Director/Screenplay/Producer – Jose Figueroa, Photography – F.S. Tobias, Music – Kyle Puccia, Makeup Effects – Natale Verdone, Production Design – Kyle Kannenberg. Production Company – La Boca Productions.
Hayden Wyatt (Annalise), Sam Gipson (Cal), Eddie Martinez (Jondo), Nate Witty (Mott), Jamie Bernadette (Boss Reeby)
San Francisco, 2161. The Grapple Corporation is having problems with its fuel trucks being hijacked by road pirates. To counter this, Boss Reeby introduces the emitter, a device that disguises the fuel truck as a regular garbage truck. Jondo and Cal are assigned to drive the first truck to be equipped with an emitter. Meanwhile, Annalise is seeking to be free of her no-good boyfriend Mott. She leaves but has her bike destroyed in an altercation with pirates. She is found by Cal who offers her a ride with them in the truck. At the same time as Cal develops feelings for Annalise, she schemes to steal the shipment. Plans are thrown awry when Mott unexpectedly turns up. Annalise introduces him as her brother, while he decides to get in on the hijack with plans of his own.
I must admit the title Steampunk Samurai Biker Chick got me watching. It is a great example of the Deliberately Ridiculous Title. It suggests all manner of things – bad-ass biker girls wearing aviator helmets with weird oracular attachments going into action on steam motorcycles and lethally despatching opponents with samurai swords. However, it soon becomes apparent that the title is a big cheat. We do get a group of pirate girls who wield samurai swords that occasionally turn up, check. Heroine Hayden Wyatt is seen riding a motorcycle, check, but not wielding a samurai sword. However, that is about it.
For a definition of what I consider Steampunk is and isn’t see my essay Steampunk Films. Here it feels as though the filmmakers had appropriated a cultural buzzword that was just emerging around the time and nothing more – the setting is not Victorian quasi-technological advancements but a standard part-socially collapsed future. The nearest we get to any future technological advancement is the emitter that can disguise a vehicle as something else or cause somebody to become invisible, but this is not steam-powered.
If anything, Steampunk Samurai Biker Chick resembles another copy of the Mad Max films. Even then it is not the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max 2 (1981) and more the decaying-at-the-edges future of Mad Max (1979). It feels like a wannabe Action Film, albeit where the film has been shot on too painfully cheap a budget to be able to afford any actual action scenes. Almost all of the action takes place around a single warehouse/garage. There are various scenes with people shooting guns – although in most of the scenes, we never see who they are shooting at – and a single scene of unarmed combat.
In between that the film is dependent on a great deal of stock footage – of what looks like material of soldiers going into combat and destroyed high-rise buildings in some identified war zone, and elsewhere lots of repeated scenes of motorcycles buzzing around what seems to be the same turn on the road. This has all been blurred out and what feels like the digital equivalent of being over-exposed.
Steampunk Samurai Biker Chick is an incredibly bad film. It feels that it is being made with way less than the resources needed to adequately convey its vision. For a good deal of the running time, I sat in confusion trying to work out what the milieu we are in was and trying to make sense of the plot. To the film’s credit, the setting does sort of coalesce, although that has been given no more than the scanty details needed to carry the basic set-up, and eventually a plot that involves lots of double-dealing back and forth about hijacking the shipment. Even then the dialogue often seems directionless, while much of the middle of the film seems dragged out between various scenes of attraction between Hayden Witty and the two truckers and then her scheme to pass her boyfriend Mott (Nate Witty) off as her brother.
Even then, it often feels like the film was released uncompleted and with scenes that were intended to be shot missing. There are abrupt scene transitions that seem to skip over entire crucial sections of plot. Case in point being near the ending where we go from Annalise and Mott conspiring to double-cross the truckers and hijack the shipment before everything skips forward to after the hijack with the two truckers imprisoned and then the next scene where Mott (Nate Witty) is now the head of the pirates and the younger trucker Sam Gipson has been killed.
Jose Figueroa has also made Houndz from Hell (2011), 10,000 Zombie Heads (2012) and 2177: The San Francisco Love Hacker Crimes (2019).
Full film available here