Road Wars (2015) Reviews

• Road "Kill"

  mkealey2015-05-06

  Mark Atkins directed, editor, writer? What happened, did they withhold your paycheck? This isn't even a comical event of errors. Cars driving in the background at the mining city, new trucks parked in front of buildings, (i guess the owners wouldn't move them unless they were paid) and what happened to Dallas,(Spoiler?) the lead actor? Forgot him at the end? (maybe he was in the trunk!) This is not even worth a B movie category. Shame on yourself Mark Putting Mad Max and 28 days in the same review as this movie is a disgrace. Better off watching Doomsday with Rhona Mitra. The only person who closely represents a professional actor is Cole Parker, but even he should stick with stand up comedy. The beginning of the movie, at the gas station, actually started out OK, but then rapidly disintegrated. This is the type of movie you keep watching, thinking it might get better. If you want to watch a slightly better caliper theme, turn on Z-Nation on SYFY. At least that is only a 43 minute show and the acting is better. then again, almost any acting is better than this trash.

• I expected little and I got it

  zwolf2015-08-03

  Obvious attempt to cash in on Fury Road, and it's from Asylum, so you know to go in with low expectations. But, I'm a fiend for post-apocalypse road war stuff, so I had to give it a chance. And... it was okay. It benefited from low expectations. The cars are at least good enough to have maybe passed for extras in some of Fury Road's crowd scenes, so there's that. Unfortunately, they don't really get to do much. There's only one real chase scene and it's brief and doesn't entail much except driving around, with no real stunt work. The cover shows lots of vehicles and explosions. You get about five or six cars, and no explosions. As for the driving scenes, director's never going to be confused with George Miller. Plot-wise it's Mad Max cross-pollinated with I Am Legend. Society's broken down and the few survivors and scavenging for everything. Gasoline seems to be more plentiful than water, though, since petrol's the one thing they don't seem to fret about much. A lot of people have become victims of a "vampire virus" and, since they luckily have a biochemist on their team, they're trying to work on a cure. One guy who may be immune shows up; the filmmakers are so desperate to make him seem like Mad Max that he has an Aussie accent, and they even have him wearing a black leather jacket with one shoulderpad. Their big problem is they're running out of ammunition to fight off the nightly attacks from vampires, and to look for more they'd have to leave the only known source of water. Mostly they sit around talking about this, when you'd rather they were driving. It's not really that difficult to make one of these movies more satisfying -- just get decent-looking cars (which they did) and show them driving around a lot (which they didn't). So, it's not very good, but it's still better than most of the Italian Road Warrior ripoffs that swarmed the video stores back in the days of VHS, so, I cut it some slack. Production values aren't bad, the survivors looked suitably skangy, and the acting's not great but isn't painful, either. And the plot's not compelling, but there is one and it's not overly clumsy. It's an okay way to kill 90 minutes as long as you're not expecting too much. Better than most Asylum films, but that's damning with faint praise.

• A total waste of 90 minutes.

  johnhdavison2015-05-04

  I often wonder how these movies ever get made ,let alone why studios pay to have them made. This movie takes place in an abandoned California Gold mine town, there is a loose story, and I mean loose. In fact I would say someone has watched a Mad Max movie and a Zombie movie and come up with a really bad Script involving Weird people, Zombies, Guns, flamethrowers and Average /bad actors. The only good thing about this film was the ending, It was over and No more time was wasted watching Garbage. Also the music by Ilir Zenili was pitiful and performed by Peg leg something. Head banging garage band stuff. So in reflection, don't waste 90 minutes of your time watching the rubbish,wait for the new Mad Max Fury road.

• Not even entertainingly bad

  jmgindiana2015-07-08

  Slow, boring, stupid. I understand the filmmakers didn't have a huge budget to work with, but they could still come with something better than this. Yeah, it's a Mad Max ripoff, but there has been a bunch of those, and at least some of them are entertaining! This one has nothing going for it, with the exception maybe of the cars, which look nice (the "hero" car is horrible, though), but what's the point of a Mad Max clone where NONE of the cars get trashed? There are no car stunts, either! Guys, those cars were supposed to be ruins on themselves, don't tell me you couldn't destroy at least one or two for your "epic" movie! I guess the cars were rented from real-life fans who built their own "Fury Road"-like vehicles, since most of them have working tail-lights (a necessity when you are driving through the wasteland, I suppose) which suggest that the cars were street-legit, which wouldn't make sense for this kind of vehicles. I have seen other Asylum titles just for the fun of watching an unintentional bad movie. This one is just bad, not funny. Avoid like the plague. If you really want to see a Mad Max movie, grab the old ones or go see Fury Road.

• Sad Max...

  Rob_Taylor2015-09-19

  This is another Asylum knock-off and it shows. Which brings me to a little story... See, a little while ago a friend took me to task over my singling out Asylum for these sorts of films. He went so far as to point out that popular movies have always attracted plagiarism and opportunistic attempts to cash in on them. He even used Star Wars as a prime example, and rightly so. But then I pointed out that the difference between movies like for instance, Starcrash, which was made to cash in on Star Wars, is that they came out well after the blockbuster they attempted to ape. With Asylum, that is not true. Asylum movies usually arrive just before a big movie opens, promising the same thrills as the AAA movie, but delivering something entirely horrible instead. In this case, Road Wars was released on 5 May 2015. Fury Road on 7 May 2015. Can you see how their nefarious opportunism works now, friend? They turn out movies before, or at the same time as the movie they have mimicked. All of their marketing and promotional material is essentially paid for by the bigger movie. I suppose I should admire them for their gall, but all the process really does is just paint them with a very large brush. And it is a brush that has been used to clean toilets with. Anyway, enough ranting. Is Road Wars any good at all as a movie, despite being the product of Asylum? Well, no, of course it isn't. The budget is non-existent for things like car stunts, though the cars are reasonably well done in and of themselves. There are no crashes, no smashes, and no hits. In fact, most of the time you get little more than scenes of aimless driving. Scenes of aimless talking and... well... that's about it, really. Even if none of the Mad Max movies had existed this would still be a sub-par, boring movie that even the 80's VHS era would have been embarrassed to field. The acting is very weak here indeed and the story is simplistic and almost pointless. Do yourselves a favour and give it a miss. SUMMARY: Rip-off Asylum at work again! No fun, no real action, cars that don't get damaged. Acting at a high-school drama level. Not worth the effort.