Released while Dirty Dancing was still in theaters and Thunderdome still fresh in our minds, this sci-fi update of Shane crawls through the ruins of nuclear war, a dusty landscape of unearthly beauty in a world struggling against the forces of nature and the evil of mankind. It opens with our nomadic hero standing on his head in the middle of a desert and only gets weirder from there as he wanders the wasteland slashing through mutants and madmen to carve a future with his sword. Steel Dawn is a sparse but tense affair cemented by committed performances by Swayze and his real-life wife Lisa Niemi, tightly directed by frequent Cannon Films collaborator Lance Hool (Missing in Action 2) and stacked with an army of classic that guys: Anthony Zerbe, Brion James, Arnold Vosloo and American Ninja’s John Fujioka!
