In Angelo Lopes’ Wasteland Cop, a relic from the old world turns a routine pursuit into a hunt for something far stranger and far more dangerous. As The Marshal follows the trail, the road ahead fills with warlords, replicants, and the possibility that the ruined world still holds powers no one fully understands.
Civilization is a dystopian hellhole, and what now passes as order rests in the hands of The Marshal (Brendan Guy Murphy), a hard-bitten lawman and his small crew of enforcers. During a souped-up chase across the open prairie, he intercepts a stolen artifact hidden in a bag, and the moment he touches it, he is hit with a vision of what appears to be an alien temple.
The Marshal starts digging into the mystery with a rough crew that includes Scout (Carol Cardenas), the Constable (Sian Vilaire), and the Deputy (Greg Brown). Before long, he is confronted by various marauders and by a vicious figure, Gungnir (Joseph Franco), who wants the artifact for himself. He is a warlord flanked by two grotesque nurses who keep him moving with jolts of chemicals and adrenaline.
The deeper the Marshal investigates, the clearer it becomes that the wasteland is crawling with more than raiders and opportunists, as strange technology, rival relics, and rumors of replicants begin to point him toward a wider conspiracy involving the ruthless Daedalus.
What begins as a routine recovery job quickly turns into something bigger, as the device seems tied to secrets buried beneath the ruins of the old world and to a force watching from above.
“…a relic from the old world turns a routine pursuit into a hunt for something far stranger and far more dangerous.”
As Hollywood buries the stories we Gen-Xers loved in our teens, like Mad Max, director Angelo Lopes and writers Bert and Trina Boutin took matters into their own hands and created their own Mad Max while avoiding copyright infringement. Lopes’ work in Wasteland Cop drew inspiration from “classic Hollywood, video games, and Japanese anime.” In the Marshal, the filmmakers created a sci-fi western lawman who enforces the law in a lawless world.
Wasteland Cop looks like pure post-apocalyptic grindhouse glory. The film offers a good blend of practical and CG. Computers built their alien spaceships, rocket-powered cars on the horizon, along with some of the gory kills and brain splatters. The practical elements are equally impressive, with matching uniforms that look like they’ve seen years of battle. The monster make-up and dismembered body parts rival any B-movie made today.
Storywise, it’s exactly what you want from this genre. It’s a bleak future with warring gang factions murdering one another for ultimate supremacy. Now add an ancient artifact so powerful it can sway the balance of power in one direction. No one is safe…that is, unless the Marshal has something to say about it. In the end, it’s all good sci-fi fun.
In the end, Angelo Lopes’ Wasteland Cop delivers the kind of scrappy sci-fi adventure that knows exactly which dusty, blood-soaked road it wants to travel. It embraces its low-budget roots, leans into its weirdness, and comes out feeling like a loving throwback to the kind of genre filmmaking the studios stopped making once they got too comfortable.
For screening information, visit the Wasteland Cop official website.
"…Civilization is a dystopian hellhole..."
