WOW! A highly impressive fifty-minute movie from Scythe Productions, their most professional to date and also their most cinematic! Mike Martinez and his cast and crew build on previous experience to deliver an excellent little movie, packed with neat camera tricks, directorial flourishes, an engaging story and some hilarious acting in places! A steady tide of well-choreographed action keeps the movie zooming along nicely and the amount of work and effort put into the production is tremendous. Things begin explosively as the credits play out over a string of explosions (footage cribbed from other movies, of course) while pumping music plays. The film begins for real when three astronauts crash-land in a lake and find themselves in a barren world seemingly totally devoid of any human life (incidentally, this opening is EXACTLY the same as in the film THE AFTERMATH!).
After lots of trekking through some splendid (and eerily isolated) Alaskan scenery, our unlucky heroes find themselves battling mutant gas mask-wearing soldiers and soon only one man, Corporal Roger Corman (!) is left alive. Taking a hostage, he escapes into a nearby city and makes a horrific discovery. Okay, so AN ENRAGED NEW WORLD doesn't have a lot of story, but being an action-orientated flick it doesn't need to. The latter half of the film is packed with gun battles, stuntmen, and cheap explosions and is a real riot to watch. Things finish off with a genuinely surprising twist ending which I didn't see coming and which throws a whole new light on previous occurrences. Although the acting is a bit lacking (although noticeably better than in THE FROZEN INFERNO, for instance), leading star George Thompson is impossible to dislike, proving himself a force to be reckoned with in the action stakes (that flip he does is a hoot!) and mugging into the camera more openly than Jackie Chan at other times!
Mike manages to throw in some pleasing references to his beloved Italian cinema (Lenzi' THE EXECUTIONER appears playing on a television in one scene, and there's a YOR THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE poster in another) whilst spicing the film up with music varying from orchestral pieces to a newly-composed synthesiser score which is impossibly catchy. One of my favourite scenes is in the spooky segment with the ALIEN theme playing - a nice touch. Most impressively of all, Italian cult cinema icon Gordon Mitchell appears in a cameo appearance which is almost exactly the same as the one he had in 2 + 5: MISSION HYDRA (both scenes involve Mitchell appearing for ten seconds on a monitor), thirty-seven years previously! Cheesy computer animations only add to the irresistible brew. AN ENRAGED NEW WORLD is everything it should be but above all else is a lot of fun - so I recommend seeing it now!