This future is really dark.
A mysterious plague wiped out most of humanity and a group of fascist cyborgs took over. (They actually prefer to be called Synthetics but everyone knows that they’re actually cyborgs.) The remaining humans were exiled to an abandoned train station that was renamed the Forbidden Zone. In the Forbidden Zone, the human survive as bartenders and sex slaves for their cyborg overlords. If you want to enter or leave the Forbidden Zone, you have to put your hand on one of those balls of lightning that people used to buy at Spencer’s Gifts.
The humans have been told that they are all sterile, which is one reason why they are willing to accept living in such a dark future. When a baby is born in the Forbidden Zone, it blows up the sterility myth. Kendall (Darby Hinton, who co-wrote the script and who is best remembered for starring in Andy Sidaris’s Malibu Express) is a bartender who tries to protect the baby while rallying the other humans to rise up against the cyborgs Synthetics. The Synthetics want that baby for their own incoherent reasons. War breaks out between man and the half-machines.
Even by the normal standards of director Greydon Clark, this is low budget nonsense. The action’s slow, the story is incoherent, the acting is bad, you get the idea. There are a lot of scenes of people standing around fires that have been lit in barrels. There’s so many barrels on fire that the Forbidden Zone should have burned down years ago. Also, why is it called the Forbidden Zone when anyone can enter it whenever they want to? The humans aren’t allowed to leave the train station/night club/brothel so it seems like the rest of the world should be called the Forbidden Zone. The future is dark and not easily understood. So is this movie.
Humanity’s only hope, Kendall
New York. The prohibition era. The Coll Brothers, Vincent (Christopher Bradley) and Peter (Jeff Griggs), are sick of working for the Irish gangster, O’Malley (William Anthony La Valle). They want to hang out at the Cotton Club with big time gangsters like Lucky Luciano (Matt Servitto), Legs Diamond (Will Kempe), and Dutch Schultz (Bruce Nozick). Vincent has fallen in love with Lotte (Rachel York), a singer at the club but the club’s owner, Owney Madden (Jack Conley), makes it clear that Lotte is too good for a low-rent thug. After killing O’Malley, Vincent and Peter go to work for Dutch Schultz but soon, they grew tired of the low wages that Schultz pays them. The Colls decide to strike out on their own, leading to all out war with New York’s organized crime establishment.
Mad Dog Coll was one of two gangster movies that Menaham Golan produced, back-to-back, in Russia. In fact, Mad Dog Coll may be the first American film in which Russia stood in for America instead of the other way around. Though this film was produced after Golan broke up with his longtime producing partner, Yoram Globus, Mad Dog Coll still has a definite Cannon feel to it. It is low-budget, fast-paced, unapologetically pulpy, and entertaining as Hell. For a Golan production, the performances are surprisingly good. Bruce Nozick steals the entire movie as crazy Dutch Schultz. None of it is subtle but it is enjoyable in the way that only a Greydon Clark-directed, Menahem Golan-produced gangster film can be. 1920s New York is recreated on Russian soundstages. The threadbare production design and cardboard cityscape brings a Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker-era Dr. Who feel to the movie. All that is missing is The Master brewing up moonshine and the Daleks exterminating the Chicago Outfit.
Through the Shattered Lens 