El mundo que viene

I too, saw this excuse for a movie in theaters expecting it to be a remake of the 1936 classic. Talk about major lunch-bag let down! The only worth while event of sitting through this insult was listening to the wise-cracks and jocularities coming from the audience. Watching Barry Morse (a fine actor) humiliate himself with contortionistic facial expressions related to an attack of hemorrhoids was laughable! Jack Palance(another fine actor)didn't fair any better with his army of robots looking like walking garbage cans! All in all a complete waste of time. Possibly twenty years from now this might become a cult classic or mercifully disappear out of cinematic history!

Makes a great double feature of bad films paired with Space Mutiny(1988)or Starship Invasions(1977). I remember there being some hype for this film in Starlog and other genre mags of the time, and that Barry Morse was headlining it(along with Jack Palance and Carol Lynley) and that Sylvia Anderson(Space:1999, UFO) was producing it and involved in aspects of the design. Well, Anderson walked early on, signing herself off it, but not after signing on Barry Morse from her Space:1999 haunts, to star in this. The film was to be made in Canada and, to feature some "top line" visual effects and miniatures by Brick Price.It's ghastly from the get-go. A disco-inspired theme song opening the show(this was 1979) and we go to a moon base which just happens to be a futuristic(then)office building outside of Toronto and we're told in that casual, expository way, that the "earth-like" conditions outside the windows, complete with clouds and trees, are all inside a dome with a "sunsphere" providing a familiar view for the people inside. How convenient. Barry Morse puts on an American accent for this, not his familiar grandfatherly British accent. Jack Palance plays "Omus" an evil kind of guy(he played the same kind of "evil guy" in an episode of Buck Rogers about the same time) who has these walking-garbage can robots who look totally ridiculous and awkward. He also laughs, for no apparent reason only that he's amazed himself, which isn't hard. All of the costumes of the young people look like they just roller boogied to the moon. The same corridor is used again and again for "chase" scenes-they just change directions. The miniatures are pretty bad-fighters that have model parts of the "K-7 Space Station" on the front end. The FX work is largely some glitzy animation that's passable at first, but just gets more annoying. Landing on another planet, it looks just like some empty lot or tract of land in Canada. Supposedly this was to be a much more ambitious production, with Mike Trim having done some production drawings and miniatures made in England-that all went when Sylvia Anderson walked off it. In fact, that's what Morse was led to believe when he signed on. (I read where he said he was taken aback at the cheapness of everything, but honored his professional commitment and did his job and finished it, as he agreed to do.) Harry Allan Towers (no slouch at cheap films)came in and the quality was replaced by the thrift of just getting the film done. I admit I was pretty shocked it was so low-budget. I'd accepted that it was a Canadian film, for the time, and figured it would be lower end, but this took the cake.

Absolutely Awful! This movie has nothing in common with the 1936 classic movie with a similar title. I wonder what the "pitch" was like, "Let's remake one of the most important early science fiction movies written by of the great early science fiction writers.....but we are going to change everything but the title." Think of it as "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" remade and set in metropolitan Chicago about a young advertising executive, his hectic life, and a loveable dog named "Nemo"

"The Shape of Things to Come" is the second screen adaptation of the H.G. Welles story, after the 1936 film "Things to Come". It stars a few veterans (Jack Palance, John Ireland, Barry Morse, Carol Lynley) and two Canadians who were then up-and-comers: Nicholas Campbell ('Da Vinci's Inquest') and Anne-Marie Martin ("Prom Night" 1980). Bright young Jason (Campbell) and his scientist father (Morse) venture into space with Kim (Martin), the daughter of a senator (Ireland), in a future setting where robot wars have decimated Planet Earth and humans live in colonies on the moon. Their self-appointed mission is to throw a monkey wrench into the plans of nefarious villain Omus (Palance), a power hungry would-be dictator who once studied under Morse.

This one does seem to be mostly disliked, and the reason why is clear early on. This was obviously done on a limited budget, and the filmmaking (direction by Canadian born George McCowan, "Frogs") definitely lacks distinction. This is admittedly minor league fare with low grade effects, and is an unmemorable adaptation of the story, but this viewer found it impossible to actively hate it. It's all appealing enough, ultra cheap effects and all. Even the robot characters, as extremely clunky looking as they are, are endearing in a hearkening- back-to-sci fi-B-pictures-of-the-50s sort of way. The main robot character "Sparks", voiced by Greg Swanson and performed by Mark Parr, is endearing.

Palance and Ireland are just picking up paychecks here. Both Lynley and Martin are simply gorgeous. Martin and Campbell are very sincere and likable. Morse has more to work with than his other veteran co-stars and gives the best performance in the movie.

If you're a die hard science fiction buff, you may want to see it for completions' sake.

Five out of 10.

In the future, human race sets up colonies on the Moon, when Earth becomes uninhabitable. A madman decides to destroy the Moon colonies with his robots and automated ships and only three people and their robot dog can stop him.

Wow. In the future, the world will be threatened by a cheesy-dialogue Jack Palance in a stupid cape! Who can save us? Awful robots so dumb they couldn't even get a job on "Battlestar Galactica"? It sure seems that way, doesn't it? Thanks to Blue Underground, you can see this film in the finest quality possible. Now, there is nothing they can do to make the movie any better, but at least it will look and sound good while you make fun of it.