A Violência do Futuro

I picked up Future Kill because of the Giger artwork on the box and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre alumni in hopes that it would be good crappy film (you know, like Ghoulies 3). What I got was a hybrid of genres, and something that I had already seen when I was younger. Look at the storyline: A group of teens running from a gang in the city because they have been framed for murder. It wanted to be a futuristic version of the Warriors so bad (it even starred someone who was featured in The Warriors). It's certainly no Warriors or anything to write home about, but it's not as bad as you'd think. With no budget whatsoever the filmmakers actually made a credible feature. It never once gets boring and the characters are fun to laugh at. What was up with the beginning though? It's like they were trying to make the next Porky's and then realized that the movie was titled "Future Kill." It doesn't really fit with the rest of the flick. I couldn't really decide whether the movie was sci-fi, horror, or comedy, but it does star Edwin Neal and Marilyn Burns from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and features Bill Johnson who played Leatherface in TCM 2. With that cast, how could it not be a horror movie? But the real question is, why is one of the alternate title Night of the Alien?

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.

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...