THE AIR PIRATE APOCALYPSE MOVIE YOU NEVER SAW BECAUSE EVERYONE IN IT KEPT DYING.

MAD MAX used to have competition.  In the early 2000s, MARAUDERS, the now-forgotten air war epic, was something of a cult favorite.  Now it has dropped into deeper obscurity.

Set in a world of constant and furious winds, MARAUDERS was based on a book about a young loner pilot whose girlfriend is kidnapped by a brutal group of somewhat zombie-like air pirates.  He has to get her back—but her own plan to get free may very well undo everything he’s working at.

That’s it.  It’s as streamlined as the airplanes that cover the skies in this weird, wonderful world.  Well, except for that one twist about the girlfriend having literally a split personality at the most inopportune times…  You’ll see.  Anyway…

Anything and everything that is airborne populates this story.  A dazzling array of gliders, wingsuits, prop planes and even jets keep people in the skies, because if they hit the ground, there are swarms of predators that will devour them within minutes.

Everyone loves a great zombie tale.  And a great pirate story.  Everyone loves those amazing WWII airplane air shows.  Imagine cramming them together and you’ve got an action mini-masterpiece.

The problem with the production was that it was highly troubled, as its no-name cast kept getting killed.  That’s right.  The actors in those souped-up airplanes kept crashing, and after three leading men died in fiery balls of barely-insured destruction, and the fourth actor lost his arm in a propeller incident, the studio called it quits.  A second studio tried to finish the production with the one-armed actor and his co-star, but that leading lady proceeded to crash her plane on the exact same day as a certain Osama bin-Laden rammed his into the World Trade Center, and thus, the production came to a final end, doomed in the most bizarre ways to continuously lose its actors to plane crashes.

MARAUDERS, even in its unfinished state, has earned a spot on somebody’s video release schedule somewhere… or better yet, why doesn’t somebody out there put it together for a midnight showing?  We’d pay.  Even if it might be sad seeing the stars of the film die before our eyes in burning true-life conflagrations.

It is in this way that we as an audience would understand there is always some price to pay for art, even if the form is mere science fiction.  Watching death unfold onscreen as a reality, with the actors continually changing to compensate for the previous actor’s death, we would inevitably gain a sense of the impermanence of life and the eternality of cinema.  If only one of the players had passed away, it would be one thing; having five deaths from lead actors in a single production is fluke-tragedy-as-transcendental-artpiece.  It is equally fascinating that so much production violence did not result in legendary status for the film.  Is there anything stranger than what captures the attention of the cult-minded?  Why that, and not this?  Why this, and not that?

The book’s story, nevertheless, remains for us to experience the plot, but the visual mayhem must remain, for better or worse, only in our imaginations.

There is, however, this teenager’s fan-made trailer about what could have existed…

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Text copyrighted, 2015.  All rights to photos and media retained by their proper owners, and no rights are asserted to the media here except under fair use standards.