Future Kill - Die Herausforderung

The only thing good about this movie is the artwork on the promotion poster by H. R. Geiger. Anti-nuke protesters who all looked like punk rockers of the late 1970s, and somehow became non-violent, (except for their leader, "Splatter") occupy the cities. Fraternity boys descend on the punkers to do some violence on them and turn them into victims. Bad acting and bad plot then descends on the real victim, you, the viewer. I gave this a "2" because a few sexual scenes at least give it MST3K potential.

The idea for this film must have looked good on paper. No wait. On second thought, there's no way it could have. Let's see what we have here: In an unspecified future, after some sort of non-descript social collapse has left the inner cities inhabited only by freaks, a group of frat boy jerks decides to play a hazing prank that involves them driving into the heart of the city where they are stranded and under attack by post-nuclear punks. Can they make it back to the suburbs? Who cares?

An intriguing, although unsuccessful, meshing of different ideas, "Future-Kill"'s biggest problem is that its various concepts don't gel. In fact the Troma-esque frat-boy comedy at the very beginning of the movie is so jarring (and gross) that it almost seems like part of a different film altogether. The rest of the flick follows suit.

Only high points: Seeing how many times you can spot the microphone boom in the camera shot, And the cool H.R. Giger cover art on the box, which incidently gives the illusion that this film has some class. It doesn't.

oh good grief...get over yourself...this is not that bad at all...when was the last time YOU tried something as difficult as making a film??...yeah..that's what I thought...I give it @ least a 6...have you ever seen WATERWORLD...or ISHTAR...or PEARL HARBOR????....right...and they cost MILLIONS...these kids did great stuff w/ about a buck and a dime...so back off monkey-boy and go back to your almost-worn-out Jenna Jameson collection...

I thought the sequences where the frat boys are being chased were pretty creative and the lighting was very good when you know they didn't have enough money to get all those huge lights they use on the A films...and the punk sequences weren't bad either, considering this was shot in 1984!!! ...I thought a bunch of the punks were real people...you KNOW they didn't have enough money to put all those people in those cool costumes...so they must have brought them from home...

FUTURE-KILL! Holy crap, I revisited this one last night and was shocked at the disconnect between my childhood memories of it and reality. I thought it was cutting edge stuff at the time, but it is just awful. The setting is a futuristic Austin, TX (I assume, they never say) where a gang of painted up punks protest nuclear armament. A bunch of college frat guys head down to the ghetto to play a prank on them, but end up running into radiation-mutated Splatter (Edwin Neal, TCM's Hitchhiker). Splatter kills pacifist anti-nuke leader Eddie during a scuffle and blames it on the frat boys. After that, the film is THE WARRIORS with a $50 budget as they kids try to escape and get help from sympathetic punks including Dorothy Grim (Marilyn Burns). From 30-year-old frat guys to laughable punks, director Ronald Moore gets everything wrong. One would think the re-teaming of CHAINSAW stars Burns and Neal would lead to some interesting moments, but the film has none.

I'm sure I saw FUTURE KILL for the same reason as most people: the awesome poster by HR Giger. And like everyone else, I was disappointed to find that the movie could not live up to the poster (Giger said that director Moore actually begged him to do it). When I first saw this, at the age of 14, I thought it was the worst movie ever made. I'd still think that if I hadn't seen certain movies on MST3K since then.

The plot has a bunch of annoying college boys driving into the "mutant city" to kidnap a gang-leader for their fraternity. That's when they meet Splatter (Ed Neal), a mutant/cyborg/psycho who kills the gang leader and blames it on the frats as an excuse to hunt them down and seize power. The rest of the movie consists mostly of chases. A hand-full of frats try to battle their way out of mutant city (which I think is supposed to be LA, even though it was made in Texas). There's some pseudo-political stuff about the frat boys' society being pro-nuclear weapons and the mutant-society being anti-nuke. There's talk of how Splatter became a freak due to radiation. Most people develop cancer from radiation, but splatter just shoots spikes and slaughters girls. Yeah, that makes tons of sense. At one point, our heroes rescue a mutant girl from two pro-nuke police, and she shows them "how the other half lives." The other half, it turns out, are all punk kids who dance around to a bad 80s pop-band. So our little epic is both dumb and dated. That's really all there is to it. Frat boys running around in messed up buildings while guys who look like bikers try to kill them... Oh, and it's the future.

I don't think you'll have any doubt about why Ron W. Moore never made another movie. This thing is a real stinker. If you like Giger, buy his books (they have the poster without the horrors of the movie), or just watch ALIEN again. FUTURE KILL is a waste of time that nobody needs.

If this description makes the picture sound good, there's another crappy movie that does the same thing, only bigger and better: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK. It's crap, but it blows FUTURE KILL off the screen.