Life is a B-Movie: Joe D’Amato’s Bizarre Prophecy of 2025

Four decades ago, Italian exploitation filmmaker Joe D’Amato envisioned 2025 as a bleak, spectacle-filled wasteland. Set in the Bronx following a nuclear holocaust, his 1983 film Endgame depicts a collapsed society with an authoritarian government in control, their troopers wearing garish neon-pink thunderbolts on their helmets as an unsubtle nod to fascist iconography. Telepathic ‘mutant’ people, an aftereffect of radiation (naturally), are persecuted for their assumed threat to power, while the main form of entertainment is an annual state-sanctioned and televised gladiatorial contest known as Endgame, in which fighters hunt a volunteer human ‘prey’ for a cash prize.

Even at its most sensationalist, apocalyptic cinema offers an invaluable lens through which to examine how we contemplate the future, and ultimately our destruction. Though it might be a stretch to propose that Endgame was prophetic in any real or calculated sense, the film’s vision of dystopia resonates in unexpectedly profound ways today, both through its reliance on recurring anxieties of the apocalypse, and also because the pulpy theatrics of exploitation cinema feel more true-to-life than ever.

Endgame takes place after World War III, bringing together totalitarianism, gritty cityscapes, desert vehicles and high-octane action. It is a blatant ride on Mad Max’s success two years prior, and a relatively softcore entry into D’Amato’s filmography, which includes pornography, erotica, spaghetti westerns, horror, fantasy and other post-apocalyptic imaginings. A filmmaker that would revel in the shocked reception when at his most extreme, he was even accused of making snuff on films such as Antropophagus (1980), in which a cannibalistic Neanderthal consumes the fetus ripped from a mother’s womb. To him, such allegations merely proved that he was doing a good job.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
On the tamer side, the violence of Endgame is more fitting to its dystopian setting: blood-spurting and bone-crunching in a fight for survival. Ron Shannon (Al Cliver), reigning champion as both hunter and prey, becomes entangled in a plot to assist the telepathic mutants escape the city, led by the righteous Lilith (Laura Gemser) and accompanied by a gang of warriors. Beyond this, the film delivers campy ’80s costuming, from leather-clad and studded warriors in face paint to background characters styled as New Romantic music video extras, as well as droll satire – the broadcast violence is interjected with perky product placements: “Life Plus: High Protein Energy Tablet!”

In many ways, Endgame speaks to ongoing concerns about authoritarianism as shaped by surveillance, our voyeuristic consumption of suffering and the oppression of an ‘othered’ community. In the film, the game itself is used to distract the public while the military exterminates sheltering mutants, not unlike how large-scale televised events such as the Superbowl or Met Gala have been used in the past year to deflect attention from war crimes – a shallow analogy not meant to trivialise these heinous acts, but rather emphasise the relationship between global imperialism and entertainment.

While deathmatches are yet to reach our screens, social media has become a relentless and inescapable stream of ads, memes, war imagery and performative outrage. The ongoing success of shows like Squid Game reveals our appetite for violent spectacle, but also demonstrates the irony of consuming ‘anti-capitalist’ art within its system. The adapted reality show, criticised for its unethical treatment of participants, exploits the very things the show made attempts to reflect on. But the highly stylised violence of Squid Game is a different breed from that of B-movies – though still gratuitous, their campy, low-budget gore demands a unique kind of viewership from modern audiences. Without the sheen or special effects that we’ve come to expect from contemporary films, whether slashers, satires or historical epics, B-movies disrupt our desensitised consumption of this polished style of violence, even if only temporarily.

In Endgame, the peaceful telepathic mutants, feared and oppressed for their misunderstood difference, are a glaring allegory for marginalised groups that have become the target of reactionary politics. This is often a marker for fascist resurgences, as are ableist beliefs that go hand-in-hand with global crises and survivalism.

A professor and neurosurgeon (Dino Conti) describes another effect of radiation: “involution”, in which genetic mutations are causing humans to regress to their primordial beginnings, depicted onscreen by brutish ape-hybrids and people with gills, fins and scales (harking back to our aquatic origins, obviously). Relatedly, the professor’s own fanaticism over the telepathic mutants marks another fascist signpost, viewing them as a superior race that should rule not only the world, but the universe, his eugenic desires shared in a German accent.

The 2025 of Endgame and now are disturbingly similar: society clings to civilisation whilst on the edge of environmental and nuclear catastrophe. But as B-movies often commandeer various tropes and subgenres in a never-ending reference loop, drawing comparisons between these films and our present day can be like playing lucky dip with thematic messaging. Regardless, therein lies their strange brilliance. The unruly splicing of aesthetics, themes and taboos, as well as a reliance on extremes in violence, sexuality or political allegory, make these films not only insightful reflections of their time, but strangely timeless in their overstuffed and unabashed recycling of tropes.

As misinformation and political pomp become even more frenzied when broadcast throughout our hyper-connected and techno-capitalist hellscape, B-movie fever dreams now feel uncomfortably close. Cruelty is entertainment. In Endgame’s 2025, a reporter instructs the cameraman to zoom in and capture the “kill shot”. In our 2025, we witness the Official White House social media accounts posting a clip entitled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight”, and only days later, Trump releasing a sickening AI-generated video depicting Gaza as a non-descript Middle Eastern luxury resort, featuring a large golden statue of the US president, skyscrapers, belly dancing women and Elon Musk stuffing his face with flatbreads. It’s not that B-movies suddenly appear more prescient, as the threat of apocalyptic annihilation at the hands of the ruling class is nothing new, but the rise of political pageantry within our age of media saturation has forged a reality that’s not too far off from their own farcical worlds.

Despite its shortcomings, as well as the glaring irony of exploitation serving as a potential critique of spectacle or commodification, Endgame is a reminder that the nonsensical can be the most illuminating. As we continue to grapple with the challenges that our media-saturated landscape brings in which spectacle is the most sought-after social currency, it is in the more unrefined corners of cinema history that we might discover films to better make sense of this mayhem. Though mostly buried beneath the post-apocalyptic exploitation canon, Endgame is one of these many cultural relics worth uncovering, and if the film is prophetic in any sense, it is that the darkest periods often arrive cloaked in absurdity.