, and a children's alphabet book. And men and women are separated into camps based on their gender. 

The women, referred to as "fraus" (I think that's spelled correctly) are determined, organized, skilled, and have a hierarchy within their camps. They remind themselves through recitations that the men, called "plugots," are their enemies who have brought darkness over the realm. They keep some men enslaved, and divide their male slaves, "seeders," into functional groups - laborers, servants, and those whose function is to father children. 

Some men are used for pleasure, and they're referred to as "toys."

There are various clans made up of fraus who seem relatively friendly with other clans. 

Meanwhile, the men have their own camp called "Camp Reagan" which they continuously build upon. Some men live outside the camps. These are more brutish and blindly follow their appetites like animals, and are no match against the women's camp. The fraus call them "machos." 

Aargh the Awful (Steve Malovic)

Other men are determined to seek out knowledge, and defend themselves against the women. They also develop plans to free those who have been enslaved. 

In the movie's central women's camp, their leader dies and a new leader is chosen. One of the fraus grows jealous of the newly appointed leader and...that jealousy doesn't really go anywhere. 

While that's going on, two men called Korvis and Gruss search the outer areas of their camp for items. By the way, the fraus have a rule never to go near the plugot's camp.
Anyways, Korvis and Gruss find a child's alphabet book and Korvis realizes when reading it that he's actually called a man, and not a "plugot." This creates a spark of self-realization inside him that'll drive Korvis to one-up the fraus. 

Later, following an attack on the women's camp to free the slaves, Korvis is chased and shot by one of the women with a makeshift pistol that shoots small spears. He falls several feet through a cave and inadvertently discovers an old bunker that belonged to the President of the United States. Inside, he finds military weapons, including laser guns, the likes of which he's never seen before. It's a small look into life before "the great nuke." 

With his new discoveries, Korvis makes a plan to free all enslaved men, scare the women's camp, and eventually teach men and women how to love each other. He uses the items he finds in the bunker to pull this off. 

The characters use a lot of slang in the movie, which they give some explanation to through narration. The narration is spoken in a way that doesn't match the dialogue of the characters. While their dialogue is post-apocalyptic, the narration is sounds like they found a random off the street who got excited to be a part of something outside his normal life. The slang, too, was confusing but I caught on to it by the end. 

The term "hot" refers to intense situations. And "cold" means dead. "Woggos" means something is crazy. And "plastic" means something is incredible and awesome. The characters go out of their way to say these words too often.

There are "old" terms used among their slang, which is a little creative, but that's not saying much. Words like "president" and "solemn swear" and a ton of Cold War references are used.  

The storyline is imaginative and a bit intrepid in a way. It seems like pointing out the differences in men and women is bound to irritate someone, but whatever.
Somewhere in the story line is commentary about the differences of the sexes, the role men and women play in society, ending on a moral high note not too far from the line "can't we all just get along." America 3000 is very much a period film, while trying to be hip (because 80s) and sexy enough to try gaining the audience's attention. 

There's a lot of battles, and fighting, and explosions, and robust women fighting muscular sweaty men, and more fighting. 

Susan Giosa as Mohra.

There's also a monstrous malformed creature called "Aargh the Awful" who's some kind of byproduct of the nuclear war fallout. 

I wish I saw more of him. He was so out of place and odd, and really served no purpose. Still, he was entertaining in that typical 80s mascot buddy - ugly on the outside but all heart on the inside like Chunk from The Goonies. Only, Aargh serves far less purpose in the actual story. 

While this is Director David Engelbach's only movie, he was a writer for other movies such as Over the Top and Death Wish II. He also wrote for the show MacGyver. 

It seems this movie tried to be ambitious, but fell very short on seriousness and acting. Nothing impressed me except for the effort to tell an intriguing and extremely imaginative interpretation of what America would look like after a Nuclear war. 

For fans of obscure flicks, America 3000 could very easily appease. Otherwise, it's just another victim left in the heap of forgotten 80s shlock that will likely die with its generation of 80s movie aficionados.