Back on topic, America 3000 has no special place in my heart as far as no-budget post-nuke dystopia flicks go. In fact, before a few months ago I’d never even heard of its existence. It was a tiny grain of crud in the cat litter box of Mad Max knock-off cheapees, indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of equally non-descript odor eliminating pebbles of carbon. Then, someone at the Badmovies.org Forum posted a “What was the name of that movie…” thread about it, in which it was revealed that A3K is out-of-print. With an almost Pavlovian reaction, I hunted down a copy and now here we are. I’m not sure it was worth the effort (or the money, speaking of regrets…), but in either case ladies and gentlemen, please hold your applause until all of the stink-ape mansquatches have completed their showings and their trainers have returned to their places on the floor. Thank you.

As any “epilogue to the end of the world” must start, mankind has nuked himself right out of the food chain. Thanks to “The Great Nuke”, the world as we know it has once again been raped by our enemy the atom and left a barren, twisted wreck of a planet. Ah what the Reagan area could have been… Starting over from scratch (for the most part), the human race has been trying to rebuild itself for nine centuries, and the most progress they’ve managed is that the women are in charge, the word “crazy” has been replaced with the word “woggos”, and generic ‘80s synth rock is the soundtrack of the new world. The Amazonian “Frauls” (whose cold demeanors reflect the German roots of their name) hold absolute sway over the mythical land of Colorado, where the men folk are little more than dirty grunting caveman types referred to as “Plugots”. I don’t know if their names have any significant meaning, but “Plugots” sounds like one of the infinite Italian references to testicles. You know, like, “Ayyyyyyy! Shut yur face about my sistah ‘fore I gotta bust ya in da plugots!” Oh yeah, and before you ask, yes, this is a Golan-Globus production, so gird your loins... keep girding... okay, that should be good.

The Plugs are rounded up regularly by the Frauls and taken back to their camps to be separated into social groups for task purposes. The “Machos” do all the heavy lifting (possibly while grunting through clenched sphincters and wearing rainbow tassled outfits… yes, it really is a “big time jubilee”…), the “Toys” get to live the common male nightmare of becoming subservient eunuchs with no tongues, and the “Seeders”, well, even 900 years into the future mankind still isn’t capable of making babies without putting Tap ‘A’ into Slot ‘B’… huh huh, your mom’s a slot…

Gruss (played later in adult form by William Wallace, not to be confused with that Braveheart dude) is a Plugot captured in the latest Fraul raiding party and, incidentally, our narrator who dropped the previous paragraph’s education on us. Because of his rebellious spirit (and presumably a shlong that could choke a camel) one of Gruss's tribe, Korvis (whose adult form is later played by former Automan himself, Chuck Wagner), is recruited by Frauls' Tiara (their leader) Raya to serve as her daughter Vena (who later grows up to be played by Miss Laurene “Hundra” Landon!)‘s personal Seeder. So, in the future, mothers will be in the perfect position of power and they'll never have to cringe again at the dirty like punk dregs little Suzie chooses to bring home from the sock hop! And dad, well, dad will be sobbing in the corner of the communal Plugot sleeping barn, mourning the loss of his balls same as he's been doing for the 20 years since Suzie was born.

Slipping their captors before they can be branded (and women say men are barbaric and inhumane), Gru and Kor escape into the harsh bombed out wastelands beyond the Fraul's kingdom... which isn't to be confused with what we here in the past would call “an abandoned gravel pit strewn with random junkyard findings”. With the help of a suitcase filled with evening wear and a child's “ABC” book, the boys grow up to be men and form a resistance group of dirty cavemen in tattered loincloths to take back their rightful place as oppressors of people sans penises. Wow, so somehow teaching yourself to read the alphabet and pronounce “horse” makes you qualified to lead your own legion of men. Guess I've been wrong all this time and George Bush really is qualified to be president.

I know this review already looks like it's gonna be a long one, and I should probably slow myself down and not get too deep into the nitpicking, but what the fuck? If you were an ignorant primitive guy with absolutely no education and someone threw a book in front of you, do you really think you'd be able to read it? If you'd never even seen what a letter 'a' looked like before, do you really think you'd recognize it or the sounds it makes within words if it was suddenly thrown into your laps?! If somebody threw a Chinese picture book into your lap, does anyone honestly believe that they'd be able to decipher what the fucking kanji were or how to pronounce them!? Fuck. It's only 8 minutes into the movie that this happens and already I want to tie it down and force it to watch me run it's babies through a wood chipper! And people wonder why it takes me so long to sit through a simple movie sometimes? Because sometimes the simpler a movie is, the most difficult it is to understand...

Back at the PMS (Pissed at Men Society), Raya's killed by a raiding party of savage Plugots and passes the mantle of Tiara on to Vena, despite Vena's drama about not wanting to take charge. Despite trying to pass it off to her butch sister Lakella though, Vena's stuck in the seat of power. As is the catty back-stabbing nature of women (I learned that from an IBM employee training video, so don't blame me!), the leader of another Fraul tribe has plans to set Vena and Lakella against each other using the most powerful weapons in the double-x chromosomal arsenal: vicious rumors and unfounded gossip! Oh the scandal.

While escaping some angry Frauls, Korvis falls into the long abandoned personal fallout shelter of the former president of the former United States of America. Not only does it still somehow draw electricity from some place 900 YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF TECHNOLOGY, but Kor also finds gold lamaé radiation suits and a weapons cache of LASER RIFLES... After having a conversation with a pre-recorded message (played on a TV, which is just one of a hundred different items all running presumably on MAGIC), Korvis thinks that he's now the President and it's his duty to dress up like an extra in an Ed Wood movie and unite the tribes of man. Shit, if I listened every time some guy on a TV set told me what to do, GI Joe would've made me miss out on years of glorious paint drinking! Oh, and those Thompson's Water Seal chasers? Mmmmmm.

Korvis also finds a boom box with 900 year-old WORKING batteries. I can't get a pair of AA's to run my digital camera for more than 10 shots and the ones in his ghetto blaster are still running strong after NINE CENTURIES?! ARGH! From here it all boils down as you'd expect it to. Korvis uses his new status as President to have some *ahem* “peace talks” with Vena back at K's presidential fallout suite... in an age where deodorant and douche (but oddly enough not makeup or hairspray) have long since disappeared... no thank you. They learn that man and woman can live in peace, while outside their tribes go to war on each other. Both groups wind up with explosives (guys with hand grenades, girls with old fashioned gun powder bombs) and both sides gets dusted up pretty bad, but in the end none of that matters because in the history of mankind, the urge for conflict takes a backseat to the urge to get laid every time.

America 3000 is stupid. It's bad. It's badly stupid. It's stupidly bad. How much you like it or hate it will depend on your tolerance/acceptance of this kind of absurdity. I like cheese. If I could eat canned cheddar off of Tiffany Shepis's ass, I'd be willing to risk the dysentery for that opportunity. Unfortunately, pressurized colloidal ass cheese and America 3000 are not the same, as I find the latter to be indigestible. It dances the fine line between goofy fun and obnoxious craptitude only to lose its footing and fall hard on the obnoxious side. Oddly enough, there are actually a couple of shots where I was wondering what director Dave Engelbach might've done with a worthy budget... but that's immediately squashed when I remember that he also wrote this cinematic bladder infection... a year before going on to write Over the Top... I could say that the acting was awful, but I wonder how much of that blame can do toward the dialog. Some of the characters talk in broken Tarzan English, while others talk in '80s casual speak, dropping the 'g's from the end of words ending in 'ing' and so on. Meanwhile, for the extent of his narration, Gruss sounds like the wacky sidekick in a John Cusack movie. As usual, the incessant barrage of “future slang” grates on the nerves and doesn't stop grating till you hit the 'Eject' button. It's like they're speaking jive or some made-up language twins teach each other! Neggy more! Neggy more!

Though I never made mention of him in the review, I'd like to take a moment to shed the spotlight on Argh the Awful. Argh is a missing link mansquatch creature that the Frauls first use as a “final test” for their budding warrior women. If you can survive ten minutes in a cage with a bald bigfoot, you can survive anything. The Plugs free him when they stage a raid on the Fraul's camp to liberate their wanged brethren, after which he runs around with a hand-cranked siren like a cross between Hulk Hogan and an organ grinder's monkey, but without the flashy yellow tear-away muscle shirts or little green bellhop suit. For the rest of the movie, Argh just kinda hangs around the man camp while they comment on his robust skunk ape musk until the big brawl-for-all where he slaps on a trench helmet and makes it his mission to protect the ghetto blaster at all costs... He succeeds too, showing up with it at the last minute before the credits for the big “freeze frame jump” finishing shot. Sadly, Argh was the only real potential available to the movie (aside from all the nekkid boobage we were denied), and as is the case with most cinematic “potentials”, Argh was largely wasted. With Canon Films sharing a concrete tomb alongside a few million copies of E.T.'s Atari2600 game out in a secret New Mexico landfill somewhere, I'm afraid we'll never get to see Argh in his own spin-off movie. Rest in peace Argh. May your collection of Billy Squire cassette tapes and your boom box with the magic Highlander batteries carry you peacefully into that dark night. Enjoy your Labor Day ladies and germs!