Awesomely Bonkers 1980s Italian Movie Imagines 'The Fall Of New York' In 2019

May 9, 2019, 10:34 a.m.

'That thing back there was a cyborg, half-man half-robot. I knew one once. I didn't know what he was until I had made love with him.'

THIS IS THE TITLE OF THE MOVIE

New York City in 2019 is pretty much a dystopian surveillance state that's nothing but a huge pile of waste and rubble with tons of weird synth music everywhere. Or at least, that's exactly how a little-known Italian b-movie from the 1980s imagined NYC in the year 2019. If you would love to watch a movie that is a mix of Children of Men, Escape From New York, Mad Max and Beneath the Planet of the Apes—but so much shittier—then 2019, After The Fall Of New York is a movie you need to watch tonight.

The film, which was made in 1983, imagines NYC after a nuclear holocaust laid waste to America. Here's the logline for the film: "After a nuclear war, society breaks down into two groups, the evil Euraks and the rebel Federation. A mercenary named Parsifal is hired by the Federation to infiltrate New York City, which is controlled by the Euraks, to rescue the only fertile woman left on Earth." That's right, the MacGuffin of this film is a beautiful sleeping woman who is a literal prop, which maybe makes it the ultimate Hitchcock homage.

That synopsis is pretty good, but you really need to read the entire opening voiceover to truly appreciate what a bad state NYC is in:

Since the nuclear holocaust, 20 years have passed. the leader of the Eurak monarchy, the powerful Euro-Afro-Asian unity who pressed the fatal button, claims to have won the conflict. But planet Earth has been reduced to a garbage-strewn radioactive desert, inhabited by humans devoid of all hope for a future. Radiation could not have been worse. A few deformed creatures developed in the immediate post-war period, then nothing. For nearly 15 years now, not one human child has been born. New York City, a huge pile of waste and rubble, is under the control of a Eurak military force. With the help of mercenary hunters, the Euraks are with deadly-efficiency steadily exterminating the locals, and using the healthy ones for every conceivable kind of genetic experiment in a desperate attempt to find the key to survival, to the continuance of the human race.

In case any of this seems too subtle, the bad guys here have Pablo Picasso's painting "Guernica" hanging on their wall.

Despite most of the humans in this film having some sort of facial deformity, the horsies are a-ok! There are flamethrowers, people dressed like extras from The Warriors, a brief rip-off of Mad Max in the Nevada desert, a robot clown (!!), and tons of rats roaming around Manhattan. The soundtrack, which is a mix of synth music and horns, is killer.

COOL HORN SOLO

The Euraks, who are the bad guys, would make for a really cool Halloween costume.

FOR HALLOWEEN THIS YEAR, I AM DRESSING UP AS "OBSCURITY"

Fun fact: the only tunnel that survived the nuclear holocaust was the Lincoln Tunnel.

BERNIE, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE ON STAGE

This is a real line that a female character says in this movie: "That thing back there was a cyborg, half-man half-robot. I knew one once. I didn't know what he was until I had made love with him."