Bad Meaning Good case study #7: 'Future War'

Tuesday, November 24 2009

In April of 2009, myself and DJ Intel launched the 'Bad Meaning Good' monthly movie event at The Burlington in Chicago (which takes place on the first Monday of every month). The idea behind the night is to screen cult classics, exploit movies, unintentional comedies and every other kind of film we collectively decide is so bad that it's actually good. In the ongoing search for the perfect 'Bad Meaning Good' film I've decided to take on a weekly (or AT LEAST once-per-week) blog entry in which I'll review, summarize and rate bad movies of every variety imaginable. The goal is to reach somewhere in the range of 75-100 posts within a year, at which point I'll look for a place to publish a first volume of 'Bad Meaning Good' reviews in book form. Stay tuned...

---

Bad Meaning Good case study #5:
'Future War' (dir. Anthony Doublin)

Summary:
The mere prospect of attempting to provide an explanation for a film with a plot as convoluted and stupid as that of 'Future War' is enough to send a person's head into a tailspin of disappointment and personal regret over the wasted time required to do so. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't sitting here knee deep in existential despair concerning the anticipation of my attempts at filling the blank page that I am so regrettably staring down at this very instant. But alas, I have entered into a personal contract with the world to do so and it is my duty as someone who has indeed seen this... this THING, to see this review/warning through to completion and thusly, do my part as a world citizen and conscientious human being. To not do so would be savage. That's what I tell myself at least. It makes me feel better.

So... The movie: 'Future War' is about cyborgs from the future who have enslaved humans on a space vessel and are seemingly wandering about in space for no good reason other than to just sort of function as villains for the movie's sake alone (we're led to believe they enslave humans solely because they're lazy and don't want to do shit for themselves). One particular slave, a sort of Van Damme-lite played by Daniel Bernhardt, escapes from their clutches on a mini space pod and lands himself in current day L.A. His arrival on Earth is no get out of jail free card though, as he's being pursued by an evil cyborg with a dinosaur "tracker" in tow (an evil cyborg with a fuck-off, shit-storm rat's nest of a mullet, I might add). You see, the cyborgs have traveled BACK in time in order to capture dinosaurs and then train them to be trackers of humans in the future, mainly because that's OBVIOUSLY the efficient way to go about this sort of thing but also because, you know, Jurassic Park had just come out and it would be like, cool to have dinosaurs in the movie and shit.

From there, this space stranger on the run comes into contact with a reformed, ex-prostitute/former drug addict undertaking the novitiate (nun school, as it were) and undergoing something of a vague crisis of faith. The two are thrust into the dangerous immediacy of the situation and have to take up arms with the various halfway house denizens, crooks and gang folk from the woman's past in a not-so-compelling fight for survival. Amidst all this drama, we're subject to a lot of long, lingering conversational scenes that drag the movie along like a clunky, dead thing's corpse. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough one-liners to go around. To quote 'Fear Of A Black Hat', this movie "was like dookie on the street, it just sat there and stank."

How 'Bad Meaning Good' is it?:
The conversation pretty much starts and ends with the ridiculous amount of forced perspective photography used in this film. The fact that the production was making use of pint-sized, rubber dinosaur props required that a lot of not-so-tricky camera work be employed to frame the dinosaurs in such a way that made them look significantly larger than they actually were. There are often shots of, say, a dinosaur's head popping into the upper right corner of the frame and the actors throwing things at it from the bottom left corner, giving it the vaguely effective illusion that the dinosaur is actually large. I can't lie, the effect is not without its charms. It often looks absurd beyond belief and can be laughably ridiculous in some cases but ultimately becomes more than a little bit tiresome in due time.

... And so does the reliance on cardboard boxes. There are so many goddamn cardboard boxes in this movie that, no joke, there are two different people cited as 'Box Wranglers' in the film's credits. The opening chase sequence appears to send the main character and the cyborg pursuing him into some sort of pre-arranged labyrinth of neatly stacked cardboard boxes and ends with the two more or less throwing cardboard boxes at each other... To death.

Where the movie gets fun is when the sister and her friends begin to rally the local street gangs in an attempt to do battle with the cyborgs. In adopting a generic "street" tone, the dialog becomes somehow even more labored than it already was and the movie begins to look something like the kind of D.A.R.E. PSA-turned-unintentional comedy that we all found laughable in junior high. Believe me when I tell you that watching cartoonish, early 90's rap video-styled hoods high five each other after a therapeutic session of dino-blasting with high-powered assault rifles is every bit as awesome as it sounds. I also don't imagine it's much of a stretch to suggest that as a mere historical precedent, this is probably the only time you'll ever see such a bunch of mock gangstas search for plastic dinosaurs through drainage systems in LA but you know... Stranger things have happened.

The movie was also infamously spoofed on a popular episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and frankly, was made far more viewable in its comic skewering than it is as a stand alone feature. If you're gonna attempt to sit through it, you'd be far better off going that route because all things considered, this movie was mostly just an awful piece of straight-to-video, early 90's dreck. It's a truly bad piece of cinematic shit but an inoffensive one nonetheless and in the words of Crow T. Robot of MST3K: "It’s not the future, and there isn’t a war, but you know me; I don't like to complain.”

'Bad Meaning Good'-O-Meter:
5.0/10

Check out the trailer here.

... And here's some of the MST3K action:

Tags: Bad Meaning Good, Bad Meaning Good Case Studies

Post Comment

Name (Optional):

Comment:

Comments