| |||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||
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, 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 thatif 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. We’re creeping up on our Golden Wonderful Spunk-Worthy 50th Review! I promise something special, and it sure as hell won’t be this movie.
Brother Fistula: 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. 1.5 Brother Ferox: I don't care how many godfucking times Ragnarok tells me I've seen this flick... I HAVEN'T, and I won't fucking comment on it because of that. I mean, if I had a few fucking thumbs of my own, I'd pop the fucker in and check it out - but fucking NO, I don't have any thumbs any more since Ragnarok freaked out and decided to demonstrate the "no-thumbs-having thing" on me. Fucking asshole. He can burn in hell forever with my thumbs. Fucking dick. [xxx]
Brother Ragnarok: Er...right. This movie. Well, everything I feel about Future War can pretty much be summed up by reading my little piece about the thumbs thing. I would feel more inclined to forgive had the producer not gone on a rampage on IMDB about how good this movie is and let's see you try to make a movie Mr. Smartypants. Okay. I will. And it'll be better than yours. And all the characters will have thumbs you fucking cock goblin. 1.5
