Owed to Trash

In about 1984 I saw a film that had a lasting effect on me. It was called Bronx Warriors and it was directed by Italian film maestro Enzo G Castellari.

Looking back 38 years I think it was a case of “right place, right time” because as much as I still love this movie...it isn’t that special.

At the age of 13 I was growing up in a boring town called Kenilworth and had recently begun attending its atrocious high school. Every Monday the local youth club would hire out a film on VHS from the shop round the corner and we’d gather in the meeting room to watch it. It’s important to note that in the early 80s, a VCR was an expensive luxury. My parents were reasonably well off but we didn’t own one until about 1986. Every week the youth club’s “movie night” was something nice and wholesome like Splash! or Flashdance or Teen Wolf and it was merely one more way to relieve the boredom of growing up in a town with nothing much going on.

And then, one night, someone hired Bronx Warriors.

I’d seen the film on the turny display thing in the shop and had never paid it much attention. The opening credits was a montage of scary/ exotic-looking weapons and clothing and the music score was an upbeat synthesised number. Our curiosity was piqued. And then the film started with an opening title card to explain that the Bronx of 1990 had become “No Man’s Land” after the police realised they couldn’t control it it any more after various “attemps” (sic) to restore law and order. Then a young woman running through the derelict streets of this lawless mess is attacked by some blokes on roller skates with hockey sticks and saved by the arrival of a gang of bikers.

The point where about 4 people in the audience at Bertie Road Youth Club went “cooorrr!!!” was when the bike gang withdrew nasty, pointed sticks from behind their saddles with a drawn out, “chiing!” noise.

And then we had the fight.

4 bikers vs 8 skaters and the bikers won. When two of the skaters tried to get away a biker hopped back on his machine and, as the engine roared to life, two blades clicked down from the front forks. He hamstrung the two fleeing cowards and then did a U-ey in order to finish them off.

The rest of the movie was the saved young woman shacking up with the leader of the biker gang and her father’s corporation trying to start a war to get her back.

This film, for some reason, blew my mind!

It had Fred Williamson in it as a character called the Ogre, the self-proclaimed king of the Bronx. It had a woman called Witch with a leather fetish and steel spikes on her fingers, who fought with a whip. It had Vic Morrow as a sociopathic mercenary called Hammer. But above all it had Trash.

Trash was the biker gang’s leader. Long curly hair, muscles everywhere and very young (although he looked old to me at the time, hey I was only 13!!). He was the boss of the Riders and when he was fighting at the beginning of the movie (in slow motion, no less) there was something about him that intrigued me. He had long hair and I wasn’t allowed to have long hair. He was muscley and I was puny. He lived in a lawless wasteland called the Bronx and I lived in a town where the police would harass you for looking at an ATM. Trash was intriguing and exotic and, by the end of the film, probably the only survivor of the carnage.

A year or so later I watched the sequel “Bronx Warriors 2” and this time the mood of the film was different. This was a kill-fest where the plot involved a vicious corporation wanting to tear down the old Bronx and build a new one in its place, murdering the few people that still live there so that the “murdering warrior gangs unite to defend their homeland sewer by sewer”. With a death count of over 130 this movie was serious fun, I mean how often do you see someone shoot down a helicopter with a small revolver? Or have an 8-year old boy accompany his father on a mission to blow stuff up and kill cops?

These two movies struck a chord that even now I cannot quite define.

When the shop sold the two films in about 1989 I bought them both and in the early 2000s I set up a website for these two movies and later met Enzo Castellari in Rome where I interviewed him, got him to sign all my (hard to find) Bronx Warriors merchandise and asked him if he knew what had happened to Trash’s actor Mark Gregory.

Enzo had no idea but said that Marco de Gregorio (his real, Italian name) had never much liked the film industry and was only 17 when cast in the first movie. He made a few flicks, including a Rambo rip-off called Thunder, and then retired from the silver screen.

In an attempt to find him I would visit Marco de G’s in Rome by going through the phone book, taking a camera (in the days of crappy, Nokia-quality, pixelated MP4s) and waiting with my heart thumping in my chest as people came to the door...only to find that it wasn’t him. Enzo and his son Andrea recorded a message for me, asking Marco to get in touch and saying that they missed him. Later I also got actor Massimo Vanni who had starred in two different roles in both Bronx movies, to record one too.

I did this on and off for several years and eventually gave up.

In 2015 I became a special feature for the Blu-ray release of Bronx 2 in a 13-minute extra called “The Hunt for Trash- Interview with Bronx Warriors superfan Lance Manley” and the Blu-rays for both movies have Enzo, Andrea and the moderator David Gregory talking about me on frequent occasions, and my love of the films and my search for Marco.

In 2018 I attended a Q&A with Enzo and other Italian directors, including Lamberto Bava, and a member of the audience asked Enzo where he had found Marco and what became of him. Enzo, like me, had no idea.

At least once a month I would get an email from someone, either via my website or from my YouTube channel, asking if I had found Trash yet. I didn’t think I would, but always hoped that maybe I could.

And then about 3 weeks ago, I found out that Marco was dead.

He committed suicide in 2013 after suffering from both depression and financial problems. His body is buried in the cemetery of Castel Madama, about 26 miles from Rome. A journalist called Roberto Zanni had found out what had happened. I went there a week later and laid flowers on the grave and actually cried a little bit that someone I had admired so much had died in such awful circumstances, probably never even knowing just how much he was loved and missed by people who were fans of his films.

The positive aspect to all this was that I finally had closure. Marco was gone and it hadn’t been a major part of my life but then again, it had always niggled me as to what became of him. He had made two films that had inspired me and that I still love to this day and I was grateful to him and his memory, for that.

It got me thinking that maybe, what we do in our lives will be remembered by other people in this way. Marco was depressed and lonely when he died but there was dozens or maybe hundreds of people around the world who would have given nearly anything to see him at a film convention or to get a modern photo of him. He had made his mark on the 80s sci-fi crowd with his portrayal of a violent yet sympathetic anti-hero.

I’ve written a lot of books (17 to date) and two are for kids. They’re anti-bullying themed fantasies with magic, sword fights, monsters and adventure. I’m proud of both of them but I’m self-published so my readership is very small. Years ago I attended a comic convention called Demoncon in Maidstone. Two teenage girls bought the first book The Catastrophe of the Emerald Queen and one came back at the next convention to buy the sequel, The Sunder of the Octagon, telling me that her friend had made her promise to get her a copy too. She emailed me a week or so later to say how much she enjoyed it and raving about the characters and the continuity to the first book.

I made a couple of people happy by writing two novels. Maybe I have made others happy with these books, or any of the 15 others, too. I don’t know but I believe that might be true.

Today I did a 5km “fun run” in Rome. As I was finishing, a little girl aged about 9 ran past me and then fell over before the finish line. I deliberately hung back for a few seconds to let her finish before me and then, after collecting my participation medal, approached her father and spoke to the kid, saying “Well done, you beat me in the last 10 metres” and gave her a high five. She beamed a gappy smile and just maybe that made a difference for her.

As I was cycling to work last week a car drove past with three little kids hanging out the window. I waved and all three of them went “CIAO!!!”

Two of my students are brother and sister and, due to regular squabbling in class, I took the initiative to ask them what they liked about my classes and what they’d like to do more of. The next lesson was a lot less stressful and both seemed to enjoy it.

These little gestures might be forgotten by tomorrow but something Marco de Gregorio never knew was just how much of a positive effect he had on people. We loved Trash (and some of us loved Thunder) and we always admired what he’d done and while was never the world’s best actor, he had a place in our hearts that he was oblivious of.

The hunt for Trash is now over, and I hope wherever he is now, he’s at peace but his sad and relatively short life (he died age 48) has made me realise that I want to make a positive impact in the lives of others and while I hope I get to know the effect I had, I want to do things that inspire people the way Marco inspired me at the age of 13.