For all its heavyweight art cinema, Russia is woefully behind the West when it comes to exploitation movies. Sure, glasnost brought a tsunami of porn from the former Eastern bloc, but any mammal with thumbs and binocular vision can aim a black-market videocam. No, true Russian drive in films are just reaching the toddler-with-matches stage with The Wild East.
Imagine a self-conscious combination of The Magnificent Seven, The Road Warrior, and Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns all crammed into one film, and then have it directed with the recklessness - and cheapness - of a Roger Corman biker flick from the late '60s. Oh, and did I mention midgets? Throw in a lot of midgets, too. And a second biker gang, all in SS drag. And a wandering Chinese martial arts expert. In The Wild East, this weirdly compelling mishmash of other countries' cultural detritus is given a thorough, if crude, going-over, reaching a surprisingly well-constructed and thematically clever climax.
The setup is standard-issue, but with a Russian twist. In a shabby, postapocalyptic future, roving bikers persecute local farmers (the midgets), who sell their grain to hire mercenaries to save their clod stomping asses. One interesting aspect of The Wild East is that "the war" that has brought civilization to its knees is never identified. Was it a catastrophic Russian civil war? World War III? Remnants of tanks, jeeps, and soldiers litter the landscape. Is the setting an eastern republic, cut off from Moscow, going through its own Wild West period? Or maybe it's Chechnya, projected into some low-rent Omega Man-like futuristic nightmare. It's probably all these things.
Jokes about the former Soviet Union abound. The obligatory blond babe sarcastically sings a Young Pioneers' song, and killers on both sides of the conflict wear their GI experience proudly. But social commentary and satire take a back seat to blowing stuff up and driving really fast.
If you've been wondering where all those great drive-ins in New Jersey, Texas, and Southern California have gone, look east, comrade. The folks in Kazakhstan are steaming up the car windows.
##### The Wild East: US$25. Video Search of Miami: +1 (305) 279 9773, email vsom@aol.com.
STREET CRED
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Drive-In, Moscow Style
