Writer/director Luke Meneok’s short film 2025: Steel City Warriors is like a post-apocalyptic tale from Heavy Metal magazine, meets many 1980s examples of the genre that popped up in the wake of Mad Max and The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max 2). Into this wasteland come the players, each with unique lives and destinies. Musty Draco (Minnie Brimstone-Kingsley), Hatchet MacReady (David Kolenski), and Rathole Plug (Michael Adam) all know the tricks and trials one must endure on the streets of Steel City. Those without such cunning don’t last, for death comes swiftly to those who walk without caution.
Like VHS classics such as Warriors of the Year 2072, 2019: After the Fall of New York, Nightmare City, and Warriors of the Lost World, 2025: Steel City Warriors delivers epic dystopian world-building on a micro-budget. Mind you, that doesn’t swat any interest away as they gave us the state of the world first. Your typical “everything-went-to-hell” scenario, and now the survivors have learned how to survive and thrive in the rubble and remnants of a fallen society.
“…survivors have learned how to survive in the rubble of a fallen society…”
Captured and presented in a style which harkens back to the good old days of having to adjust the tracking on your video machine, 2025: Steel City Warriors is a love letter to a type of cinema that has come and gone. Yet still, seeing films of this kind, it seems they have finally achieved much-deserved cult status, thus open imitation and celebration.
And why not? Subgenres exist because someone found a formula that worked and then tried to emulate it. The film 2025: Steel City Warriors emulates were perhaps the cheap knock-offs of more accomplished cousins. They are, as evidenced by this short, a type of movie being rediscovered and still worthy of reappraisal. Bring on the rest of the saga!
"…delivers epic dystopian world-building on a micro-budget."
