Beware, you are about to enter the wasteland of cinema—tonight is more about the letter Z than B... Post-nuke, or post-apocalyptic, films depict the fate of humanity's last survivors after a (usually nuclear) catastrophe, whether they roam in vehicles with two, four, or even more wheels.

Mad Max is the gold standard of this genre and has been imitated countless times. Johnny Hallyday seemed to be a huge fan of George Miller’s film, as he performed at his early 1980s concerts dressed like Mel Gibson and staged axe fights on stage. Terminus was meant to turn him into the French Mad Max.

The film was directed by renowned director of photography Pierre William Glenn, who had worked with some of the greatest names in French cinema (Rivette, Truffaut, Demy, Costa-Gavras, Tavernier…). The futuristic world was overseen by Enki Bilal, and the international cast included Karen Allen (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Jürgen Prochnow (The Keep). Yet, despite all these elements, Johnny—peroxide blond for the occasion—drove his truck straight into a wall: the film was a bitter failure despite the substantial resources invested in it.

With a much smaller budget, Italian filmmaker Enzo G. Castellari (Keoma) launched a post-apocalyptic trilogy with I Nuovi Barbari. He borrowed not only from Mad Max but also from Carpenter’s Escape from New York (another great post-apocalyptic reference) and Walter Hill’s The Warriors. Castellari was a master of imitation (his previous film, L’ultimo squalo, a copy of Jaws, even led to a lawsuit), and this new genre suited him surprisingly well—though it was far removed from his western and poliziesco masterpieces!