See also:

Dance With A Vampire
Vice Squad

Directed by Paul Kyriazi
Written by Salli McQuaid, Denny Grayson, Joe Meyer, Paul Kyriazi
Starring Ron Marchini, Adam West, Chuck Katzakian
R • 1989 • 89 minutes

After an environmental holocaust desolates the world and turns human beings into gangs of rampaging marauders, a lone cop (Ron Marchini) is forced to fight his way back to civilization with three women relying on his fighting skills for their protection. This futuristic sci-fi action adventure combines the speculative fantasy of A Clockwork Orange with the suspenseful action of The Terminator.

No, it doesn’t. Not at all. It is a little reminiscent of Mad Max, however. The environmental holocaust mentioned above is apparently related to the many holes in the ozone, which allow in solar flares, that radiate people, causing them to go alittle nuts, alotta stupid, or actually causing malignant tumors to form (usually expressed as haphazard swatches of grease-paint on the face/arms).

Most people are now either scavengers, gang-members, or dead. And then there’s John Travis (Ron Marchini) and his team of cop-buddies, working for Central Command. Their job, as they put it more than a few times, is “Stomping out roaches”, which happens to be just about everybody except the bodacious, near-naked slave-girls they attempt to rescue at the start. Walking right into the midst of a big slave auction held by a gang under the leadership of a leather daddy known as “Wraith” (or at times “Mr. Wraith”), Travis and his ass-kickin’ cohorts find themselves in one helluva shoot-`em-up. I swear, at least 50 people die in this opening scene alone, including all three of Travis’s team. At one point, a hapless bystander being used as a human shield by Wraith is shot right out from under him!

There are many valuable lessons to be learned about survival in the near future of 1999. Never stand-up on the roof of a building while a pitched gun battle is going-on down below you, especially when the cops are crack marksmen. Never follow your friends around a corner into a hail of machine-gun fire. Never, ever take on Travis, no matter how greatly you think your gang outnumbers the man. On at least three separate occasions during the film, Travis kills 4, 5, and even 6 bad guys at once! He’s good at what he does, despite the tactical blunder of walking into a thriving slave-market and attempting to disarm everyone when he’s outnumbered 50-to-1.

"Cowboy number one, a born-again poor man's son"

A note about wardrobe in the coming apocalypse: If we’re to judge by 80s-era movies like Omega Cop, we’re all doomed to look pretty silly. For this film in particular, it’s as if they raided the closets for a weird combo of pirate/terrorist/army/spandex/sports/vagrant costumes. Mostly, all mixed together into some hideous clothing smorgasbord of styles. There are exceptions. In the opening battle, Travis flips a guy in complete pirate get-up, saber and frilly swashbuckling shirt, red bandanna, the works. A parrot on his shoulder wouldn’t have been out of place. During another classic scene around the 30 minute mark, a thug gets flipped, and his wig falls off!

The kookiest looks are saved for the members of Wraith’s gang of vile slave-trading scumbags. Two of his biggest henchmen are credited as “Half Face” and “Raccoon Face” due to their rather flamboyant use of greasepaint. Raccoon Face, in particular, is plain silly-looking in a Twisted Sister sort of way, with his long, golden locks of hair, and failed attempts to look menacing.

Anyway, with his team lost, Travis reports in to his supervisor Prescott, played by Batman (Adam West)! Prescott is an utter asshole, and demands that Travis finish-off the gang, but first go over to “The Saloon.” During later report-ins, Prescott looks increasingly glazed and unhinged, as only Adam West could play it!

Travis heads over to the so-called saloon, where we get the second of several inglorious cameos, as Troy Donahue explains why Travis should take his daughter with him to the relative safety of “a family in the mountains.” Then, it’s time for another big shoot-`em-up and some fisticuffs, to showcase fighting champ Ron Marchini’s skills.

Now with two half-clad women in tow, Travis heads to his secret home in… a locker-room under a sports stadium(?). There’s a skeleton sitting in there, but this doesn’t set off any alarms with the ladies, whose advances Travis consistently rebuffs.

Cut to Wraith’s gang, abusing a poor captive girl. Besides being drug-running, bad-dressing slave-trading hoodlums, they’re also blood-drinkers(!). After killing the girl, they all raise a toast, and then a particularly nasty bloke billed as Bad Bob (played ever-so-sleazily by one Gerald Scott) leads the gang in a chant of “Travis’s Blood! Travis’s Blood! Travis’s Blood! Travis’s Blood!” etc. Bad Bob is awesomely skuzzy, enjoying tongue-baths of the captive slave-girls along with the groping and threats.

"We're living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods"

A note about Wraith: This is the first time I’ve ever seen the actor who plays him (Chuck Katzakian), but he too is just phenomenal with his leather-daddy garb, waxy-looking face, and deep, growling vocal-stylings. I can’t believe the guy doesn’t get more roles as the “heavy.” He’s great!

Meanwhile, Travis and the girls see a big gang of scavengers, and damn it, one of them has Travis’s HAT! So, he takes on the whole Goddamn gang for his stupid Special Police hat. Couldn’t he just requisition another once he gets back to Central Command? During this fiasco, the girls stay in the Jeep and have one of what turns out to be a series of arguments about whether Travis will make it back or not. No kidding. All through the movie, as soon as he leaves them alone, it’s, “He’s not going to come back!” “Yes, he will!” “No, he won’t!” etc. Of course, Travis kicks the entire gang’s collective butts, and even picks-up another hot chick for the ride. This one is an exotic knockout named Chrysti Jimenez. I dunno if she ever got any other roles, or is just a casting couch cutie, but she’s a hottie. She spends most of her screen time unconscious, and she does a damned fine job of acting unconscious, I might add.

Sooo, they take Chrysti, well, Di in the script, to the next bad cameo opportunity. Stuart Whitman is wasted as Dr. Latimer, the kind-hearted man of medicine who’s been hiding-out, helping “the people” as he can for the last few years. Even though he and Travis go way back, it’s assumed that the doc needs to fill him in again on his history for the ladies’ benefit.

“I stayed alive by hiding in a room. A room where I kept the drugs. I stayed there at night.” – words to live by in the End-Times, friends.

While at the doctor’s, Travis notices a little kid rummaging through his Jeep Renegade, and proceeds to chase the little tow-headed boy through all manner of backlots and parking-garages, until he finds himself in a trap set by Wraith. Naturally, Travis offs a good dozen or so of the gang before they bind him and whisk him away, presumably for some bloodletting (“Travis’s Blood! Travis’s Blood!”).

"Switch off your shields, switch off and feel"

Meanwhile, in a hilarious scene, the girls are in the doc’s waiting room, bickering about whether Travis will make it back alive again, and you can see the Dr. in the background, contemplating going-down on a revolver-barrel to end it all. I know it doesn’t sound humorous, but the haggard expression on his face and the girls constant yapping…

Where were we? Oh, yeah. Travis kills a guard while tied hand and foot, frees himself, kills Dr. Latimer (in mercy) and heads back to the stadium locker-room, where the girls are holed-up, waiting for him. Unfortunately, he is followed, and after a night where Travis stays-up on guard-watch (no time for sleep when you’re the last cop), and fantasizes playing baseball for a cheering crowd, it’s another 20 or so minutes of shooting, fighting, running around buildings, and crotch-kicks (Omega Cop must hold some record for the number of crotch-kicks in any movie, previous or since).

There’s a finale with even MORE of the above, and just about everybody who’s been in the thing up to this point who hasn’t already, dies. Except Travis and the chicks, who all go swimming as the credits roll.

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