One of the things I love most about Italian exploitation cinema is how little they try to disguise the fact that they’re ripping something off.  George Romero’s seminal zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead was released in Italy under the title, Zombi. A totally unrelated film, directed by Lucio Fulci, was called Zombi 2 to capitalize on the former’s success, despite the fact that the only thing that’s the same in the two films is the presence of zombies. It’s this kind of shamelessness that immediately drew me to Enzo G. Castellari’s 1982 film, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, a film that might get the gold medal for shoddy knockoffs. Clearly, Castellari and company had seen Walter Hill’s The Warriors in 1979 and John Carpenter’s Escape From New York in 1981 and said, “Hey, these two movies are pretty cool; let’s combine them, but instead of being good and exciting, let’s make our movie boring and with horrible dialogue. That’s the ticket!” And, by the Italian version of Jove, that’s precisely what they did.

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