In May 1983, Medusa announced Blastfighter, a film Lucio Fulci was to shoot based on a screenplay written by Dardano Sacchetti. The director seemed enthusiastic in the beginning: «I have to shoot a film called Blastfighter. It’s a futuristic western movie in which I take every theme from traditional western to put them in a post-cataclysmic world where you’ll have to find the old boundary of classical western and the new trust in the Man. It’s a film that I love per se… its screenplay is great. It will be a film with quotes from western, not only as a game but with a reason.» (L’Ecran fantastique 44)
In a follow up intervew five years later, Fulci didn’t mask his bitterness about this unmade project: «Blastfighter should, just like Escape from New York, take place during the third world war, after the destruction of Italy. Sacchetti had written the screenplay with me then, he stole it from me. I first told him: «Let’s file a patent for the story with the Union of Authors.» He answered me: «Ok, I’ll do it.» Two years later, someone called me on the phone to tell me that he had sold the screenplay to the producer Luciano Martino. Since then, Dardano Sacchetti and I don’t work together anymore.» (Impact 13)
On our website the scriptwriter offered a different version: «Blastfighter was a science-fiction screenplay of mine. The story took place in a future where all the energy left is in batteries. So, the one who owns a battery has a great treasure. It was a kind of western, with a ghost town full of end-of-life vehicules that drive in the snow. The production compagny had already sold the movie under this title, but it has changed the sotry which has been rewritten by other scriptwriters and gave it to Lamberto Bava.» (luciofulci.fr)
Lamberto Bava added: «The producer Luciano Martino really loved the word «Blastfighter». It should have been the title of a totally different movie that Lucio Fulci should have directed. When the project fell through, the producer asked for me to use this title for my own movie. Furthermore, he had already sold a movie under the title «Blastfighter », so it would suit him that mine would called that way!» (http://www.nanarland.com/interview/interview-lambertobava-page-2.html)