USA. 1990.
Crew
Director – Paul Kyriazi, Screenplay – Salli McQuaid, Story – Dennis Grayson & Joe Meyer, Producers – Garrick Huey & Ronald L. Marchini, Photography – Hugh C. Liftin, Music – Cecil Ramirez & Ralph Stover, Special Effects – Pat Patterson. Production Company – Romarc Inc.
Cast
Ron Marchini (John Travis), Adam West (William Prescott), Meg Thayer (Lena), Jennifer Jostyn (Zoe), D.W. Landingham (Norm), Chrysti Jimenez (Di), Chuck Katzakian (Wraith), Stuart Whitman (Dr Latimer), Troy Donahue (Slim), Louise Maro (Mary Sanders), Alfred Burt (Cop Alfred), Frank Crandall (Cop Frank), Mike Martini (Cop Mike)
Plot
The world has collapsed after holes in the ozone layer have caused solar flares to run amok, infecting people and turning them into mutated crazies. A group of survivors huddle in a bunker complex. When reports come through of slavers holding an auction, the bunker’s head Prescott despatches a team of four police officers to conduct a rescue. However, the auction descends into a shootout and all the officers except the captain John Travis are killed. Travis sets out to return to the bunker, furiously battling his way past the crazies of the urban wasteland. In the course of this, he rescues three girls. However, the girls are also sought by the scavengers who become determined to eliminate Travis.
Omega Cop was one of the films from the almost completely forgotten action star Ron Marchini. Marchini was a karate champion in the 1960s and served as a drill sergeant in the US Army. Marcini made eleven films, beginning with the war film Murder in the Orient (1974). From there, he went on to make a number of Martial Arts Films throughout the 1980s, even producing and writing several of them and taking the director’s chair for his last film Karate Raider (1995). However, he never attained much of a presence as an actor and retired after the mid-1990s. Since then, Marchini appears to be running a martial arts dojo.
Omega Cop falls fairly and squarely into the brand of Action Films that emerged in the 1990s. Among these were a series of SF hybrids that blended elements of all the successful works around that time – killer androids, cyborg cops, Cyberpunk or post-apocalyptic futures, time travel plots and martial arts/kickboxing. Omega Cop is evidently made on the cheaper side – it is a Mad Max 2 (1981) styled post-apocalyptic future that comes without the addition of any of the vehicular chases, killer androids and time travel plots that other works around this time were adopting.
The one novelty that the film offers is that it was an earlier adopter of climate catastrophe themes – see Global Warming. Here we get a world where the collapse is due to runaway greenhouse effect. Unlike modern climate change predictions, this doesn’t appear to have resulted in the rise of sea levels where the concern is more a series of ozone layer holes, meaning that the Earth is more prone to solar flares. The only real effect this appears to have had is to create Mutants, which seems to be people that have gone crazy and have some black makeup and sores on their faces. In actuality, all that unprotected exposure to solar flares should do is give someone a sunburn. Strangely though, we never see Marchini or any of the others going out applying sunblock or putting on headgear to protect themselves from the sun.
Ron Marchini is not much of an actor. He is also of medium and smaller build. He tries to give a tough and tight-lipped performance but lacks the acting ability to project it. However, what most people have come to watch the film for is the martial arts and Marchini proves fine once he gets into the action scenes, kicking and punching people around.
The main problem with the film is that Paul Kyriazi is not much of a director. He also directed Ron Marchini’s second film Death Machines (1976) and half-a-dozen others, all martial arts films. He does nothing to stage the fight scenes in an interesting or dynamic way – they are just scenes where the camera is a bystander watching Marchini kick and throw people around. Nor is the plot a terribly exciting one. It largely consists of repeated scenes with Marchini racing off to get into a fight with various gang members and wasteland crazies, while leaving the girls behind, before later remembering to get back to the girls by which time they have gotten into more trouble of some type.
Ron Marcini returned as John Travis in a sequel Karate Cop (1993).
Trailer here