FUTURE KICK (1991) *

Here’s a ripe slice of What the Hell Did I Just Watch?  It’s one part Terminator rip-off, one part Virtual Reality flick, and one part stripper movie.  Imagine if Albert Pyun directed Total Recall but had to have a random striptease tossed in every ten minutes or so.  That still doesn’t do it justice. Holy cats is this one big clusterfuck.

Don “The Dragon” Wilson stars as a Cyberon, or cyborg.  He’s the last of his kind and makes his living as a bounty hunter.  Meg Foster (who deserves like… SOOOOOO much better) wants to avenge her husband’s death and hires Don to help her.

This is incredibly, seventy-one minutes long, but it is one of the longest seventy-one minutes I have ever endured.  Some scenes don’t make a lick of sense.  Others are too dark to see.  Others are filled with so much nothing you wonder how it even got before a camera.  We also get inexplicable overuse of footage stolen from other Roger Corman productions to pad out the running time.  There’s an occasional WTF moment to keep it from being a total waste of time (like the decapitation scene) and there’s plenty of boobs, but for the most part, this is one frustrating experience.  

Speaking of frustrating, the ending is something else.  It’s one of those “It was all a dream” deals.  More like a nightmare if you ask me.

Wilson skates by, just barely, by deftly acting like a robot the whole time.  Or maybe he wasn’t.  It’s hard to tell.  Just thinking about the supremely talented Foster in this movie is too depressing for words.  The great Chris Penn is completely wasted as the villain’s lackey who only gets like one line of dialogue.  Maria Ford also shows up briefly as a stripper, but that’s not nearly enough to pull this one out of the gutter.

Writer/director Damian Klaus didn’t write or direct another movie.  That alone proves there is a God and he is merciful.  

AKA:  Futurekick.  AKA:  Kickboxer 2025.