Future War

My local Wal-Mart has $5 DVD bins. While I worked there, I used to buy some. Sometimes you can find classics, hard to find comedies, and a bunch of action films you've never heard of (but more recently you can get the whole Rambo trilogy). Well, I decided to take risks on buying some of the films. A lot of them weren't that bad, and definitely worth the $5. Then I found "Future War"...it had super cool looking cyborg graphics on the cover...so I bought it. I like schlock films, but this is even beyond schlock. I've seen better dinosuars in silent films, and for 1995, these dinos don't even hold up to them let alone "Jurassic Park" (of which they used raptors...very bad raptors in Future War). The cyborgs are push overs, and I can't even think of any worse looking cyborgs to compare them with! The story is also a bit funky. The woman who finds the escaped slave is an ex-gang member/drug person who's becoming a nun. Teamed up with her old friends and making an alliance between the local gangs (nuns and gang members and druglords don't mix-I'm sorry, I just can't see it) to fight the cyborgs and their raptors (the raptors disintegrate after they die). The cover art looks cooler than anything in the film. If this film was made during the 1960s-1990, the effects could almost be forgiven-but 1995!! This film is negative schlock, schlock wouldn't even touch this film. Troma wouldn't even touch this film! Yet I have a feeling, that if somebody wanted to-they could remake this and turn it into a modern hit. Sure, you'd have to improve nearly everything-but it can be salvaged. If you watch this, then watch T2. You'll laugh that such a film was made 3 years after T2-or fully appreciate T2.

A race of evil cyborgs kidnap humans from Earth's future to use as slaves, and take dinosaurs from the past to use as trackers. One of their slaves, the Runaway, escapes and makes his way to present-day Los Angeles. There he must fend off the cyborgs and their trackers, the police, and the government, befriended by a prostitute-turned-nun who runs a halfway house. Why would ANYONE in a modern time like 1997 make a stinker like THIS!?!?!?!?!? With actors that are as wooden as a cigar store indian, a script that was written by the director's 4-year-old son, a camera that was stolen from a burning pawn shop, poverty-row monster effects that were achieved by holding plush dino toys in front of the screen, and to top it off, a (once successful effects-man) director that thought making this crap would make them famous. ONLY watch the MST3K version!

The thing about watching direct-to-video movies is, just when you think you've seen the worst, you see something even worse.

But it's going to be hard to top *Future War*.

It plays like someone had access to a couple of cyborg costumes, a couple of dinosaur hand puppets, and a guy who looked vaguely like Jean-Claude Van Damme, and decided to make a movie around them.

If he had only had decent actors, literate scriptwriters, and a competent director, he might have really had something.

It's a shame, too, that I couldn't like this movie at least a little; it attempts (though badly, of course) the sort of sympathetic portrayal of Christianity that I wish more *real* movies had.

This movie hurts....it hurts to watch, it hurts to analyze, it hurts thinking about this movie. Think of a cross between a Timecop, Kickboxer, Land of the Lost and there's your movie. Earth is heaven, guy runs away from dinosaur sock puppets, nun hits him with car, captors dressed up in cheap space suits, and plenty of bad acting. Lots of kicks and punches are thrown and Jean Clod Van Dumb loses his shirt more times than a dry cleaner (final scene at the end is hilarious). Very bad sets, a inordinate amount of cardboard boxes, and no plot to be found whatsoever will leave you wondering why this piece of trash was made. The characters are so lame you have no motivation to cheer for anyone, good or bad. Lots of kicks, YAs and super-imposed images to make any viewer checking themselves at the local sanitarium. Also, don't miss the exciting advenutures of Fred Burrows!

This film was featured on the cult television show, Mystery Science Theater 3000. It is also very bad and I have to say that it is almost too bad. A film that seems to try and combine the Terminator series with Jurassic Park it fails doing either in any good way. Once again, it just seems too bad. More like one of those awful Terminator ripoffs combined with the Carnosaur dinosaur puppets...yes, they are the same dinosaurs used in that cheesy film, but that film was still better than this one! There is just too much bad going on in this one! Wounds that appear, disappear and reappear! Cyborgs that start out having white faces, but that is seemingly ditched mid-scene! A credit in the opening sequence that notes a special appearance by someone most people who have watched thousands of films most likely never heard of! It just screams suck at every turn! I would normally try to find some merits, but I cannot as this film seems to have been made purposely bad! The film Werewolf was bad, but it seemed like they were at least trying in that one and even had a recognizable star or two. Here we have Robert Z'Dar who has his moments, but here you barely recognize him except for his large face!

The story has a spaceship flying through space and a smaller ship flies to earth. On it is a man who must flee a dinosaur and then fights a cyborg and then gets hit by a cussing nun! Soon she becomes entangled in his problems as dinosaurs start eating the local citizens and cyborgs are chasing after the guy she hit! She turns to her gang of plaid wearing gang members and they take one final stand against the dinosaurs in the driest sewers ever, complete with wooded ceilings and ladders! Will she become a nun? Will our hero become a counselor? And will the film ever explain why it is easier to kill dinosaurs and cyborgs with knives, poles and nets than it is guns?

This movie made for a really good episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Too good. I almost think after watching it multiple times that it was purposely made bad in the hopes of being riffed by the show. There is just too much to joke about going on, even Manos did not have as many slow pitched softballs as this film for the gang on the satellite of love to hit out of the park. There are so many they could not even make fun of it all! The film was made in 1994 so MST3K was well known then and probably at its height. So I just can see makers purposely making a horrid film in the hopes it would be riffed because my guess is that the movies that are riffed get an up tick in sales. I don't know if I am correct, but the movie just seems to horrible and to easy to riff.

So there you go, I just think at no point did anyone think they were making anything but a very bad movie. Which is why I could not give this thing more than a one. The nun sub story was abysmal and she was not attractive, the gore was limited and what could be Jean Claude Van Damme's stunt double is annoying. The fight at the end was idiotic and there is just not a whole lot of good one could find here. I guess it was nice they found some more uses for those Carnosaur dinosaurs.