The film is set in the 21st century, where Romans have found a new way to handle criminals: by having them fight each other like gladiators on motorcycles on national television.

Cortez and his two female assistants, Sybil and Sarah, receive a video message from the mysterious station boss, Sam, demanding that they recreate the formula of the gladiatorial contest and set them back to where they began: in the Coliseum.

Meanwhile, Drake has been imprisoned for the murder of three men who killed his wife Susan after they broke into his house, and he (conveniently for WBS) is now under the sentence of death for taking the law into his own hands.

Abdul is an African-American Muslim extremist; Akira is a notorious Japanese serial killer; Kirk is a German-born robber/killer; and Tango is a Latin American terrorist.

The next day, Drake is strapped into a 'hate stimulator' device, designed to measure the point when man can be provoked into murder.

The following evening, Sarah visits Professor Towman (Cosimo Cinieri), the inventor of Junior, the WBS computer system, looking for a way to gain access to the restricted files.

She has discovered from the computer chip that Junior will trigger the bracelet devices of all the surviving gladiators to kill them all 20 minutes after the show ends.

Revealing this information to Drake and the rest of the men, they mount an attack on the control tower, killing all the guards, including Raven.

Drake, Sarah, Abdul, and Kirk break into the central control room and discover that Cortez is found to have plotted the death of the survivors to discredit Sam and take over as station head.

Then, the three surviving rebels are attacked in the control room by Monk, who is revealed to be the traitor who filmed the escape attempt with a mini-camera built into his eye.

After a bitter fight, Drake kills him, and Sarah uses some of the information stored on his camera chip to access the destruction codes.

The suggestions included adding skyscrapers to scenes where Fulci had envisioned a futuristic Rome covered by gigantic Plexiglas domes.

[5] Sacchetti denied these allegations, stating that Fulci was originally excited over his drafts and had it read to a producer who commissioned him for a script.