"Anno 2020 - I gladiatori del futuro" (1983), Italy, Action/Science Fiction

Movie Summary:

Blood and gore abound as good takes on evil in this futuristic sci-fi actioner that is basically a knock-off of the Mad Max series with a low-budget Italian twist. The year is 2020 and the setting is post-nuclear holocaust Texas. It's a dusty, nasty world now as can be seen in the opening scenes when a band of drunken outlaws viciously rape and murder innocent nuns at a mission. They then crucify the priest. Their debauched reveling is interrupted by roving rangers who engage the villains in a blood-soaked, bone crunching fight. The rangers manage to save a terrified young woman from the melee, and the heroic leader and she fall in love and head for the peaceful land she describes to him. Years pass. The hero and the girl are married and she is pregnant. He is working at a refinery. Trouble erupts when a meglomaniacal Neo-Nazi dictator and his cruel minions attack the heavily fortified refinery and begin trying to convert the hapless workers to his insane idea of the New Order. Of course, the hero, after witnessing the rape of his wife, decides to get revenge. Unfortunately, the dictator blows the hero away with a machine gun. More time passes and the workers have become slaves to their new leader, but fortunately at this point, the story is far from over and eventually after considerably more blood is graphically spilled, the forces of good inevitably triumph.