This really is a post-apocalyptic sports movie, and it really does owe more to Rocky or Raging Bull than to any of the obvious After the End touchstones.Īrguably the biggest challenge that writer/director David Webb Peoples set for himself in The Blood of Heroes is that it’s about a sport that doesn’t exist *, and yet it employs the usual jock-flick technique of using the contests themselves as its dramatic set pieces. What’s even weirder is that The Blood of Heroes isn’t selling us a bill of goods by opening the way it does. It seems to imply that the focus of the film is going to be on some kind of athletic competition, rather than on the usual embattled efforts to rebuild a semblance of civilization in the aftermath of nuclear annihilation or ecological collapse. That’s an extremely strange note on which to begin a We Have Seen the Future, and It Sucks flick, even granting that the entire subgenre had long since reached the point of diminishing returns by 1989, and that it had become difficult to drum up even a shadow of the excitement once generated by The Road Warrior, or for that matter the original Mad Max. They didn’t remember when Juggers first played The Game, or how it came to be played with a dog skull… They didn’t remember the miraculous technology or the cruel wars that followed. People no longer remembered the Golden Age of the 20th Century. The first thing you see in The Blood of Heroes, an Australian-American post-apocalypse movie from absolutely the very last moment when it would have made any kind of sense to produce such a thing, is a title card reading: The Blood of Heroes / Salute of the Jugger (1989) ***
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