Future Shock

This film is not a masterpiece and I shall not pretend that it is. However it does offer some surprisingly fresh and effective ideas and is overall and enjoyable watch.

Segment one is surprisingly tense for a film with a clearly tiny budget. The lead actress' performance is strong enough to sustain the segment, the camera-work creates a good feeling of isolation and vulnerability, and the downplayed musical score adds to the sense of dread throughout. This is the simplest short and uses this to its advantage.

Segment two veers into a more darkly comedic tone. It works due to the entertaining performances of the leads and the effectively surrealist atmosphere. However overall this is the weakest segment, mostly due to feeling out of place with the rest of the film.

Segment three is the best, due to its less goofy attempts at dark comedy over the last segment. It actually offers a fairly entertaining and in depth character study and offers some fairly complex ideas on the nature of mortality. The writing is good, the acting is solid and the humorous moments are well integrated.

Overall I was very impressed by this simple yet effective anthology. Its low budget charm and snappy writing really created an enjoyable tone for this one, and I highly recommend it, despite its quirks.

FUTURE SHOCK is complete garbage although it definitely had potential. Certain scenes are great but I was turned off by the whole virtual reality thing and by some of the incredibly bad acting. The actor that played Dr. Langdon looked like the late actor Michael Landon and I thought that the character name was actually Dr. Landon. Coincidentily, Michael Landon died in Malibu, California where some of this movie was made. The best actor in this sad film had to be James Karen who gave yet another hillarious performance as Kefka, the mute boss. Overall, not BAD BAD, but not as good as it could've been. I strongly believe that it was the whole virtual reality thing that sunk FUTURE SHOCK into future schlock-**1/2out of****.

This movie is a compilation of three separate movies. The last one is "Mr. Petrified Forest", which is the Masters Thesis film of Matt Reeves, which he completed for his Masters in Film at USC. He fund raised, wrote, directed, cast, edited, etc., every aspect of "Mr. Petrified Forest". Subsequently, USC sold his Masters Thesis film, which was incorporated into this theatrical, commercial film. No one connected with "Mr. Petrified Forest" received any monetary compensation, including the actors, crew, director, writer, editor, etc,. when it was incorporated into this commercial film. USC should not have sold it!!!! Perhaps there are copyright infringement issues. It is an outrage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I knew FUTURE SHOCK's packaging was a scam, as "The Roommate" short subject has made the "tournee" circuit a couple of times since 1987. However, this three-part anthology is still pretty good.

"The Roommate" is by far the best segment. Bill Paxton excels as a squirrely, abrasive con artist who barges his way into a roomie relationship with meek apprentice coroner Scott Thompson. He rips off, torments, and abuses Thompson. Thompson tries to kill the unwelcome visitor, with ironic results. The black humor keeps the film from being a thoroughly unpleasant experience. James Karen has a welcome supporting role as one of Thompson's co-workers.

The least successful entry, "Mr. Petrified Forest," was a USC master thesis and is predictably filled with arty composition and paper-thin sentiment. The title character is a "chicken little" type who waits nervously for a predicted earthquake to hit LA. It never hits, but he falls in love with another paranoid. He tells the story from a heavenly "wait station," as doctors on earth frantically try to revive him from a mysterious accident.

Another examination of paranoia, "Jenny Potter," stars and was written by interesting actress Vivian Schilling. She lives in a Malibu house decked out like a fortress, with silent alarms and a computerized security system that talks. Her husband (Brion James) leaves her alone one night and her nightmare fears of being attacked by dogs edges into her real world. The episode is scary but pointless.

As you might expect, the weakest link in FUTURE SHOCK is its framing sequence, in which doctor Martin Kove interviews each segments' protagonists. He uses a funky strobe light thingie to hypnotize them and lead into each of the stories.

The other reviewers have gotten close, but they've missed it: This movie takes two entirely unrelated short films (I'd guess student projects), adds them together with writer/"actress" Vivian Schilling's newly-filmed segment, and links them all with a weak "virtual reality" device plotline. So the producers only had to shoot a third of a movie. And the bonus is, they get to claim that Bill Paxton is a major player in the film. As far as the segments, I particularly enjoyed the "afterlife" one with the guy who chokes on olives, if memory serves. Still, the other reviewers sum it up pretty well: it's bad. Very bad.