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

A dystopian retro-future of telepathic mutants, gladiators and fascists – does Joe D’Amato’s vision of 2025 show any resemblance to our current reality?

An essay by Mila Fielker

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.