Future War is really a feel good movie. Oh, to put it another way, Future War is a movie to show manic depressants convinced they can’t do anything
right to lift their self-esteem. Combining a pungent arsenal of Cream
O’Failed Stuntman acting, kickboxing ad nauseum, one of cinema’s all-time
limpest plot devices, and Robert Z’Dar’s face, this movie does for the
action/adventure genre what Meatloaf does for the advertising division of
Right Guard™ deodorant. Our main character is a castoff from Jean-Claude
Van Damme’s school for torturing movie audiences who escaped from another
planet where he was forced into slavery. Does that make sense? If it does,
see if it does after this. Cyborgs from the future went back in time to
get humans from Earth to do their work and went back even further to get
dinosaurs to keep the humans in line. You may ask yourself (in your best
Andy Rooney impression if you’d like), “why don’t they just build cyborgs
to do the work instead of all this nonsense?” If you concluded “because
they wouldn’t have had anything to make a crappy cyborg movie about” then
you not only deserve a pat on the back but also a Nobel Prize in preventive
medicine for discovering the cure for crappy cyborg movies as well as
putting Albert Pyun out on the street.
The reason for the harvesting of humans is because the cyborgs don’t have
opposable thumbs. Allow yourself no more than 10 seconds to ponder this.
Allow yourself as much time as you want to laugh at this as a plot device.
I could go off right now on this absurd concept, but I know another guy
who is even more pissed off by this explanation. So, in a new feature,
here’s my good buddy Brother Ragnarok to discuss the merits of sophisticated
beings of the future not having thumbs.
Activate Remote Reviewer Beacon. Transmitting... Hey all, Brother
R here. So no thumbs. Right. Let's talk about that, shall we? Well,
one day the director, writer, and producer were sitting around discussing
their plans for the movie you are currently enjoying a review for. Says
Anthony Doublin, "We must have mute kickboxing action, and dinosaurs!"
Says David Huey, "But...HOW!?" Says the redoubtable Doublin, "The evil
cyborg villains it took us two minutes to rip off from the Borg in our
meeting last week will have...NO THUMBS! The master race will be too busy
conquering worlds and suchlike that, having been really tired from creating
all the really complex components of their cybernetic likenesses, they will
rest on the Seventh Day instead of making a small effort to program an
assembly line to make a little jointed stick with a rubber grippy bit at
the end." Says Huey, "But isn't that kinda...dumb? Do they really need
a reason? I mean, couldn't they just have dinosaurs and kickboxing slaves
because they though it'd be nifty?" "Fie on thee!" retorts Doublin. "Thee
with no vision! See you not how sophisticated having no thumbs is? How
much more efficient it is taking innumerable years perfecting time travel
to enslave two entire species from the past of a galaxy far far away than
to make that one last little bit of plastic that would mean you'd have to
hold your own gun? Unthinkable! Our master race is beyond that! We will
weed out the infidels with thumbs and return the world to purity! HEIL
HITLER! HEIL HITLER! ZIG HEIL!!!!" With that, Doublin hacks off his own
thumbs with a paper slicer and runs screaming from the room. "Uh...okay,"
says Huey. So shaken were they by Doublin's treatise that they went ahead
with the mind-boggling plot device, oblivious as to how, besides it being
really dumb, it would never work because wouldn't you need thumbs to build a
galaxy-spanning empire of battle cruisers and time machines anyway? Or
did they build those with their super-strong prehensile roboweiners which
then became defective and revolted necessitating their destruction and
with them went the last hope of the cyborg master race being able to pick
things up? How about clenching a screwdriver in those cyber-butt cheeks?
Little socket wrenches that come out of ports in the nipples? No? Just
the thumb thing and the dinosaurs then? Okay.
To follow up, I did some fact checking on the cast and crew. Anthony
Doublin was arrested in Prague in the fall of 1997 for walking around
the streets dressed like Hitler and blabbering some silly nonsense about
people with no thumbs. When officials searched his flat, they discovered
four hundred and twelve pounds of pure cocaine, seven Cabbage Patch dolls
with paper cutouts of Don Knots' face making the surprised "O" expression
stapled over their...private areas (the mouths on each of the cutouts had
been removed as well, and there were deep punctures in the dolls, authorities
suspect something icky), one copy of Luis Bunuel's An Andalusian Dog, and a
cage containing a very distraught chicken covered with shaving cream.
Doublin was executed later that year after several officials viewed Future
War and decided, I quote, "Well, it's not really genocide or even a little
bit of murder, but it's pretty dumb. Fuck it, let's whack the silly bastard
anyway."
Okay, back to Earth. Where the refugee, simply referred to “The Runaway”
in the credits, kick boxes a peaked-in-high school cyborg sent to retrieve
him and kills his pet dinosaur, or dinosaur puppet, which is equipped with
an exploding collar which causes it to explode once it is killed. The
Runaway, who will from here on out be referred to as John Claud Vann Dammme,
hooks up with Sister Ann, an ex-hooker/drug dealer turned nun and her
generously proportioned friends who run a shelter for those in need of
sheltering. While with Sister Ann John Claud exposes the exposition. Where
he comes from, Earth is Heaven and he’s familiar with our Bible. He
explains the thumb thing (see above if you have a habit of reading reviews
middle first) and why in God’s name he could only grunt yesterday but
speaks fluent-yet-foreign accented English today. Meanwhile, the dinosaurs,
or puppets if you prefer, are attacking homeless guys indiscriminately and
coming after our heroes as fast as a forced perspective puppet with tiny
arms and an exploding collar can. Our plucky dinosaur fighters are derailed
when Jean Claud gets arrested after saving the collective ass of a whole
S.W.A.T. team (not that S.W.A.T. team, it must have stood for Sodomized
With Anal Trauma) from the dinosaurs. He’s taken in for questioning unaware
that they are being closely followed by the Cyborg Master. Who is the
Cyborg Master? If having the sun blotted out by a guy’s face made you guess
Robert Z’Dar you get a cookie and a date with Sister Ann ( though she wanted
me to tell you that if you want penetration it’s going to cost you). You
know captain, that reminds me of a conversation we had once which went, in
summary, “Robert Z’Dar’s face is fucking huge!” We salute you, Mr. Z’Dar.
Thank you for teaching us to laugh again, at love.
Our non-big faced hero escapes after Z’Dar kicks L.A.P.D. ass and Van
Dammme drapes an exploding dinosaur on him and hooks up with Sister Ann
(don’t feel ripped off, he had to pay extra for penetration, too) and
her alien-fighting brigade which consists mostly of a local gang, some
fat guys, and a fat guy in a local gang. They head to some sort of cavern
which might have been a water treatment plant and have a showdown with
some dinosaurs and a rejuvenated Z’Dar. Some puppets get killed and some
crappy models are exploded before they escape and our kickboxing astro-slave
has saved the day in time for Sister Ann to take her final vows so as to
get her to a nunnery. How much Mother Superior had to pay for penetration
is never discussed, but at the time they were on tour so it’s not really
important. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about go to your
local non-Sam Goody CD store and look up Mother Superior. You won’t be
sorry. As I’m being forced at chin-point to return to Future War, guess
who sticks his big chin in Sister Ann’s nun ceremony? Z’Dar gets fitted
with an exploding collar, blows up and that’s the end. Don’t miss the
appearing/disappering chest wounds and our hero (no, not Z’Dar) “losing”
his shirt in battle. That’s the end. That’s the end of the plot synopsis,
I should say, let us move on to the gripe symposium.
First off, this movie didn’t take place in the future and there was no war.
Why didn’t they just call it Early 90s Terminator Ripoff? Second, this
movie may or may not have been edited by a blind rock by the way it looks,
though I guess it gets D.I.Y. credit for covering up the lack of good blood
with bad editing. What blood we do get to see pretty much consists of some
slaughterhouse guts placed here and there. Next on my gripe itinerary is one
that’s been on my mind for a while. How much kickboxing does any one movie
need? If there is an inherant amount of acceptable kickboxing, then Future
War squares it and multiplies the answer by the circumfrence of Robert Z’Dar’s
chin. Keep in mind the fact that I have no idea how the amount of kickboxing
in Future War compares to that of other movies. All I know is that I was
ready to kickbox Ragnarok’s DVD player after watching this movie. That said,
I’d actually have to cast Daniel Bernhardt, who played The Runaway, as my
favorite kung-fu actor. That’s not saying much. The silver lining to this
fart cloud of a movie is the Z’Dar factor. You can put Z’Dar in any movie
you want and I’ll watch it. He also had my favorite line of dialogue in the
movie. What? Z’Dar didn’t get a line or a thumb in Future War? That’s
exactly my point. After hearing Bernhardt explain the thumb plot point Z’Dar’s
“make noises whenever he walks so people will believe he’s a cyborg” effect
was like reading Tolstoy. Did we learn a lesson from Future War? Yes and no.
A possible lesson would be to stay the hell away from the $5 DVD bin at
Wal-Mart but we were all familiar with this movie from "MST3K". We also
learned to appreciate the work of Albert Pyun in the altogether loathsome
cyborg genre. Stay tuned all you little Z’Dar fans.
Perhaps the new measuring stick
for filmmaking incompetence, Future War is basically what happens
when you eat a good movie, digest and poop, and take your feces and make
another movie. It gets points for Robert Z’Dar and multiple fat guys but
that’s it.
FEEDBACK
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