Apocalypse Oz Review

Alexandra Gizela stars as Dorothy Willard, a punk rock Amer-Asian girl - the offspring of an absent GI father and Vietnamese mother - stranded in the terminally bland environs of Kansas. Following a severe blow to the head Willard encounters a strange woman who, speaking Vietnamese, charges her with an important mission, to hunt down and terminate with 'extreme prejudice' a rogue military officer known as The Wizard, an officer who turns out to also be Dorothy's father. Hot wiring a ruby red muscle car Dorothy sets off down Yellow Road in search of her prey ...

An important point to make here is that although the script is entirely cobbled together out of earlier works Apocalypse Oz is an entirely new production, shot with new cast and crew. This is not a re-edit of existing work but the manipulation of source materials to use as a base for an entirely new effort. Original dialogue, no, but original effort, absolutely. Clocking in at only twenty five minutes there is scarcely time to work in more than a Greatest Hits of the source films but Telford finds enough common ground between them and gives both such a bizarre spin that you can't much help but be hooked by the film's loopy energy.

And where do you find common ground between such seemingly disparate works? On the road, of course. Both are quest films and Telford fuses them into a technicolor road movie, well more than half of his film occuring with Dorothy on the road in pursuit of her quarry. Like Coppola's film - he gives this one a ringing endorsement, incidentally - Apocalypse Oz is heavy on narration, a ploy which always runs the risk of tedium, but the film moves along quickly enough to avoid any such danger here.

There is a certain temptation to consider this some sort of bizarre spin on the fan film, but that doesn't seem quite fair. Apocalypse Oz is clearly the work of film professionals with something entirely different in mind. The goal here seems to be if they can create something new and unique rather than rehash or expand on someone else's world. Telford clearly knows his way around the camera and how to maximize his budget and the cast is made up entirely of professional, working actors, most notably MC Gainey in the role of The Wizard.

With its brief run time Apocalypse Oz feels too slight to really succeed, more like an experiment than a finished piece of work but there's certainly something to be said for knowing how to leave an audience wanting more rather than overextending a concept. If nothing else it certainly leaves you wondering what Telford may come up with next.

Apocalypse Oz Website