All’s I gotta say is, if this was a film called “The New Men,” about a world where men are left to wander the Earth without their female counterparts, it would’ve wound up being the erotic homosexual post-apocalyptic adventure that “Mad Max,” “Road Warrior” and yes, even “Thunderdome” wanted to be.
In a little desert town called Lacuna, the women, who are fed up with their boorish husbands, boyfriends and sons, get what they’ve often fantasized about, but ultimately end up wishing they never had. A rainstorm renders the world’s population of men comatose and sucks the energy supply dry. With no power and very little food, the town’s women must hold themselves together in a world gone mad, finding ways to keep themselves healthy and fed. Before long, the sleeping men begin dying off due to their own lack of food and water. But this doesn’t happen before Lisa gets one last ride out of her comatose, but erect husband, which finds her pregnant with a child that’s growing at an alarming rate inside of her.
With most of the town’s men dead and the women turning into famished zombies, Lisa, her greedy sister and two other women from the town, lured by a mysterious radio transmission, decide to head for the hills to a safehaven for women. And thus begins a road trip that finds the women crossing paths with a hippie commune, lesbian bikers and other fun bumps in the road on their way to a possible better life for them and this mysterious child that Lisa is bearing.
This black and white DV feature has a charming sense of humor that keeps it from drowning in post-apocalyptic depression. I can imagine that making a road trip movie that takes place in a barren wasteland would be difficult to keep interesting, but director Todd Hughes has no such problem and helping him out is the brilliant cast, with cult star Mary Woronov, Jamie Tolbert and Sandra Kinder turning in hilarious performances that make these catty “new women” extremely fun to watch. Instead of freaking out and trying to get to the bottom of this catastrophe, they’re only slightly bummed, referring to their comatose men as slumbering logs, and worrying more about their own welfare as well as how to possibly screw one another over. But this film isn’t some hokey statement about what a better world this would be without men because after a while, these women realize that they miss their men and without them, the world is still full of bitterness and hate. So instead, it’s a comic look at our four central characters and how exactly they deal with this bizarre situation they find themselves caught up in. The film actually plays like a John Waters take on “Road Warrior” Yes, it is just about that funny.
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