Steel Frontier brings us to a stereotypical post-apocalyptic future of sorts. It conjures up a man without a name or title (Joe Lara) beyond that of a "drifter," similar to Clint Eastwood's versions. A gun-wielding vagabond on a spiffy motorcycle who facially resembles Jesus Christ wandering through a toxic wasteland of society reduced to rubble and sand. At first glimpse, he finds a dying man with both legs torn off left to die in the middle of desert. This dying man pleads to the stranger to quickly end his life, as the stranger ponders over him for a few brief moments and decides...As the film's introduction continues, a recovering town by the name of New Hope shows a community of people ambitiously moving around tires, which now are being used as a natural resource (film does not elaborate on that, it does not really need to in the given context), as a harbinger of Mad-Max styled vehicles (seemingly gang members) approach the timid town of citizens.Once the vehicles arrive, we start to see all sorts of random odd-balls armed with rifles and pistols step out of the vehicle and ensure their grandiose of chaos on these innocent people, while the supposed leader of the outfit, General J.W. Quantrell (Brion James) casually enters into a barber shop with a rather frightened barber.The town's police force enters the scene, and is obliterated in mere minutes. After the General's done with his shave in the barber shop, he comes out to proclaim the town, as a (self) designated military outpost under the United Regime. Later, we see him discussing plans for new leadership for the town, as he dresses down the cowardly Mayor Kissmich (Quinn Morrison) who was nowhere to be found, during the siege. The General appoints his son as the #1 leadership of the town a little to the chagrin of Ackett (Bo Svenson).A few of the town's henchmen ride out onto the dusty roads to find runaways, and more or less runs into their possible Grim Reaper...the long-haired vagabond on the motorcycle. The henchmen taken by surprise to find someone crazy enough to be hanging out in such dangerous and desolate desert all by themselves with no care in a doomed world. One can observe fairly quickly that stranger is very much toying and play childish games with them. A stereotypical, but yet very excellent choreographed action car chase takes place. The stranger slips up... or does he? He enters the town as a man that no one has seen, before and the chaos really hits up. The film borrows elements from The Man with No Name and the Mad Max series, but it holds its own water very well. The ending actually turns out be a bit of surprise, and kind of ironic ... not quite as it seemed at the beginning of the film. The action scenes remain top-notch and exhilarating, as usual like with most PM action produced films. The characters are actually well-written for what most would consider to be a run-of-the-mill B-movie.

It has to be said that this film is definitely one of the better "bargain bin" movies out there - I'd feel a bit cheated if I had paid £15 for it, but at about £1.50 I felt that I definitely got more than my monies worth. The film can't quite decide if it wants to be "Mad Max" or one of the Clint Eastwood "man with no name" spaghetti westerns, and as such is stacked with clichés from both. Even the manic loony who hangs out with the bad guys in "Mad Max" is there.That guy from "Blade Runner" also cops a good billing, although he only turns up at the beginning and the end of the movie.Favourite bit - for me the punch-up on top of the oil refinery - if you look closely you can see the "post-apocalyptic" rush hour traffic thundering past in the distance as the two protagonists knock seven bells out of each other.Get several lagers in, a few pizzas and sit back and enjoy what is ultimately lightweight but entertaining drivel.

If you take the films, Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome, and the movie Steel Dawn with Patrick Swayze, you will have a pretty good idea what the film is about. The only problems is, that the film lacks the production values of either, and represent mainly cheap copy of the former two. True, the film has plenty of action, but asks the viewer to suspend belief. No one can shoot a 50 Caliber Machine gun by holding it in his hand - and miss everything to boot, nor can you shoot at a group of people with an automatic weapon and miss the whole bunch. There is also a problem with poor editing, when the school bus flips over, it is easy enough to see the cannon used to do the job. And the lady driving the truck through it is superfluous, since she had more than enough time to stop the truck. If you are interested only in mindless action and violence then the movie is easy enough to watch. But don't expect anything on paar with Thunderdome, or even the somewhat cheap and tacky Steel Dawn.

Generally, films from PM Entertainment and me don't get along (I'm thinking of LA Heat here). In my opinion they tend to stop just short of putting "I'M CRAP! DON'T BUY ME!" in fluorescent writing on the DVD cover. So you can imagine the sense of fear i felt when my friend returned from the bargain shop with this, 'Steel Frontier'. At first my suspicions seemed justified, the typical trailer which revealed most of the plot and action set-pieces was present and correct, and the opening to the film was fairly cheesy. But as it continued, something occurred to me: Steel Frontier isn't that bad. Although it's not particularly ground-breaking in any way, it's obvious that this film has a fairly big budget, due to the amount of explosions on show here, and it's these combined with the fairly non-stop action which give this film a fast pace which puts it ahead of many of its rivals. The acting on display is fairly competent too, and the presence of B movie icon Brion James in particular adds to Steel Frontier's credibility. All in all this is a film which won't particularly stick in the memory, but is a great way to pass the odd hour or two - kind of the film that wouldn't be out of place on late night sci-fi channel, for instance.