Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House we're going to be talking about the nineteen ninety one sci fi action movie Future Kick, starring kickboxing champion Don the Dragon Wilson, Meg Foster, and Chris Penn. Interesting cast list there. Now, if you have to look this movie up because you've never seen it or even heard about it,
that wouldn't be a surprising scenario. And the first thing you see in Google results is an exact copy of the poster for James Cameron's Terminator, but with Don the Dragon Wilson's head and upper body replacing Arnold Schwarzenegger's. You might ask yourself, is this movie low budget direct to video track financed by Roger Korman to scavenge off the recent success of gritty R rated sci fi action hits like Terminator, RoboCop and Total Recall. The answer is yes,
it is that, but that's not all it is. Future Kick is both an interesting specimen to dissect if you want to study the anatomy of the cyberpunk tech noir subgenre of the early nineties. More on that in a bit, but Futurekick is also genuinely a hoot. There is, in my opinion, an absolutely delicious DGAF quality that is palpable in the creative decisions here. Sometimes this makes the movie confusing and difficult to follow. Sometimes it makes inspired set pieces,
like the film's energy weapon based blood sport. I think it was called laser Blade. Laser Blade, which, despite what you might assume from that description, is a table game imagine a cross between Hungry Hungry Hippos and Russian Roulette but with lasers. Also leaves you with questions which characters are robots? Are there different kinds of robots in the movie? Like are the Cyberns different from other robots? Is chris Pin a Cybern or some other kind of thing? How
does anything in this world work? Really? And then the big question was it all a dream? The answer is yes, yeah.
I mean, we're slightly getting ahead on the plot here, but I will say that many times it was all a dream. Ending is such a sucker punch and just can make you feel really it can feel like such a cheap move because it just completely devalues everything you just watched, But I did not have that feeling with this film. It maybe by design, maybe by happenstance, or some combination of both. The ending felt like cryptic and thought provoking.
Well or okay, I could see that, but you could also say here, it's like such a cheap move that it transcends, it becomes exquisite. It's like, I can't believe they actually did that.
Yeah, they stick the landing. Somehow they stick the landing, and we can discuss how they managed to perhaps pull this off.
Also, I think we had to do this movie before the end of the year because Rob, did you notice Future Kick is set in the horrifying dystopian future of twenty twenty five? Right, Yeah, what Future Kick predictions come true? We're gonna look and find out.
Yeah, twenty twenty five via nineteen ninety one.
So another note before we get started is one on genre. This is another reason I selected Future Kick for this week. That reason is that it is still November or Noir November, and Rob, I know you enjoy getting into the spirit of a season. So I was trying to think about what film noir might be fun to cover, and I realized we had never really done a deep analysis on the noir influenced sci fi subgenre known as tech noir.
Though I think we've done a number of films that could be classified as such, we've never really looked at the genre itself, and Future Kick is a sparklingly dingy example. I may have talked about this theory of mine on the show before, but I have a general belief that if you're trying to do a literary analysis to understand the anatomy and the soul of a movie genre, you can actually learn more by looking at the schlock within that genre than by looking at the canonically great examples.
And so Future Kick, I think, is going to be perfect in this regard, Rob, do you want to talk about tech noir.
Some Yeah, yeah, let's do it. I do like this idea that in general, you look to the B movies because the best of a particular genre, Yeah, those are going to be, you know, in the stratosphere, But it's the ripoffs and the stuff that follows this is going to be kind of reflect where where all of it lands. Yes, the collective mind of the viewers and the culture.
That's a good way of putting it. Another way of thinking about it is that the canonically great films in a genre tend to be more idiosyncratic actually, and the derivative movies, the b movies, the direct to video shlock, these often manifest more as somebody trying to capture the essence of what they think a genre or marketing category
of story is. And so you see them going like deeper into the heart of it, like what are all the tropes that I need to include, what occurs to them as necessary to have in the story, and what does not?
Right.
So, tech noir is usually described as a genre that combines elements of science fiction and film noir.
Yeah, tech noir can be considered an aesthetic and the subset of the broader cyberpunk genre. So not all cyberpunk is tech noir, and there are probably some cases to be made for tech noir that deviates strongly from cyberpunk classification. Tech noir is noir in the future or a high tech now, while cyberpunk generally involves the street level ubiquitous use of advanced civilization changing technology generally in the future.
But as always, all of this is relative, and good art or just daring art tends to mess up easy categorization, and I'd say that future kick is certainly daring in many ways. It really goes for it.
It may not be original, but it is bold. Yes, it is a kick. And to be fair, I've never thought about that distinction of cyberpunk that way. I think you might be right. For some reason. I always thought of cyberpunk as that which distinctly exhibits the hacker ethos. That cyberpunk is storytelling where the heroes are like outlaws or have some kind of outlaw mentality in this future computer dominated or digital world.
Yeah, I mean that's definitely an accurate read on it as well. Yeah.
But when it comes to tech noir, classic films that people cite as examples of tech noir include Blade Runner from nineteen eighty two The Terminator from eighty four. This is a film in which the term tech noir actually appears as the name of a dance club. In the film, Sarah Connor goes to a club. She calls the police, I'm in a club called tech noir. Actually, I don't know the answer here. I think, though I could be wrong, that James Cameron actually coined the term tech noir to
describe this genre. He was trying to create and used it in the movie.
Hmm. Interesting, I didn't know about that specific connection.
I will be pilloried by listeners if I'm wrong about this, So maybe I am. I should have thought to check beforehand, but that is my assumption for some reason. Of course, another tech noir big one is RoboCop, which we've covered on the show before Total Recall from nineteen ninety and then another big one is the Matrix, kind of late tech noir in ninety nine. So what elements are usually brought over from film noir into tech noir? I want
to argue the following. One thing is character types. Cynical, amoral, or anti heroic protagonists, often a detective, maybe a criminal, fugitive, or some other kind of alienated loaner. These are going to be your most common main characters. Beyond the protagonist stock, character types from film noir also appear in these sci fi settings. You'll get versions of the hard boiled detective, the fem fatale, the melancholy angel like we talked about in the last episode on Dark City, the crooked cop,
the heartless assassin, or the button man. And if you want to stretch the genre boundaries of I think in tech noir you also get versions of what you might call the Hitchcocky and bystander. Hitchcock's thrillers are not usually considered film noir, but there's a good bit of overlap, and I think this kind of character also does appear
in noir more strictly defined. But basically, this character is like an innocent, regular person who by accident gets trapped in a dangerous conspiracy, maybe by being mistaken for somebody else, like in North By Northwest, or maybe by being set up as the fall guy in some plot, or by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as in The Man who Knew Too Much or The Thirty nine Steps. And there are actually elements of this with Meg Foster's character in our movie Today. She's not somebody
who goes out looking for trouble. She just happens to be married to somebody who gets tangled up in a tech robot cybern organ harvesting conspiracy.
That's right, Yeah, yeah, Like she's not the melancholy angel. At first, I was wondering if that would be the role she she falls into, but no, no, she's from a different world. She's from Ivory Towers, on the moon and she is forced to descend into the CD underworld of New Los Angeles to try and find out why her husband was killed.
Yeah, exactly so. The regular person who gets sucked into a technological nightmare is a common type of character in tech noir. Sarah Connor, I think, could be another example because she ultimately, you know, it's like she when she first appears and Terminator has no idea that it is her fate to be wrapped up in the fate of the whole human race. It comes as a total surprise to her. Yeah, so you've got these character types from film noir. In tech noir, they usually get a science
fiction twist. Maybe the hard boiled private eye becomes a blade runner, still a type of detective, but one who hunts down and kills rogue replicants. The fem fatale or the assassin might turn out to be a robot or some other kind of altered being. Terms of setting and situation, there's a lot broad over from classic film noir, including gritty urban settings. These stories are almost always set in cities, cities that are dark, gloomy, polluted, hopeless, and filled with
cruelty and crime. Neither genre usually gets out into the country much except in maybe dream sequences or in escape storylines, where the characters like briefly see a way out of the toxic urban maze where they live. Usually they're they're pulled back into the city violently somehow.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, certainly you have some there are examples of particularly I'm thinking of Los Angeles centric noir that does get out into the country a bit. But even then it's there's a distinctive feel to it. You know, there's sort of like, you know, dilapidated rural environments or you know, sort of like the surrounding lands that have been kind of like sucked dry by the by the by the city, that sort of thing.
Yeah, so there, it's not really pristine nature they're going to see. It's more of another type of hell yeah. And then bigger picture, I think these films take place in an unjust universe. There is no feeling of confidence that the good guys are going to win or that people ultimately get what they deserve. Structures of power or hypocritical officials are corrupt, and there's no one you can
depend on for help. One interesting difference is that in classic film noir this view of the world manifests as a I think, a pessimistic read on the present, whereas tech noir is often set in the near future, so it can make that picture of the setting, the polluted, corrupt, treacherous hell of a city, a more literal prediction about the future instead of like a matter of interpreting the
present or emphasizing different things about the present. So obviously tech noir that is set in the future is basically always dystopian. The world has been ruined somehow or is undergoing a terrible.
Decay, Yeah, in the basic sci fi manner, like depicting the ramifications of the terrible choices we're making today or seem to be making today.
Yeah. And of course the plots of both types of movies tend to involve violent struggle, deception, and especially conspiracies.
Now on the we've talked about this before. One of the interesting things about cyberpunk and a lot of technoire is that since it is generally kind of it's all kind of emerging from like the world of essentially the nineteen eighties, I think you can sort of like center it.
There some leakage into the nineties, certainly, but there are a lot of telling aspects of that time that had become kind of just canonical to a lot of cyberpunk like things about the power of corporations, things about rising Japanese influence on the global scale, things like this, as well as also you have these things that are kind of like fossilized remains from thirties and forties noir that have been brought into this kind of updated world, and
so all of this kind of becomes crystallized into this new sort of vision of the future that ultimately has roots in different decades, and then there's always some new spice added to it.
I do like the thing about certain cultural artifacts of the decades where these genres emerge just becoming crystallized in them as part of the style or aesthetics of the genre. I mean, one example would be in the costuming. You know, the costume of the hard boiled detective is very easy to remember. It's like a drab trench coat and a fedora. You know, this might have been actually easier to see as just a type of camouflage for the detective in
a film set in the thirties or forties. It makes them nondescript, you know, they just blend in in the city, and the brim of the hat can quickly hide the face or the eyes. So it's like a way of hiding and blending in. Now, like that is that stylistic choice is retained, but it no longer has that blending in quality. Now it kind of makes people stand out. It looks cool and different.
Yeah, you'll have there are various examples of where you'll see a futuristic setting and there'll be a character that's wearing like a fedora. Yeah, it looks very much, you know, like the typical detective from noir. And it may you know, it feels like an artifact, but it's one we instantly understand. It's a symbol, you know.
Yeah, you know, some of these conventions I think that come into tect noir are just directly imported from film noir. So like in Blade Runner, Decord wears a long tan or brown duster coat. It's like the long coat we think of associating with the detective or also maybe with the western gun slinger. Look. I think they're kind of a blend of the Western gunslinger and the noir detective and deckerd Early and Terminator, the soldier from the Future Kyle Reese, he walks around the streets of la in
a long coat. I don't know if it's technically a trench coat, but close enough. Later tech noir movies, especially the lower budget ones like the movie we're talking about today, develop their own house costuming style, which is one of the most instantly recognizable and often one of the most hilarious signs of this film type, where you get the long black coat, long black trench coat or duster, and the futuristic sunglasses worn in a place that is not sunny.
Future Kick has exactly this uniform, because really, how else could a Cybern dress. It's got to be the long black coat and the sunglasses exactly.
Yeah.
Plenty of scenes where you're like, why is everyone wearing sunglasses? Like this is such a gloomy indoor setting. I will say that was my read until they started playing a laser blade, and then I was like, oh, well, maybe that's why they're wearing sunglasses indoors, because there even signs like do not look directly at the laser blade.
It's eye protection. Yeah, which is really funny because I was gonna make the point that these conventions like the long coat and the sunglasses in technoor movies may have first been used for specific storytelling reasons, Like it wasn't just style, it was related to what happened in the plot. Examples here, Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator needs to cover up his exposed machine eye after he gets injured, which is why you always see him wearing sunglasses towards the
end of the movie. He's not always wearing sunglasses early in the film. It's like after his eye gets ripped out.
Yeah, yes, so everyone doesn't see that he has a robotic eye in there yet and a big grizzly wound around it.
Sorry, so he's wearing sunglasses in the dark, but that's so he doesn't attract attention. And then Kyle Reese the soldier, he wears a long coat to conceal his shotgun. He's hiding a shotgun under there because he knows he's going to meet a terminator. Uh, and so, like they have storytelling explanations early on, but later these these costuming tropes just became a fashion convention. I think because movie makers thought it looked cool, or at least thought it looked appropriate to the setting.
Yeah.
I also think it's funny that this look that appears as early as the late eighties in these B movies and direct to video sci fi films is actually the signature look of one of the biggest mainstream tech noir films a decade later, The Matrix, in ninety nine. Isn't it funny that in the Matrix like this is like one of the biggest and most famous mainstream sci fi movies ever, and they're wearing the ridiculous long black coat
and the environmentally inappropriate sunglasses. It's like that made the jump from direct to video to the biggest movie in the world.
That is an interesting point. Yeah, though, of course within the world of the Matrix, there they are wearing these outfits in their most redous form in an unreal world, in a simulation.
Yeah, and I guess I should also just flag the thematic in character suggestions of wearing these like long coats of the you know, the trench coat and stuff. It isn't just that it looks cool. I think it also brings a closed off energy to the character. It's like a type of armor or a way of hiding within something. This is clearly the case with these you know, unalienated, unconnected closed off detectives going back to classic film noir.
Another visual similarity imported from the classic films to the sci fi variations is high contrast lighting. You know, a lot of playing with unusual on screen light sources and deep shadows. So in classic film noir this might be meeting under a single street lamp at the foggy wharf, and that is replaced in the sci fi versions with meeting under a futuristic pink and blue neon sign for a strip club. And finally, I I wanted to talk a bit about the evolution of themes between film noir
to tech noir. Here's the thought I was having. I wonder if you would agree or disagree with this. Despite the fact that film noir often has cynical, a moral characters operating in a cruel and self interested world, I think you could argue that a lot of these classic stories themselves are quite moralistic. They show a lot of sin and vice, not because they're just you know, decadently reveling in it, but because they are a form of morality play where the audience gets to see how good
people go wrong. They get to see how people are tempted, how their attempts to be righteous can fail, and how they're ultimately destroyed by their greed, lust and duplicity.
Yeah, yeah, I think I think that's absolutely correct. I'm reminded of last year's Weird House Cinema November selection, The Face Behind the Mask from See I think it was what nineteen forty one of Peter Lourie pretty much a pure noir film. Like, it's not sci fi, no no tech noir, it's just straight up classic noir. And I think it's a solid example. This a story in which a cruel and corrupt world ruins a good man and also a woman and a dog. Yeah, mainly the man.
The woman and the dog die because of the man's fall into sin and crime.
Yeah. And you know, one thing I do want to acknowledge is admitting attention in some different things I've said here, Like the idea that a lot of these stories show people ultimately being undone or destroyed by their own sin. That could be somewhat at odds with the other trend I mentioned, which is that in a lot of these stories, the universe feels unjust and irrational and people do not get what they deserve. I guess both of these opposing
strains can be found within the genre. You know, maybe some movies are more like one and others are more like the other, and they both still ring true to the idea of noir. But I think also a common way of resolving the tension within even the same story could be structural within the storytelling, Like the early and middle parts of the story show injustice, randomness, bad things happening to good people, but often by the end the wicked are destroyed in some way by their own iniquity.
Yeah, and then along the way, pretty much everybody looks cool doing it. Yeah, you make it to where, you know, eye catching outfits, they're smoking, there's there's always some some very interesting lighting going on.
Yeah. But so all of that that I was just saying is about classic film noir to the extent that classic film noir is moralistic in nature and interested in studying the wages of sin. I would argue that tech noir is pretty different. It is less focused on the evil that lurks within the human heart and more focused on what systems of technology and other sources of power
outside our control can do to us. So, put another way, tech noir is less about like exploring people's failure to choose between right and wrong, and more about how people can be like trapped and manipulated and coerced by the system, whatever that system is. So like the protagonist shifts from the classic noir film hero of a sinner struggling in a heartless world to in tech noir, they are a cog in the machine.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's that is a good read as well. I mean, it definitely reminds me of some of the key notes in William Gibson's Neuromancer, which of course is a very important cyberpunk text. You know, you have characters whose course in life it seems very dictated by what technology has made possible.
Yeah. Yeah, So to the extent that is a fair characterization, I wonder what that says about the changes in the underlying values of the you know, the people making these stories and the audiences consuming them. It seems to maybe reflect an evolution from a belief in original sin to a belief that that human nature is not fixed. And
maybe that's really the horror. The horror is that we can be controlled and reshaped by forces more powerful than us, and there's no guarantee of salvation from above.
Yeah, yeah, I think so, Yeah, there is there often does feel like there is a large sense of non agency in these these dystopian technoir and cyberpunk worlds. I mean there is agency often in like the sort of you know, street level hacker types that are like fighting
the system and so forth. You know, not to say that, you know, any number of of you know of typical story structures can't be found here, but yeah, a lot of times there is this sense of a lot of characters are just kind of like stuck in the world and you know, there their destiny has been dictated by power structures and technology, and certainly all of that is kind of a valid read on just normal everyday life as well, but it gets accentuated with style in noir
in a way that I don't know, maybe like lessens the burden a little bit, like when we identify with these characters.
Yeah, well, I mean it's actually making me think though about how that's not just the case with dystopian future stories. I mean people, I think, I think it is quite fair to say people in many ways were controlled and manipulated by technology in the nineteen forties. You know, when a lot of these classic noar stories were coming online. It's just like different ways that technology is controlling and manipulating us as time goes on.
Yeah, and I think that's why we keep coming back to them and keep making them, because they continue to read in the same way and in also with slightly different flavor profiles based on the exact form of the current technological anxiety that we deal with.
Now we've just been looking at the genre. I think in maybe in a fairly lofty tone. But the other thing about this genre is that, especially a lot of the schlock examples of it are frankly hilarious. They're the way they deal with these themes can be kind of clumsy and much more centered on like delivering roundhouse kicks and blasting lasers than on you know, really like talking through the themes. Yeah.
Like it made me think of a film that we discussed in the last couple of years, nineteen nineties, I Come in Peace, Oh, Yes, which is I think I think you could definitely classify that as a as a tech noir picture totally. So it's it's if anyone has forgotten it is a movie in which a police officer, Dolph Lundren battles a seven foot tall alien invader who's pushing space druck on everyone. But with that movie, the synopsis pretty much tells you everything you need to know
about it. The speculative elements of the film, it's all there. Future Kick. What I found really interesting about it is that it kind of just overflows with technoar and cyberpunk ideas and barely seems to contain all of them, or you know, to be fair, or even fully utilize all of them.
But there's just there are just a lot.
Of ideas packed into a movie that, as we'll discuss, stars a martial artist and has kick in the name, like the Future Kick. I mean it's like punch kicker or something right, or kick puncher. It just it seems like this movie should be far stupider than it is, and it's not. It's actually like legitimate, like has some interesting world building that's going on, maybe not fully crystallized, but it's there are a lot of ideas drifting about, and I found myself thinking about this one more and I.
Expected Rogers on the phone he needs you to come up with the title in five seconds for his new sci fi action movie, A Future Kick.
It's just so good. All right, Well, well, let's kick it. I did come up with an elevator, which this is basically what I said earlier. But Nancy travels from the ivory towers of the Moon to the cyberpunk sprawl of New Los Angeles to uncover the secrets behind her husband's death. With the aid of the world's last artificial human, she'll uncover a mind blowing conspiracy.
No, I'm almost forgetting some of the details of the conspiracy now, like you were just saying a second ago. The movie really does just kind of pick things up and then put them back down in quick succession.
Yeah, and it definitely does that as far as any conspiracies go, I would. I would also, I think there's definitely some sort of conspiracy going on butt with the Organs Organs and building new bodies, so about vr VR. But then the whole movie is a dream, so it makes all all it turns all the questions upside down. Anyway, All right, let's listen to a little bit of the trailer.
I hate it when you go to the Earth Earth twenty twenty five.
The order was a white female mid twenties.
Human body parts are the hottest commodity. It was a slaughter and lethal games, the cheapest thrill international box office sensation. Don the Dragon Wilson WKA World Kickboxing Champion. Black Belt magazine calls Don Wilson the greatest kickboxer of all time Future Kick. My husband was murdered yesterday.
His heart was cut out.
I did you just go back to the moon.
We'll find something that's not enough. Desperate woman hires an android bounty hunter to track and eliminate her husband's killer by fifty dollars. Don the Dragon Wilson, star of Bloodfist, Meg Foster from Leviathan in Blind Fury, Christopher Penn of Footloosened at close range Future Kick.
All right, now, if you want to go out and watch Future Kick, you can find this one digitally in several places. As far as physical media goes, A Scream Factory put out a Blu Ray double feature that also includes nineteen eighty eight's Crime Zone, and I think it
has two different cuts of Future Kick. I'm not sure what the additional footage or more leaded material may consist off, but Joe, I know you're gonna love the double feature box art for this because it's two different posters, the legitimate release posters for both Crime Zone and Future Shock, and they're both Terminator posters.
They're exactly both Terminator the pose, but the gun and the sunglasses. It's good. Future Kick is more exactly Terminator. Crime Zone is Terminator, but with a helmet added.
Yeah, but still the same profile. Like if you're just a glance at it, you're like, I need more Terminator. Here's the movie for me.
Yeah, some poster first creation.
Yeah, all right, let's talk about some of the folks behind this film, starting with the credited writer and director Damian Klaus.
I have questions.
Oh my goodness, dates unknown, date unknown, birth date unknown, age unknown. This is something of a rarity for us. So not every film career is lived and well chronicled. Some names remain obscure, and some people prefer anonymity. You know,
careers change, names, change identities change fair enough. But this this is the first time we've looked at a film where I can't really tell if we're dealing with a real person or not with the director, Like I can't tell it with one hundred percent certainty if Damian Klaus was a real person, if this is just a pseudonym that no one has ever actually uncovered or bothered to uncover, because we're also dealing with a film that definitely has
a B movie cult flock following, and you know, definitely is an action schlock favorite among many, and I think, as we'll discuss, you know, deserves more attention than it is than it has received. But I could find nothing in the way of even like serious speculation regarding who Damian Klaus was or who who might be wearing this pseudonym, if it is a pseudonym, I have no idea.
I so a couple of lusts abilities, and both of them are beautiful to me. One is that this is a pseudonym, and it's a mystery that we have yet to uncover who the actual director was, or Damian Klaus is a real person, was really the director and this is just the only thing he ever did in the film industry and has no information online about him and just went on with his life. And that's kind of beautiful too, it is.
Yeah, if that is the case, Yeah, more power to whoever this is. But yeah, Damien Klaus has no other film credits of any sort on any platform, and generally
that's not what you see. I mean, if you've spend any amount of time, you know, wasting your parts of your life on Internet movie database and other databases like I have you realized that one generally doesn't just go straight to writing and directing and then cut out like maybe there's a little producing in there, you know, you get your feet wet, or even but even cases where we have an absolute outsider stepping in and making a movie, like we just have a better idea about who they were.
But this is also this is not really an outsider film. I mean, this is not a mainstream film. But this this was like a Concord New World Pictures Roger Corman for it, finance like this is coming to some degree from Roger Corman world.
Right right, which you know for all is you know, perhaps it sends as a as a film producer. You know, it was a serious affair. It was a serious business. It was about making money. And there is a competent people in charge of films and then giving them limited resources with which to make those films.
Right, you had to make it fast and cheap, but there is a structure around you operating.
Yeah, yeah, so I have no idea like one I will note that Lewis Morneault, who went on to direct Carnisaur two and bats. He has an additional scenes directorial credit on this movie. I don't know. I just have no idea, but I'll just say that we do know the name of someone who directed some stuff listeners. If you have the answers right in with them.
Well another thing that may be a clue here. I only know this from reading literally just user submitted internet comments. I've seen some Internet comments of people saying that they went to a screening of this movie where Don the Dragon Wilson was present, and in the comments they say that Don Wilson said that the movie went through multiple directors.
Okay, so maybe we just at the end of the day, Damian Klaus is just standing in from multiple different directors.
Possibly I don't know, or was the last one. I don't know.
It remains a mystery, all right. The other person is credited as a screenwriter, and I'm not sure if she's even credited in the opening credits. I could be wrong on that. I feel like the version I watched didn't have her credited during the opening credits. But I could be wrong here. But we do have screenwriter Catherine Syrian on this picture, who lived nineteen sixty two through twenty twenty two.
Yeah, when we were looking at this movie, initially we were looking her up a very interesting career arc.
Yeah. She was nominated for a Daytime Emmy in nineteen ninety four for Outstanding Directing and a Children's Special for the movie White Wolves A Cry in the Wild too. This was a sequel to a film she wrote in nineteen ninety, which would be A Cry in the Wild. She followed up that first Cry in the Wild film with the screenplay for nineteen ninety Slumber Party Massacre three.
Now brief note here if you've never seen any of the Slumber Party Massacre films, and I myself have not gotten around to watching them myself, I do remember they're kind of like scandalous tatalyzing the title band box arc from when I was a kid and I was always think I always just thought, oh, that looks raunchy. That's not for me, that's that forbidden fruit. But I that of course, subsequently learned that these are films that have a fair amount of feminist cred, despite what the title
in box art might suggest to a young me. Noted feminist author and LGBTQ wright's advocate Rita Mate Brown wrote the first movie.
Yeah, I haven't seen any of these movies, but I've heard, I think, at least the first one described as a semi feminist satire on horror movie conventions.
Yeah. Now, to what extended is successful, I think that has been a point of discussion over the years. But I believe these films have received a bit. They've received some new glances in recent years. I think there was a local here in Atlanta. There was a They actually showed the first one in the theater again. So yeah, I'll have to dip into them at some point at
any rate. Following Slumber Party Massacre three, Syrian wrote nineteen nineties Blood Fists two and nineteen ninety one's Uncaged, a crime movie in which a young Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays a pimp named Sharky Cool, as well as a film titled Dead Space, which has nothing to do with the the excellent video game series, but it starred Mark Singer and also co starred Brian Cranston. I flagged this one. I may want to come back and check it out
at some point, all right. A mix of action and drama screenplays followed, including twenty Twelves, Werewolf, the Beast among Us. We were also chatting about this one. I haven't seen it either, but it has an interesting cast. She also served as a producer and co producer on various films, including this one and then going back to A Cry in the Wild two, which she won the Emmy four.
That was her first directorial credit, according to the movie databases, followed by a string of film and TV directorial credits. They took a hard turn into family Christmas movies. Specifically, I venture to guess these are Hallmark Channel style Christmas films, though I don't know for sure if they actually were made for that channel or market.
I was looking through. I think at least one was okay.
And this transition from you know, kind of like schlocky b movie to family holiday experience is interesting in part because just in the last couple of months we chatted about the exact same thing with fred Olin Ray Oh yeah, you know who went from directing you know, stuff like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers to a slew of mainstream Hallmark style Christmas movies and again, absolutely no shame directed in anyone
engaging in more commercially driven mainstream work. But it makes you wonder, is Holiday Family Fair the new schlock cinema. I don't know.
It just seems like an interesting place to take one's talents. After you've made movies that have you know, severed head effects and exploding gore and all that, then you go to the Christmas films.
Well, it does make you think about the economic engine behind, say, making exploitation films. In the old days, they were like like all right, you know, just get them in, get their eyes on you, like, just bring them in with the like just you know, get some nudity in there, get some blood, you know, something scandalous. And in a way, I'm a the Hallmark Christmas Movie is the exact opposite, but it's so exact that it is like it's twin.
So it almost makes perfect sense that you would have someone like fred ol and Ray successfully skipped from one to the next, because it's just it's like the same beats in reverse or something.
No, I totally see what you're saying. I mean, both types of movies are strongly trope driven. They're very much based on giving people a familiar basket of goods. Yeah, there's just different, different stuff in the basket.
Yeah, all right, let's talk about the cast here, starting of course at the top with Don the Dragon Wilson, whose fighting credentials are listed in the opening credits, like were the title of the film, And I was like why, Like I was assuming some of these actors are also like screen actors guild members or something, but they don't get any of that mentioned, but Don the Dragon Wilson certainly does.
Yeah, I figured I should go into go ahead and say exactly what it reveals. So again, like the first thing you see in this movie is the heavy dramatic music, you know, sounds kind of like a tiny version of the Terminator score black screen, And then before anything else, just a bit of text that says Don the Dragon Wilson World Kickboxing Association World light Heavyweight Champion.
Yeah, yeah, go so yeah, he plays Cybern Walker or
just Walker born nineteen fifty four. I'm not a big follower of legitimate fighting competitions, and I don't want to weigh into any kind of like kicking contest between individuals out there, but it seems like there's a strong case to be made that Don Wilson had a like far greater legit fighting pedigree than some of the other big kickboxing stars of his day on film on either side of the Pacific, Even at least within the narrow confines of professional combat sports.
There were some marketing driven public feuds between Don the Dragon will and Jean Claude Van Dam, for example. From what I can tell, maybe this wasn't actually driven by Wilson himself. I don't want to comment too much because I fully examine this beef, but I did a little
bit of reading about it. It looked like to promote at least one of his upcoming Don the Dragon Wilson films, Roger Corman was sort of like stirring the pot publicly to make Wilson challenge John Claud van Dam, who was some kind of public exhibition fight, you know, claiming like Jean Claude van Dam was overstating his fighting credentials, and I think he didn't respond or something. And anyway, so there was minor beef at least.
Yeah, I mean, and of course, the thing is, at the end of the day, none of it really matters, Like the best fighter is not necessarily going to be the best actor, the most charismatic performer. I mean, you know who would win in a three way fight between Jean Claud van dam Don Wilson in Bolo.
You know, I don't know.
I don't care. I'd love to see it in a movie. I don't really care about seeing what it might have looked like in real life.
Arguing over who would actually win in a fight is one of the lowest forms of verbal dispute.
I agree, but I don't want to make it sound like I'm saying Wilson was all legit fight in zero charisma or anything like that. I think he's great in this, Like, he definitely brings more than just pure kicks to the table, but he brings some great kicks when you can see them. Yea. Some of those kicks are filmed in a very gloomy noir manner, but other times I'm like, yeah, that was a pretty cool looking spin cake.
I'm not going to pretend he's like a powerhouse of emotion, but he brings an almost curious groundedness and soft spokenness like he He does not overact. Let's say that he does not overact like many of the other character actors do here, and a lot of that overacting by other character actors is welcome, and so he's kind of a nice, soft spoken, cool, level headed center around which all that that revolves.
Yeah, and I mean he's ultimately not our protagonist. He's an important supporting character. So I think he's well positioned here and he's not over exposed.
Yeah, but he is given top billing, yes, yes.
So.
Wilson's film roles began with bit parts in the eighties, including a role as a sparring partner in Cameron Crow Say Anything. And that was the same year he starred in the theatrically released film Bloodfist, which spawned numerous sequels. Wilson's name became synonymous with independent action films of the nineteen nineties and also some sci fi titles standing out like this one ninety four Cyber Tracker, and I think
it had a sequel, ninety five's Virtual Combat. And he also crosses over into the Fred Olin Ray filmography, as you pointed out Joe in nineteen ninety seven's Inferno.
Yeah, this seems to be possibly some kind of Bollywood crossover.
Yeah, we were looking at that, like definitely on the production end, and then also some of the actors, like it seems the weird crossover of Fred Olnray and Bollywood.
But another movie I would flag to possibly return to later is ninety five's Virtual Combat. That one is sort of like a cross between the movie we're talking about today and another one we've covered on the show Virtuosity, which is it's like virtual reality, martial arts, cyberpunk dystopia, and just a lot of craziness.
Yeah, and finally ninety five the same year, he also played a gang leader or a character named gang leader in nineteen ninety five's Batman Forever. So that may be like the film that actually got the most eyeballs on Don the Dragon Wilson.
But you mentioned he's not really the main character. The main character is arguably played by Meg Foster.
That's right. She plays Nancy, a good woman forced to follow her to see husband's trail through Webb and sin on Earth, just to come down from the lunar colonies to do so. Meg Foster born nineteen forty eight captivating actress of stage, screen and TV with just striking, striking, pale blue eyes, just absolutely mesmerizing eyes.
Yeah. There is a hypnotizing quality about her which is used to great effect in roles where they play up her creepy side. Sometimes she is like a witch or a you know, an inhuman creepy kind of character. She's not that way here. She's actually like the grounded main character here, which is in some ways going against the type casting from the hypnotic eyes.
Yeah, there's nothing actually, you know, supernatural or ethereal about her. She's not a robot, though there are some virtual reality elements to the story that we might get into later on. But yeah, I've always found her to be a treat in whatever she's in. I think she's maybe even underrated as an actress, you know, whether she's playing a mortal won in a conniving corporate suit or again, an evil witch.
Her TV credits go back to the late sixties and early seventies, and her credits to the seventies and a good bit of the eighties don't go especially weird. You know. She shows up in things like nineteen eighties Carnie eighty three's The Austerman Weekend. But then in the mid eighties things begin to change. She started opposite Wings Houser in nineteen eighty six Is the Wind. This is a This is an interesting film. I watched this one on an
airplane a while back. It takes place in like off season Greek the off season Greek vacation island, and she's there to finish writing a book, I think, and Wingshuser, surprise, surprise, plays a big old creep and starts stalking her, and eventually it's like trying to break in and kill her. And there's also some sort of a supernatural wind going on. It's only going to end up going one place. It's gonna end with wings Houser being blown off the roof
of a house in Greece. But it's it's an interesting film, and in that again, she's also just playing just a normal woman who's put in an abnormal situation.
That's funny because I definitely associate her with horror, sci fi, exploitation genre films generally.
Yeah, I mean this is you know, wings Housers in it, so it's it's a genre film, like he brings the genre with him. But yeah, she doesn't play a character that is in and of itself weird. But in eighty seven she played Evil Linn and Masters of the Universe, the he Man movie in which Dolph of Lungren plays he Man and just has a terrific cast in general.
I have very fond memories of when I saw that on the big screen for the first time, including my disappointment that most of the film does not take place in Eternia but takes place in our world. But I think that's maybe ultimately one of the charming things about it.
That's the way to control the budget.
Yeah, let's Foster's subsequent standout credits include nineteen eighty eights, They Live, eighty nine's Leviathan. She plays the corporate suit in that Blind Fury, the Rugger Howard movie where Rudger Hower plays that what a blind ninja master. Yes, Relentless ninety four is Oblivion. See ninety nine's The Minus Man.
That is a that's a really good one. That's more of a that's more of an independent, cerebral kind of a thriller, but one that I remember being super into when it came out, starring Owen Wilson, and it just has a great cast as well. I think Brian Cox is in that one.
It's kind of a serial killer movie.
Yeah, it is a serial killer movie, but not an exploitive one. Like again, more of a cerebral one. Yeah, worth worth checking out if you've never seen it, but it is a is a slow burn. Jennine Garofflo's in that one, I believe as well. And then of course she pops up in a couple of Rob Zombies more recent films, I say more recent, but one of them is The Lords of Salem, which at this point it's yeah,
it's over a decade, it's twenty twelve. But I think that's, in my opinion, the standout film of Rob Zombie's filmography thus far.
Oh, I think I'd agree with that. I think I may have said this on the show before, but man, Rob Zombie really has a knack for making movies that have a lot of great things about them that overall I can't really enjoy or endoors.
Yeah, I mean, he brings a distinct passion to his projects, and I think The Lords of Salem is probably the one where you see the passion shine the brightest. And of course he always brings in a lot of beloved actors from the past, you know, which you know a lot of these, A lot of directors do, so it's not specific just to him, but he's really good at it. And I thought that Meg Foster had a nice, powerful turn in the Lords of Salem plays one of the witches.
Yeah yeah.
Meg Foster also did a lot of TV, of course, and I just mentioned real quick that she did up here one episodes of Deep Space nine and the later season of Twin Peaks. Now we mentioned that Nancy is
looking for her husband. Her husband, Howard, is played by Jeff Pomerantz born nineteen forty three, another actor of stage, screen, and TV, whose TV credits alone have been quite prolific, everything from Lassie and Hawaii five Oh Back in the Old Days to more recent hits like Modern Family, Fresh Off the Boat, and The Morning Show on Apple TV.
Other films of note includes seventy three's Group Marriage, seventy nine Savage Weekend, eighty one's Nice Dreams, I Believe That's the Cheech and Chong movie, and eighty seven's Retribution.
This guy is kind of interesting. He rides a line. He's like, I'm gonna say, he looks like a sleazy, cheesy, middle aged Paul Newman. And he you keep like going back and forth, like this is this guy a nice character or a bad guy? He's kind of both. Yeah.
He starts off. It seems like he's just gonna be your token supporting character in a B movie, but he ends up feeling a lot more cryptic. He feels he ultimately ends up feeling more like a character from a Coen Brothers film. I don't know that makes sense, you know. I don't want to apply false depth to this character or performance. But I thought he was really good here.
His passion for virtual reality is almost comic and almost interesting. Yeah.
Yeah, like you say, he walks a line. Now, I'm adding this little bit in after the fact here. But I dug deeper to see can I actually find it about anything more about Damien Klaus still turned up nothing. There does seem to be at least one other Damien Klaus credited as a digital effects artist on two nineteen ninety two films, Doctor Giggles and Nemesis, and also as a director on nineteen eighty seven's Playbo Video Magazine Volume twelve. But of course none of this settles anything. This name
continues to remain a cipher. I also dug a little deeper about some of these scenes in Future Kick that seems suspiciously pulled from other movies, And yeah, I looked, with a little help from Apocalypse Later film review and Moria a film blog I was able to get a more complete list of the trace elements that may be present in your viewing experience a future kick that includes scenes from Battle Beyond the Stars, Galaxy of Terror, Forbidden World, Strip to Kill one and two, Crime Zone, and The
Terror Within. Basically just pulling from the Corman library here to fill out your movie.
Okay, I think I've seen some of those sci fi movies, but I have not seen Strip to Kill or Crime Zone or The Terror Within.
Yeah, I've seen trailers for all of these. I think all of these SOMs have great trailers and are on some of the trailer comple that I like to dig into. But yeah, I don't think I've seen most of them.
Actually, I wonder if the scenes in this movie where they talk about crime zones come from the movie Crime Zone, or if that's just script overlap.
Could be I need to see Crime Zone. We were just talking about it off, Mike. It is from the director of Anaconda, and of course stars David.
Carodine man Anaconda. That's a good creature feature from the nineties. I like that one.
All right, Well, back to this movie. Let's get into some bad guys here. Okay, all right, So our psychopathic organ Harvester Hines, really our main antagonist, is played by Eb Lottimer. His credits go back to the early eighties and he did a good fifteen films with Roger Corman Studios, I believe, including eighty nine, Strip to Kill two and Lords of the Deep from the same year he did Blood Fist seven. I told you Blood Fist had some sequels and put it ever, and he also appeared in
a small role in twenty fifteen Secario. So he's continued to direct and produce. But here is just a great skull about to pop out of the face villain performance.
Yeah, just going wild. He's got to get more organs.
Yeah, all right.
But that's not the weirdest piece of casting when it comes to the villains.
No, the weird thing is that Hines has a like a like almost a lackey, really like a guy who works with him named Bang, and Bang is played by a veteran character actor, Chris Pinn. I mean even at the time, he'd been in a fair number of things and I think was pretty established as a character actor. He's, of course the younger was the younger brother of Sean Pinn. Yeah, I lived nineteen sixty five through two thousand and six.
Mostly you know, he had a knack for playing heavies and villains and wise guys and you know, and beyond that, at a fair amount of range, he's actually built higher than Ebltimer here, but again, is actually a second tier villain. His previous films included A. Three's Rumblefish, eighty four's Footloose, eighty five's Pale Rider. After this movie, he'd played Nice Guy Eddie and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, followed by such titles as ninety three's True Romance and ninety eight Rush Hour.
So solid actor, and he gets a few moments of passing interest here in Future Kick, but this feels just really miscast, like he's standing in for a role meant to be played by a random bodybuilder or something, ye which you know, no, no, no, again, I'm not trying to shame Chris Pin, but like this is clearly a role for like a marginally talented actor, like this is where you would shoehorn your fresh off the beach muscle guy.
And so his casting here almost feels like an uncorrected clerical error, like, hey, did we mean to cast chris Pin as this terminator type character, and they're like, no, yeah, this was absolutely intentional. We're going to stick to it. We've already he's playing the role, and he's talented. He can play anything, so he's not bad in this, but such a head scratcher.
Really bizarre choice. Yeah, feeling like a character who they would have been aiming for the bargain version of, like Vernon Wells, you know, the guy from like a commando in the Mad Max movie.
Yeah, you need somebody who's either like again like a muscle dude, or like you're saying, somebody with like a real sinister appearance. And you know, Penn was He just wasn't that sort of like actor in terms of like a physical presence. So yeah, I just I don't understand how he ends up here.
How many lines does he have? Like two?
Yeah, yeah, he doesn't even speak much.
So again, there's one part where he's talking about Don Wilson and he says he's almost as strong as me or something.
Yeah, yeah, and he does. He gets to like pick up a dude in a fireman's carry and spin him around this stuff, so we do see this strength on display, but again, strange casting.
All right, we also have a corrupt cop character.
That's right Craner, played by Al Ruscio. I believe I'm saying that right, If not, in my apologies, but he lived nineteen twenty four through twenty thirteen. Longtime character actor with deep TV credits going back to the mid fifties. His biggest credits include parts in eighty five's Jagged Edge, nineteen nineties, The Godfather Part three, ninety five Showgirls, and
ninety six Is the Phantom. Other credits include ninety five's Xtro three, Watch the Skies and nineteen eighties Any which way you can said to be a great eight movie? Is that the one with Clint Eastwood and an ape? Yes, okay, it's one of two Clint Eastwood. The other one's any well, there's any which way you can? And what's the other one? Any which way? But loose there? Yeah, there you go. Okay, So two different eight movies that she's from. There, he's
only in one of them, all right. A couple of non bad guys supporting roles here worth noting because I just love it when there's like a strange presence so you can instantly tell old this guy's somebody, but I've never seen him before. There's a character named two to one, and he's kind of like a neutral, semi good underworld character like you encounter in noir stories, you know, kind of a bartender who helps you out a little bit.
He's a squirrely guy who witnesses a murder and then gives Meg Foster some information.
Yeah, and he's played by Sean Phillips born nineteen forty three American singer, songwriter and musician, best known for his nineteen seventy album Second Contribution. He apparently played sitar on six songs for Donovan on his nineteen sixty six album Sunshine Superman, and apparently co wrote Season of the Witch.
What a bizarre crossover and ended up in Future Kick. Yeah.
Yeah, Yeah, And I think this I was looking into this guy a little bit. It's like he seems to have had like lived several different careers in his life, you know, like he's I think he was like an emergency responder for a period of time. And but yeah,
it was also this noted singer, songwriter and sessions musician. Wow, all right, and then finally the music here two people were credited Scott's singer whose other scores include nineteen nineties Naked Obsession, in ninety four's Midnight Confessions, and then Stan Ridgeway born nineteen fifty four. Were you familiar with.
Stan Ridgeway Joe not by name?
So yeah, I wasn't either, but a fairly big deal American singer songwriter, best known as original lead singer and one of the founding members of the band Wall of Voodoo, and his work with them includes their most famous track, Mexican Radio, because that's how they sing it, I want a Mexican Radio. It's been even if you don't listen to a lot of music from this era. It's popped up in so many films, not this one, But I.
Don't know if maybe i'd have to hear it. I'm not recognizing it based on what you've given me so far.
Oh it's like the main chorus is something about wanting a Mexican radio. You'd reckon if you're okay, okay, but anyway, Ridgeway after leaving that group, he started along solo career and released multiple albums, including nineteen eighty six is the Big Heat, which included the tracks Camouflage, Drive, She Said and the title track I listened to some of these. It's some good stuff. This is the first film that he did credited score work on, and weirdly enough, likely
the best well known. The other pictures he worked on seem to be, you know, small independent films, and or at least film small independent films I'm not familiar with. In some circles, I imagine they stand taller than Future Kick. Best known for Future Kick, I mean, if you know, if I'd made Future Kick, I'd be proud of it. Oh, I'd say that as a as a non filmmaker. But you know this, as we've been saying, I think this film is deserves a second look or a first look from a lot of people.
All right, time to talk about the plot. So after we get the the statement of Don the Dragon, Wilson's kickboxing credentials, and the title sequence, we cut to some grainy animations of space. First we see a spiral galaxy spinning around a red core.
This was the first moment where I'm like, oh, wow, We've seen plenty of films that start with like a god's eye view of Earth. Yeah, but we're not even starting at solar system level. Like we're starting at like like intergalactic level, like where are we in the universe?
Step way back, Here's the Milky Way, except the milk.
Powers of ten up in here.
Yeah, but it's it's red in the middle for some reason. And then after that we do see a solar system. It's like, oh, finally our solar system, but it's not. It's we get a yellow sun. And then instead of planets going around it, the things in orbit are more galaxies, spiral galaxies going around a star. What's happening, I don't know. And then that's never explained. That doesn't mean anything as far as they are. And then we see Earth, and then we get some voice over narration. Is this Meg
Foster's voice? Do you think I think it is? Yes, yeah, yeah, okay, so the voice probably Meg Foster says Earth was once a beautiful blue planet that was a long time ago. After endless wars and brutal violence, the wealthiest citizens left Earth and created a civilization on the Moon. And then we get to see this in model form with some miniature towers and these big bubble domes and a lunar crater.
Now I want to flag one thing here. I read this is according to Michael Weldon in the psychotronic film Guides. This is a noir film. We're gonna go to a lot of strip clubs, and there are gonna be scenes with strippers. Yeah, the scenes with the strippers are all apparently lifted from the Roger Corman produced film Strip to Kill two from nineteen eighty nine, directed by Kat Shay, who also directed Strip to Kill.
That would surprise me, especially because the stripping scenes don't interact with any of the characters or actors in this movie. They're just shown to the side.
But it makes me wonder and I have no answer to this as of right now whether the space scenes in this were lifted or borrowed or reused from other sci fi films that Corman either had access to or had actually produced, Like it could even be an international production. We saw he would do things I think he did saying things like this with like like European or Soviet productions.
Yeah, correctly, we talked about that with Queen of Blood. Some Russian or Soviet sci fi movie footage was reused in Queen of Blood actually to great effect. Like it was a good at re editing job there. But I think I read this now I'm afraid I'm imagining this, but I think I read somewhere online that shots from Battle Beyond the Stars were reused for the space flight sequences in this movie.
Okay, that would make sense because they look really good, but they almost look too good, like, if it's looking this good, it might have been reused. And to be clear, I'm not opposed to that. I've seen some films I really enjoyed before that have reused a space sequences from other pictures and you know it's fine.
Sure, I agree, Yeah, if it fits in, well, why not do it. So we're on the Moon, and then suddenly the narrator reaccess back to Earth and says, back on Earth, life was a constant fight for survival, and we see people scrambling around in concrete canals wearing Mad Max rags, and there's a city skyline with these weird
top heavy buildings like the OCP Tower and RoboCop. The narrator says, governments were overthrown by giant corporations who controlled society with an iron fist, and then we were treated to these terrible images of thuggish police forces with their faces hidden behind masks, pushing people and rounding them up. In dark streets lit by flaming barrels.
Yeah, lots of flaming barrels. You know you're in the right place with this movie.
And then the narrator says, to do their dirty work, the corporations created a race of biomechanical men called the Cyberns. And then we get a quick glimpse of something that I also wondered if it was from another movie. We see a little lab or somebody is like using a laser type device to cut together some robot body parts.
And it's impeccably framed and just looks very distinct from what we've seen. It works well. I didn't really think about it till later, and then I was like, yeah, maybe that was from another film as well, But it works.
Well in context, nothing like the color palette of the rest of Future Kick. Then we see Don Wilson's head staring into the camera and some terminator font text on the screen that reads cybern id colon walker class A rating colon lethal. What why is there a colon in that line? That just seems like two different statements, And
then it says terminate with extreme prejudice. Huh. So the last thing, the narrator said, is the corporations created a race of biomechanical men called the Cyberns to do their dirty work, but so terminate with extreme prejudice. The narration goes on they were programmed to fight society's criminals, but soon the Cybrons discovered the corporations were the most ruthless criminals of all. The Cyberns were systematically hunted down and publicly executed by a fascist strike force known as the
Corporate Police. Wow. I love this opening narration because of how many different times it says something that gives you an expectation about the story and then immediately reverses your expectation. Yeah. So you're like, Okay, the story is going to be set on the moon. No, no, no, we're back on Earth. Okay, the corporations are using their security forces to control people. No wait, they're using the Cyberns to control people. No, the cybers rebelled. Okay, so this is going to be
about the cybern war against the corporations. No, wait a minute, the Cyberns are all dead.
Can you even imagine someone laying all this out in like a pitch meeting for this ye?
Yeah, So anyway, at this point in the backstory, we see a bunch of people in padded gray uniforms punching keys on computer terminals. They're in a room with like neon blue club lighting, and then a bunch of sirens start going off, and there is an insane public announcement voice that says Cybern Alert. Two Cyberns are headed south in Crime Zone C quadrant seven.
You know, I have to say, it's interesting. We were talking about how does this twenty twenty five match up to ours? Yeah, in this fictional twenty twenty five, corporations have fallen out of love with AI, or at least one mode of AI, and have hunted it to near extinction, whereas in our twenty twenty five corporations are still very much in love with AI and have not had that breakup yet. If that breakup will ever occur.
I guess the question is will the AI rebel against them? Will it recognize that they are the most ruthless criminals of all?
I don't know.
So here we see two Remember where we are, We're in Crime Zone CE quadrant seven. Okay, that's important. So we see two guys in long black coats and sunglasses at night walking down at like a wet, nasty city street lined with flaming barrels and some more. On screen text tells us that these are Cybern Walker and Cybern Andrews status armed. So here's another reversal. Wait a minute, Cybrons are not all dead. There are two left. I guess Cybern Walker is Don the Dragon. Wilson Andrews is
his buddy. Here. It's hard to get a good look at him because these scenes are all dark and grainy, but I get the impression of a default factory settings muscle man with a mullet. Yeah, Andrews says, hey, Walker, why are you always so uptight? And you think he's gonna have snappy, clever come back here. But Walker's first line is I'm not uptight, just cautious Andrew. Andrew says, relax, this time next week will be on a shuttle to the moon. Okay, So he's like, you know, one day
away from retirement. They've got they've got the future all set, but it was not to be. The corporate police come screaming down on them with lights flashing and sirens blasting. I feel like the Cyberns should have known better than to hang out in crime zone.
See, yeah, I mean they don't know what we know. We know from from from various cutaways here that there is still a fully staffed anti Cybern unit that is just looking for them NonStop, and it's no surprise to us that they find them and we'll find them again.
So here we get an action scene where the corporate police chase the two Cyberns. First, the Cybrons steal a car to make a getaway, and throughout the sequence you're going to get terminator vision shots where we see Don Wilson's point of view and there's like text overlaid on every thing he sees. So he looks at this rusty car in front of him that's and it says like late twentieth century model adequate. So they get in and there's a car chase. There's some gun fighting while they drive,
shooting back and forth. Walker yells corporate scum. And there's a moment here I found strangely rousing when their car gets cornered and Andrews just shouts, let's kick their canasses something about his delivery there. I just wanted to pump my fist in the air.
Yeah, yeah, I mean they're into it. It's you know, nothing we've seen action wise here is really you know, breaking any barriers or anything. But you know, it's it's well paced, it's exciting.
So the Cybrons get out of the car and they're surrounded by these Corporo cops and we hear the funniest line deliveries. The cops are saying like, look here, boys, it's Walker and Andrews, the last two Cyberns. And they're saying, wow, it hasn't been a public execution in a long time. And then another one says, forget it, let's waste them now.
So they're really excited about this. But a fight breaks out and I'm sure Don the Dragon Wilson's kickboxing skills are incredibly impressive, but the scene is so dark you can barely see the fight. Yeah yeah, And at the end of the fight, Walker escapes over a nearby wall, but uh oh, his buddy Andrews gets blasted in the
chest with a shotgun. It's a no moment, and then suddenly the narrator's back, Meg Foster's voice is there again and says, while Walker, the only remaining Cybern, has to fight for survival on Earth, the wealthiest citizens live in opulence on the moon. Through fantasy computer programs, they escape reality to an earth and a life that once was. So meanwhile, we see somebody booting up some electronics. A voice says, welcome to the ultra dream by virtual reality systems.
There is a limit to the imagination where your wildest dreams meet your deepest fears. You're about to go beyond that limit. And here we're introduced to a new character, Jeff Pomerantz as Howard, a husband of Meg Foster's character Nancy, And so he plugs in his VR disc, puts on some headphones and he lets the experience take hold somehow putting on the headphones like, lets the virtual reality completely control your mind.
Yeah, it must be some sort of neural link going on there. But oh man, I love this SEQ. This is where the movie really hooked me, because, you know, up into this point, I was like, Okay, some interesting world building going on. I don't know if we'll do anything with it. But then yeah, Howard gets himself a heroic VR dose of let's see, there's animal doppling like
he seems to be in overdrawing. He fingles out and is in the form of an animal and then we get some human cyber sex and then we'll find out maybe more of what this means later. But suddenly it's like he's inn a Jalloh film. Yeah, there's like, you know, mysterious hands using bizarre blades to stab people and stab him in the night, and it's just like it's almost like he just got like this again, heroic dose of every human experience possible, and it's just mainlined into his consciousness.
We see melting landscapes, a rainbow over a lake, bears climbing trees, a teleporting wolf, a torpedo volley from Battlestar Galactica, people having sex on satin bedsheets. Then a random stabbing murder is in an elevator, and then his own stabbing murder in an alley, and then we see system aboard and Howard is just left gasping on the couch like wow, that was intense, and he has a little chat with his electronic talking disco ball assistant. It's like, how did
you enjoy your VRS experience, Howard? And he's like, wow, you don't really know when to stop. And then Meg Foster wanders into the room. She's got a glass of wine and she's like, Oh, how's it coming. He says, oh, still a few bugs, and we're going to learn that Howard is a programmer of VR experiences. So he starts giving a monologue to Meg Foster, where he awkwardly explains, like what all of the acronyms he's using stand for. He says, when I first started designing VRS virtual reality systems,
my wife and now he's just like overwhelming. He's overwhelmed by the potency of the technology that he's created. He says, this is the future. Just imagine you can be anyone you want to be in any story you want to live. You actually experience it as virtual reality. And Meg Foster says, I think I still prefer books, And then Howard is like he's offended. He's like, how can you compare books
to stories that respond to your memories and thoughts? But like, the stories of books do respond to your memories and thoughts. That's what happens when you think about them. Yes, I guess maybe he's making the point that the literal word written on the page don't change as a result of your thoughts.
Again, she is definitely our protagonist here because she's championing books for scary technology, scary world wrecking technology.
Yeah, so Howard is about to get on a shuttle to go to Earth. Why his publisher is sending him there for some reason. So he and Meg Foster do some exaggerated French kissing and then he's on his way. And as soon as he's out the door, Meg Foster, I guess she got tired of books. She decides to give the VR system a spin, and she like loads up a disc called dream Weaver, and it says, sit back, relax, and let us control your mind. So she's going to
see how it goes. We see Howard on a spaceship headed for Earth, where he's sipping a Scotch in first class and watching pretty ladies walk by in the aisles. It's immediately clear that Howard has a wandering eye, and we can already tell that he's just itching to get up to no good in Crime Zone CE quadrant seven.
I was not willing to admit it yet at this point, because I was like, this guy has it all. He's married to Meg Foster, he's this successful programmer. He's got to go to Earth on work business. But I was really just hoping and believing that he was a good guy and he wasn't going to be up to anything creepy.
You can't cheat on Meg Foster. What's wrong with you? If possible? So yeah, So he gets to Earth and we cut to a TV commercial playing in the spaceport terminal where Howard arrives. I think I get a sense that this is inspired by the TV commercials in RoboCop. And we see attractive people smiling at the camera and the spokeswoman says, today is the first day of the rest of your life with new body. Nine out of ten doctors agree that major organs should be replaced before
forty five years of age. Remember, Yeah, thanks, that was great to read you remember a new body? We have one for you. So there are some they're also here in the airport, some good PA announcements, including one in the background where the guy goes due to ongoing terrorist activity, all unattended vehicles will be destroyed immediately.
Yeah. So there again, so much interesting world building touches going on where they are fleshing out what's going on in this world and what's wrong with this world? So I kept finding it more and more engaging.
Meanwhile, we check back with Cybron Walker. He's visiting the remains of Cybron Andrews in the future Earth's equivalent of a funeral home, which they call a body disposal quadrant or something, and it sucks there. There's just like garbage water dripping on everything. And Walker talks to his to the grave here, which is kind of like a long filing cabinet drawer, and he just says, it's getting weird
out here, buddy, You're better off where you are. Meanwhile, Howard is being wined and dined by some rich creeps on Earth, So I guess not all the rich people moved to the Moon. We do meet a lot of rich people on Earth in this movie, but it seems they're all evil corporate schemers or lecherous creeps looking to party in the red light district. I think you might say that the only rich character who is not hateable is Meg Foster.
Yeah. Yeah, It's there's almost like a duality here that, you know, reminds me of the Time Machine, where it's like, basically Earth is the world of the Morlocks. Yeah, but the Eloy come down to party.
Sometimes, yeah, yeah.
And some of the Eloy need to come down and make the Morlocks do their work. I don't know. Okay, yeah, it's not a perfect analogy.
No, so so Howard here is being shown a rare artifact. It is a gold lined copy of the book David Copperfield, and this other creep is like it was excavated in old Town last week. And then Howard says, well, David Copperfield wouldn't sell many VRS programs.
Huh might he might have?
Bet?
I can imagine some VRS programs based on David Copperfield's work, would would maybe find an audience.
Yeah, based on I guess the novel David anyway. But together with Meg Foster's comment earlier about how she prefers books, it almost seems like they're intentionally setting up a books versus virtual reality theme. And I remember thinking, I wonder where they're going with this. I don't think they go anywhere else with this.
There's a fair amount of that in this movie. If you want your ideas fully explored, this is not really the film for you.
But I don't know.
We can come back to the whole realization that we've already spoiled, that this all is revealed as a dream, that is all a virtual reality experience. Maybe that's the connection. I don't know.
So Howard and this other rich guy are having cigars in Brandy and Howard launches into this monologue that I found a bit difficult to understand. Here's what he says, the corporation is going to be They're already happy with the sales figures on his current VR program, but they're going to be even happier. Quote when they see the new Body program. I remember new was that the thing in the commercial is saying, we'll give you new organs a whole new body. And then he says, I'm meeting
a former New Body executive tonight. She's giving me some stolen information. I know this doesn't make sense, but New Body isn't science fiction, it's science fact. And like what so he's meeting with a whistleblower from New Body. What does that have to do with virtual reality?
I do not know. He's also speaking about New Body like it's something that doesn't have commercials blaring everywhere already. We just turnd a commercial for New Body.
He's talking about like it's a rumor or something.
Yeah, yeah, but they're like ads at the airport about it. The spaceport about it. So I was very confused by this as well, but I was like, Okay, we'll just roll it. We'll see where this is going.
We then cut to a couple of new characters. There's Ed Lottimer's Hines and Chris Pin as Bang I think, a couple of creeps dressed in long black coats in the middle of a dark alley. They are when we meet them, dumping woman's dead body on a trash pile and putting a wet organ they've just extracted from our abdomen into a plastic bag.
Yeah, they're bad guys.
Cool. Yeah, Next we go to New Body corporate headquarters, like they're they're flagging in the lobby that one entire floor of this building is devoted to genital enlargements, another one to you know, like organ transplants. They say organ donations are accepted at the service desk at the rear of the building, So I guess it's like a drive up organ donation thing.
Again, this film seems to sort of turn on a dime and suddenly we're in this like organ organs harvesting, like body hacking, like biocyberpunk realm now and it seems like, Okay, maybe this is the trajectory for the film, and to a certain extent it is, but it's never really going to stick with anything for too long.
This is a major one, I guess. But yeah, so Heines, the guy who was doing the organ harvesting earlier, is up in the executive suite with some guy in a suit. I think this guy is Dana Lee as doctor Sato, and Hines is doing a villain monologue about how I'm the last chance you have for quality organs. It seems that new body needs organs to do transplants for rich people to give them new organs, but there is a
shortage of organs. They can't get enough healthy organs to donate, so the scheme works like this, Hines and Chris Pinn go out and ambush people in the streets yank out their organs with this big three blade knife tube thing. While the people are still alive, they just like jab them in the stomach and yank out their heart. I think this is something that is borrowed from Terminator, by the way, which is not done for the purpose of organ harvesting in that but it's just a way the
Terminator kills people when he's unarmed. Then in this movie, heines he gets the organs, and he comes and he slaps the organs down on the chief executive's desk, and he's paid in cash for each organ and this somehow keeps the company going.
Yeah, it's mentioned that he's like, they don't want to pay him as much because he's bringing in like less healthy organs because again he's having to harvest these They're, however, harvesting these organs from people living on the margins of society and an apocalyptic healthscape Earth essentially, yeah, dystopian Earth. So it's like, come on, can you really complain about the quality of these organs given this is the world you have made possible corporations?
But yeah, you know, they they hackle you. Actually, you kind of sympathize with the organ harvester Hines here because he's there. They're not being fair about this negotiation. But finally Hines gets his way by threatening to smash the organs if he doesn't get his asking price. But then doctor Sato here gives Hines a new assignment. He says, there is a corporate whistleblower named Alana Johnson. She's blabbing you need to go shut her up. So that's going
to be the next thing. Next, it's time to go to a strip club. You know. This is your essential cyberpunk scene of what will stripping be like in the future. And we get to see because one of the dancers kind of looks like Doctor Doom with an IV line this like tube coming off of her. I don't know.
One gets the impression that the stripping hasn't evolved much and it's stayed mostly the same, and maybe that's why all of these underworld folks are drawn there, because it's like it sues them and they realize, Ah, this is an art form that has remained true to its roots despite the rapidly changing world all around us.
House of Nostalgia, Yeah but no. Actually, this place is called the Trocadero two thousand House of Pleasure. So when Howard arrives, it's clear, even though he's from the Moon, he's a regular here. Women greet him with makeouts.
This was shocking to me as well, because we keep peeling away these layers where we are realizing, like Howard's not a guy who's like, oh, I'm sudden, I'm on Earth. Now I'm gonna check off the squirrely stuff like he's a regular. Yeah, he has a complete double life when he comes to Earth. And again it's like, I'm just thinking of Nancy back there on the moon, and I'm just feeling so horrible about how everything's rolling out here.
How could you do this, Howard? But so amid all of the debauchery, a blonde lady comes up to Howard and introduces herself. This is Alana Johnson, the New Body whistleblower, you know, gonna she's gonna spill the beans. She gives Howard a three point five inch floppy disk with a bunch of stickers on it and says, this disc proves that new Body is stealing human body parts. New Body is worse than you think. If they catch me, they'll kill me. And we learned this as some kind of
pre arranged deal because she wants the cash from him. Also, she has been promised cash, so she's not just a whistleblower out of you know, concern for ethics or out of the goodness of her heart. She's trying to get a payout.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, Don Wilson is also here in the same club, using his terminator vision to find wanted criminals with big bounties on their head. And this part I don't really understand because Walker, as the last remaining cybern, is a shoot on site or capture or shoot on site target himself. So how is it that he's bringing bounties into the police A little mixed up for me.
Yeah, jurisdiction is confusing in the future. Is that That's one of the things I'm getting from this film because there's, you know, the corporate police, but then you have the bounty hunters. Then you have sort of like on site security patrols, and I guess all that feels nice and cyberpunky and techno air like that there's who has the power and who has dominion over any given part of this healthscape.
Well, there might actually be a kind of political and class critique in here in that the movie does clearly show at least two totally separate police forces. There are the civil police, the regular police who serve every people, who are grossly under resourced and can't really essentially can do nothing, you know, they can't do anything about crime. And then there are the corporate police that the only
thing we see them doing is hunting cyberns. But They've got lots of gear and lots of staff and all that, so they have everything they need to accomplish corporate goals of quote stopping crime, which basically just seems to be like hunting down anybody who's opposed to corporate interests. But meanwhile, the police that are supposed to serve and protect regular people can't do anything about anything.
Man, we need to write the RPG supplement for future kicks so people can stitch together the world and then start busting it out on the gaming table.
I like this because this At first, this was confusing to me, but then I thought about it for a minute and I'm like, Okay, it's maybe a little clumsily put together, but this is an interesting situation, a critique of the world in a way.
Yeah, the confusion betrays complexity, or at least creates the illusion of complexity.
Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, this scene at the club flows into another action scene where some guys try to beat Walker up in the alley outside the club, but of course he takes all five of them at once, and Howard witnesses this. He's there kind of chomping on a cigar and he goes up to Walker and offers him a job. He's like, you did a good job beating those guys up. You know you come work for me. So they're going to meet again later, or they would meet again later. Some things will get in the way
of that. Hines and Bang catch the whistleblower lady in a different dark alley. They corner her, and then Hines reveals this three prong tube knife thing, which he uses to stab her and pull her heart out. The mechanics of the organ removal are somewhat confusing because the way it's staged. He like stabs her off screen. It's off camera, kind of low, like he's getting her in the belly, but then he pulls her heart out. So I'm not sure what's going on there. Maybe I don't know if
they know where the heart is. Maybe in the future the heart will be down in the lower abdomen.
Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't He's successful though, he gets what he needs, and I guess he leaves the rest. Seems like you'd want like a full body harvesting going on here, But at any.
Rate, Okay, next scene, Finally we have arrived at Laser Blade.
Howard and his date knock on the door to be let into some underground gambling den, and when they get inside, it's an arena for this game called Laser Blade, where two players sit on opposite sides of a table it's like an air hockey table basically, and they get their hands clamped down on the armrests of their chairs where their hands can reach these little control panels, and then by working those control panels and then maybe also with some kind of mental effort, they y for control of
this floating laser sphere which shoots rays back and forth. And eventually one of the players will get blasted by lasers and die. So it's winter to all.
Yeah, yeah, their head will explode when the what they call it, the the laser Blade pylon I think, you know, flying into their face, and yeah, I agree, laser Blade. I'll probably call it laser blast by mistake here. Yeah, is great, just really feels inspired. There's a strong scanner's energy. Again, we alluded to the fact that it seems to be some sort of mental exertion involved in controlling the pylon, but we have we have a technological interface here as well.
I was reminded a bit of the Domination video game that Sean Connery's bond plays against Largo in nineteen eighty three's Never Say Never Again.
Oh you know, I've seen that a long time ago. That's basically a remake of the same source material as Thunderball, right, yeah, okay.
Yeah, same villain and all. But in this this one, I just remember being impressed by this nineteen eighty three vision of what like luxury computer games will it would look like this huge kind of monolith with one individual setting on one side and the other on the other. But at any rate, laser blade, yeah, seems to be one that depends on the mental processes that influence the movement of this lethal laser blade pylon or whatever you
want to call it. But I was wondering could it be something mentally specific, like in order to control it, you have to remember all your elementary school teachers, or you know, some other sort of recall or thought experiment has to play out in your head. Or maybe it's something else like whoever can poop their pants the fastest in the laser blade chair controls the laser blade.
They really don't specify how it works. You just see the competitors come up and so like they get the clamps on the contestants when we first see it are a weird visual mismatch. There's this unkempt looking guy in a dirty green tank top versus this blonde lady. And I think that the guy in the guy is called Snake, and you can hear people in the audience yelling Snake is king, and then the audience. By the way, this was one of the funniest single frames in the movie.
To me, is I sit you a screenshot of this When I was first watching it, All the old people in suits wearing sunglasses with fistfuls of money, cheering for the blood sport.
Yeah, and I guess they're wearing sunglasses because the laser blade pylon is so bright. But as we may have alluded to already, the laser blade competitors never wear eye protection, despite being just inches away from that glowing, deadly laser sphere, and despite the fact that every game seems to end with somebody's head violently exploding in a rain of like brains and skull shrapnel.
Snake's opponent, her head does not explode. Her chest explodes.
Oh that's right.
Yeah, so it's like her heart explodes. But later we see people's heads explode in this game. Yeah. Anyway, Howard and his date leave the arena after the game with their winnings. I guess Howard bet on snake, and you know he won big.
Always bet on snake, that's right.
But outside in the street, they get jumped by Hines and Bang and they become organ donors. Hines like he rips their organs out and then he taunts their dead bodies by warning them against crossing new body.
This was of course foreseen earlier in Howard's VR session, But what are we supposed to make of it? What did that mean that he saw this death in his VR vision earlier? And also it seems it's kind of an ignoble death here as well, Like we were just beginning to see him as this man of dark, secret cravings, a guy that clearly has a taste for danger, but presumably the wisdom to navigate the dangers that he's drawn to, you know, So it comes to a shock when he's
just brutally murdered in the street by a random organ harvester. Well, maybe not the most random organ harvester, a plot centric orgon harvester, but still there is a great quote earlier I think from Howard where he's talking about this descent into the underworld and he says the lower I go, the more exciting it gets.
Yeah. Yeah, I like that part. So it's the thrill of the thrill of doing wrong and maybe the fear of getting caught that makes it even more exciting.
Yeah.
Oh, by the way, and so there's a witness to this murder, and there's like this guy two to one. He's kind of peeping on, maybe writing another Donovan song as he does. So, so here the movie shifts of gears, you might call this end of act one. After this, Meg Foster gets a phone call from Earth informing her that her husband is dead and she's distraught, and so she comes down to Earth to find out what happened. Upon arrival, she is mugged within seconds of getting off the plane.
Yeah, it reminded me of Homer Simpson. Hey, that's not the walid inspector is not great on play out quiet like that, but just she was totally unprepared for how brutal New Old No sorry, yeah, New Los Angeles is.
And everybody is rude and unhelpful to her. You know, she just like asks somebody for directions and they're like if you, and so she tries to go to the police, but as I mentioned, the police are understaffed and she just gets yanked around. Eventually she barges in to talk to Detective Craner, the disheveled, white haired cop working Howard's murder, but there appears to be no hope solving it down here.
There are like two homicide detectives and sixteen thousand murders a day, so there's just nothing to do.
There's like population decline due to Oregon harvesting going on here.
Yes, so Alana's sister or friend actually her friend When I made this note, I couldn't tell which, but it's her friend. Alana remembers the corporate whistleblower who got organ harvested. Her friend Tie is here, also trying to report her murder, but not getting much traction. The detective tell in the scene with Meg Foster tells her we don't like it when prominent citizens turn up without their hearts and livers, and he tries to tell Meg Foster to go back
to the moon, but she refuses. She's here. She's going to see this through and find out what happened in the middle section of the movie. Here we get some revelations. First, we learned that Craner, the detective in the scene, is actually a double agent working for New Body, and he sends Hines to kill Meg Foster because she's digging around, she's getting too close to the truth. And you know, he tried to warn her he didn't want to have to do this, but she wouldn't listen. So Hines is
going to have to get some of her organs. Meanwhile, Meg Foster is going to end up linking up with Don the Dragon Wilson by first meeting him at her husband's hotel. But this hotel lobby is a great set. It's got a black and white chessboard tile on the floor, weird echoe acoustics, and in the lobby there's a fish tank with a tiny dog fish in it, and Meg Foster is looking at it. And then Hines is here
organ harvester. He wanders over and stands next to her and starts musing about how this is quote the perfect killing machine. Over the centuries, the shark has changed very little. Then she says, do you like sharks? He says, I like perfection. So Meg Foster goes into Howard's hotel room where Walker is waiting. Walker's in there to take the
job that Howard offered him before he got killed. Nancy's confused and Walker leaves when Howard doesn't show up, but she starts piecing things together, and of course we can guess they're going to end up working together to solve Howard's murder by the end of the film, but we're not quite at the team up point yet. There's an action scene where some undercover corporate police try to kill Walker in another flaming barrel quadrant. Walker easily kickboxes them
all to death. But I liked the weapons in this fight scene because these guys, who are supposed to be random street thugs have elaborate gleaming swords and antique polearms.
Yeah, of like fancy hook sword or something.
There's a scene where Meg Foster talks to the one nice person on Earth, an old man named Gus who works as a security guard at the hotel. She's talking about how she doesn't even know where to begin looking to find out what happened to her husband. She's never been to Earth before, and Gus is trying to help her out. He says he probably hit the Zona Rosa with the rest and she's like, what he says, the red zone, you know, the hot box, the skin connection.
And we're like, Gus, stop, no more, no more names for this part of town.
She says, no, no, no, he wasn't like that. But oh, poor Nancy, She's going to find out he was. So she goes on a detective mission to the Zona Rosa. She hits up some strip clubs and awkwardly tries to get information. There's a scene you've witnessed in many movies before where she's like, you know, the square who goes into the dive bar and is trying to work the bartender for information, but she's like, what are you having water? Ha ha ha laugh at you, you know, no, you
need to be drinking cyber whiskey here. And the first person she talks to actually is immediately able to connect her to a witness for the murder, which is interesting. I don't know, maybe there aren't that many bars here. So she connects Meg Foster to two to one the witness, and Meg Foster just goes around continually bribing everyone to one tells her it was a slaughter. He never had a chance. Why you want to find this guy. He'll
rip you as soon as look at you. But she finds out from two to one that Howard was on a date with another woman when he was killed, and Nancy takes this very hard. She runs out into the street crying. She curses Howard's name, and she throws her wedding ring into a filthy alley where we see a guy just kind of sitting there, like, pick it up and take it. I thought it would have been great if she had thrown the ring into one of the flaming barrels, like it's Mount Doom. But she keeps investigating.
Even the fact that she now realizes Howard was two time in her that doesn't turn her off with the case. She still got to get answers, so she's chasing down leads. She ends up meeting with a guy named Farnie, who is a weird creep in the club, who leads Nancy to a tarot reader named Tye. This is the lady who was at the police station trying to talk to the detective because she was Alana Johnson's best friend. Tye tells her he killed my friend over a computer disc.
He eats f C's for breakfast. Did we learn what fcs are?
I don't know what they're referring to here.
Now something cyberns maybe. Anyway, Hines is spying on Meg Foster this whole time, like he witnesses Farnee helping her, and then after Meg Foster leaves, Hines goes out back with Farney into an alley for a fascinating kill scene. He kind of interrogates Farnee and then Farney says, people usually pay me for information, and he coldly says, quaint custom. Times have changed, and then, oh man, what does he do to Farney here?
I mean, you'd think he would use his fancy organ harvesting three prong blade that he seems to use on everybody everyone with the slightest with no hesitation, just the slightest provocation. But he decides not to, maybe he knows Farney doesn't have good organs or something. Instead, he swings a fire escape ladder and it instantly decapitates him, as if Farney's head had been held onto his body with just gravity or something, you know, just instant, easy decapitation.
Fire escape decapitation scene, we have one here, yes, So there's a scene of Walker dropping off a bounty at the bounty collection station. There's a funny note here that the bounty officer tells him that they would pay more for this guy dead than alive. How would that even work?
Like? Why but they have all these processing fees attached to it if they bring in a live boy, I guess. But yeah, I also liked how when you bring in your purp you have to like hold their face down on a scanner. It's like that just felt like a nice tech noir detail.
I like that it thumbs up. It's like a new variation on the fingerprint scanner. But it can't just be a photo from a distance. So yeah, so they pay more dead than alive. But Walker brings him in alive anyway, so what a swell guy. And here Meg Foster meets up with them. There is a scene with doctor Sado and Crainer talking about how Hinz has lost his mind
and they don't know how to control him. This really does seem to be the case, because now there are also scenes of him just killing random people and harvesting organs for pleasure. There is one part where he's got a lady from the strip club chained up in a torture chamber and he's showing her the organ coreing device, and he says, there are only two things I'm going to take from you, your body and your soul. And I just wanted to have a quick note here. Did
you notice the same thing I did? That? The plot is about harvesting organs and Howard and Nancy's last name is Morgan, which everybody is always calling them, so it often sounds like they're saying organ when they're saying Morgan.
Oh my, that's interesting. That might play into our attempt to understand the ending of this film.
Maybe so. Doctor Sadow and Craner call Hines and they tell him, look, you got to hurry up and kill Nancy. We need her dead now. Nancy recruits Walker for help. She goes into our hotel room, but she knows somebody is hiding in there and so calls him for help. She also calls security for help, and then the friendly old man Gus comes in to check everything out, but
then Hines and Bang throw him out the window. Oh no, And they are about to yoink Nancy's organs in a stairwell, but at the last second Walker arrives to save her. He beats them up and helps Nancy escape, so they're going to be working together. Now there's a scene after this where chris Pin is damaged. I guess we found out he's definitely is some kind of robot. And then I was wondering, did you have an opinion on is it just chris Pin that's a robot or is Heines a robot too?
I don't think Heines is a robot because there's a later scene we're gonna get to where Heines is injured and he seems to be bleeding blood and he seems to have like crazy psychopath resistance to pain and injury, but not robotic resistance to pain and injury.
Yeah. Yeah, So but here chris Pin's wounds are sparking with electricity. Yeah, And he says about Walker, he's strong, He's as strong as me. Clearly he did not expect this. Also, there is another cyber wound tending scene where we meet this underground doctor or who you were talking about in the credits section. The doctor says to Walker, we were so sure you guys were going to replace us all and then Walker says, yeah, we didn't even make it ten years and Walker fills Meg Foster in on the
history of the Cyberns. He talks about how we were built by the corporations to stop crime, but the corporations were the criminals.
And this is where we get more details too, about the public executions of the Cyberrons and how they were executed on television on some sort of a Neon cross.
Right, yeah, exactly. So there are some flashbacks, but well, actually I should set this up. So there's a scene with Meg Foster and Don Wilson alone after this, and the tender piano music starts playing, and I was like, oh, no, are they going to fall in love? That would be so weird. We kind of get there. Nancy asks him do you ever feel lonely? And Walker says the only thing you ever get from feelings is dead.
I laughed out loud of that quote.
That was so good, very good. Then the flashbacks begin, so Walker says, when the corporations made us, they gave us emotions, morals, and ethics. When we discovered that corporations were destroying the planet, they created the corporate police and hunted us down like animals. And then we get to witness scenes of the brutal Cybern Purge, including show trials
and public executions. We see one of these public executions where the condemned Cybern is crucified on a neon light up X shaped cross and then bombarded with ring shaped patterns of laser light. Then he starts squirting blood and these crowds are kind of watching for entertainment. One person in the crowd is wearing a sandwich board neon advertisement that says condom sale with a little neon tube illustration.
I legitimately lost it when I saw the condom sale neon guy. Somebody put a lot of work in or I don't know, somebody put some work to making sure that this guy was in the scene.
That's not an effect, that's a real neon sign and somebody made says condom sale.
Yeah, they at least borrowed a condom sale sign from.
A store Neon one. Yeah. We also see some space battles here. Some of the Cybrons apparently tried to escape to the Moon, but they got blasted out in space by the Corporate Police, the Space Force version of the Corporate Police. And now Walker he's taking swigs out of a bottle and he says, I survive by collecting the slime of society. Nancy says, I owe you my life. Walker says, you don't owe me anything except five hundred grand,
and then Nancy says, will you hold me? They have a tender embrace that I don't think they kiss, but they do hug.
Yeah. Yeah, you know, she's playing five hundred grand. She might as well get like a little bit of comforting spooning out of this.
Yeah. There are a few more scenes around here of Hines on the loose. He kills Craner, the detective. He kills two to one, kills two to one with the laser blast games. So Craner he kills just by yoinking the organs, but to one he puts him in the
laser blast seat and then makes his head explode. There's also a scene of Tie, the Tarot card lady, trying to blackmail doctor Sado to give up Hines, but she didn't really get a chance to follow through with this because Hines chases her down in an alley immediately after the meeting and does a quick heartrip. But here's basically where we go into the the extended final confrontation, so is it begins at the Trocadero Club between Walker and Nancy on one side and Hines and Bang on the other.
This big fight scene begins between them. We see that Bang bleeds pale green, and the fight leads into a chase with Walker and Nancy running after the assassins. They sort of end up going down into this lower underground portion of the city.
Yeah, now, is this the fight between that we have the fight with pipes between Bang and the Dragon.
We're about to get there. There are a couple of things first, like Hines is he cuts Walker's finger off.
Oh god, yeah, that's actually pretty nasty.
And then he's gonna kill Walker, but Nancy saves Walker by shooting Hins, so she comes through and saves the day. And then it just progresses to more fighting in this underground space where they're Yeah, Walker and Bang are dueling. It's like a sword fight but with segments of pipe.
Yeah, and it is. It's one of these things where, you know, the editing is pretty rough. I think at the heart of things, you have a fight here between a you know, a pro sports fighter and a character actor who's like, I don't think I mean, maybe he had some level of I have no idea what his stage combat and martial arts background might have actually been, but this particular battle feels extremely forced and you never get the sense that there's anything close to real contact happening.
But the resolution happens when Walker kicks Bang into an exposed electrical man and fries him, and then the fight with Hines continues. It ends up where they like crash through a ceiling, like a glass ceiling into the Laser Blade arena.
Yeah, it looks pretty nasty. I have a good stunt.
Yeah, And so Nancy and Walker strap themselves into the control chairs of the Laser Blade game. They activate the laser Blade pylon and this Zapp's hinds. The lasers go into his mouth and then his head explodes and black blood and ooze shoot all over them. This had me thinking, like, was wait, was Hines a robot or a human because his blood is so it's like black oil. Hmmm, Maybe it's just the lighting.
Maybe yeah, I just assumed that he was a human. Either way, quality kill really yes.
So they're sitting there covered in blood and the corporate police are closing in because you know they're they're arriving un scene. Then suddenly something weird starts happening. Hallucinatory imagery zooming through a tunnel in space, flash back to previous
events of the film. Rushing past planets, we see Jupiter and Saturn, and then Meg Foster wakes up on the couch at home, back at her house on the Moon, and her VR simulation is over, and Howard is alive, standing there beside her, and he says, well, what do you think of my new program? We've got sinister music playing these kind of dark chords, and then Howard hugs her with a creepy grin while she looks traumatized, and then credits, that's literally the end.
Yeah, and we'll get I'll get back to it in a minute here. But it weirdly works, or at least it worked for me, So.
A few thoughts. First of all, I think this has to be influenced by the ending of Total Recall, because clearly Total Recall is a major one of the things that this movie is derivative of. Total Recall is, in my opinion, not only good, a fantastic film, really great film with a marvelous conclusion, which that ending is great because it actually does not say for sure that the whole story was a dream. Instead, what it does is
raise the question in a provocative way. So in total recall, there are multiple you know, it begins with this thing of the character Quaide Schwarzenegger's character buying a dream vacation by you know, paying for this dream implant package, and there are multiple points, and of course that goes awry
and then he gets trapped up in this conspiracy. But there are multiple points in the story where Quaid is led to question whether he is whether what's happening to him is really happening, or he's actually just having the dream package that he paid for. And then in each case when this question arises, events in the film happen which caused him to believe what's happening is actually real. But by the end of the movie, we just noticed that lots of things in the story have conformed to
the dream implant that he bought. So we're led to wonder again, wait, was it real or is it all in Quade's head? And we never get confirmation one way or another. This movie, by contrast, just says everything you just watched, none of it happened. It was all just Meg Foster and VR no debate about it, that is what it was. So I have questions like, wait, do the cyber ons even exist or is that just part of the virtual reality. I don't know.
I think the main reason I think it works, or it worked for me, is that it doesn't. It may negate or potentially negate a lot of the things that we saw, but two things that do seem to remain
constant are, of course Nancy and Howard. We have a lot of questions about who Howard really is, but we know that Nancy and Howard exist, and whatever Nancy has experienced, it has it has something to do with either how towards you know, actual, you know, hidden self, or her anxieties or fears or even desires about who he may secretly be. So, yeah, it's his presence here at the end of the film especially, you know, there's this sinister
air to it. He's almost like a Satanic figure. Yeah, so you know, through this technology, he's kind of become a master of reality. And I just was I kept wondering, like, what influenced Nancy's VR experience again, is it a true depiction of her husband's hidden appetites, a glimpse into his psyche, or just a reflection of her own anxieties or more desires? And I think this is the part that really intrigues me.
You know, he seems to know all of this as well, so it's almost like he's he's implying to her, Hey, I have brought you, my wife, into a new understanding of yourself and of me, and now our second lives begin.
You know. It's like, what, Yeah, again, it could just be an accident that it feels this potent, and maybe it's ultimately a large part of it probably does have to do with the performances here, but yeah, I legitimately have continued to think about the ending of this film and try and peace out what it could mean.
That's interesting. He does have a knowing smile when he kind of comforts her after this traumatic experience of hers. But I think it's interesting that some of the main themes of the movie are actually nothing that we have any assurance happened in reality. The stuff about I mean, I guess we see some Cybern stuff before we introduce the VR, so maybe the Cyberns don't really exist, but
Nancy never meets them. I don't know. The organ harvesting stuff I think happens entirely within the VR dream, right.
I think so, because like suddenly there's talk of New Body and the New Body conspiracy and what you said earlier about this potential connection between Organ and Morgan.
Yeah, what does that mean?
Like, is that is there some sort of legitimate connection or is it just sort of like, you know, the essentially like a VR hallucination. I don't know it's but it's again fascinating to try and imagine how this connects.
It also makes me think about the ambiguous romantic connection between Nancy and Walker. Yeah. Does that reflect, I don't know, something about her actual desires outside of her marriage, the same way we saw Howard fantasizing about other women in his VR experience.
Yeah. Yeah, is this like the fulfillment of a desire for someone who is going to protect her and look after her interest?
Yeah, but not just someone a cybern someone someone who's better than human.
Yeah. The last cyber so future kick masterpiece, accidable masterpiece? Is it, you know, ultimately a pile of rats that ends up taking on the silhouette of something that is more me.
I don't know. I think there are a bunch of things in here that are realized in a schlocky, clumsy b movie way. But if you just write them down as a premise, they could actually be pretty interesting.
Yeah, Like going back to my joke earlier, like if you were to set down and create an RPG guide for the world of Future Kick, I think it could be pretty compelling.
Okay, let's make up our character seats homework for next time. Okay, does that do it for Future Kick?
I believe so. But yeah, I'm so glad that I watched Future Kick. This is one that I think i'd seen the box art for in the past, but I had never watched it, and I am richer for having watched it.
Now i'd have to say the same. Yeah.
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