Dark Future

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🎙️ EPISODE 589: 11.02.22 A lovable and incredibly stupid, ultra low budget Good Bad Movie™. From one of the masters of the form: Greydon Clark. The WTF madness of his 1989 cult classic Uninvited is mostly absent here. In its place, a surprisingly cohesive plot serves as the basis for a wide variety of bad performances, over-acting and shoestring FX. I should probably do a career-spanning Director Focus on Clark, honestly. We're dropped in a dystopian world set in the latter half of the 21st century (a "dark future" if you will). Here the working class has been banished underground to a "park" with various subsets representing different cultures and time periods from the past. Hordes of android-human hybrids (called "synths," short for synthetics) enter down an escalator through the "forbidden zone." This zone is protected by one of those orbs with the lightning inside you used to see at the Sharper Image...

So, as you see there, any plebeian that goes near the orb is electrocuted and dies. As to why these robot people come down the escalator to hang out? Well, something human in them still likes to get drunk and screw...


That bartender in the absurd and very funny 30s-esque "Chicago" pub is one Darby Hinton. He's the main character in this and he's great, reading every line of dialogue as if it's the most important statement ever uttered. The first ten minutes are incredibly hard to follow as you figure out what the hell is going on. But it eventually settles in to tell a relatively simple story about these banished folks revolting against the part- human/part-machine guards and their comically old and evil overlords above ground. It actually ends up having a wholly anti-capitalist message, though I truly don't know if that was intentional or not.

Anyway, the two synths find a baby and they are very confused by it...


After they decide not to kill the baby (lol) they're confronted by the bartender, Kendall. In a stroke of luck, he's able to defeat both of them...


Kendall brings the baby back to his girlfriend and a strange nerdy man in a tuxedo with a heavy accent. Then they dump a whole shit ton of expo on the audience...


And there you have it: the plot and conflict in a nutshell really. If you close your eyes and think about that setup, it's not a horrible idea for a movie! The two same actors who played the dead android things return as duplicate models of the same synthetics that Kendall killed. They have a laser fight...


After trying to rally the troops at an 80s heavy metal bar (lol)...


...and walking through the other super silly parts of this maze-like underground world...


...they get into another laser fight set to horrible jazz music where the synth's extremely budget Terminator rip-off eyesight technology is revealed...


That laser fight goes on FOREVER, chewing up around seven minutes of screen-time. Later, Kendall gets into an argument with Tuxedo Guy while he's doing some kind of autopsy on the defeated synths...


Tuxedo Guy is about to double-cross everybody and team with the robot dudes. But first, the lady watching the baby ponders what "the sun" might be...


Kendall makes his way towards the barrier with a bunch of the synthetic innards and confronts yet another one of these orange jumpsuits...


Other robots kidnap the lady and the baby and Kendall then blows up lightning orb guard thing by shooting the thing he pulled out of the synth with a laser gun next to it...


The escalator is now open! I forgot to mention that the above-ground overlords are all these old wizard-ass looking men called "the patrons" who ride in horse and buggies despite having harnessed all this future technology. The synths deliver the baby to these creeps along with the message that the human rebellion is under control, which... nope. These cloaked weirdos have nefarious plans for the baby and the parallels to real modern day conspiracy theories revolving around a similar idea were not lost on me. What's more insane is that they used an actual NEWBORN baby in all these wild scenes (!!!) ...


I mean, this is a pretty lo-fi file, but that's a real baby right? Cray.

As the hordes of the proletariat make their way up the escalator, we see a group of the synthetics plugged into some type of brainwashing session by the patrons where they're put into a comatose state as a video plays...


It's actually pretty cool and effective. I mean it looks like shit and is stupid but it is also pretty cool and effective! What can I say, I contain multitudes. It's just my opinion, man.

They make their way inside the bad guys' lair and Tuxedo Guy's double-cross is revealed to Kendall. They get into fight and T.G. gets impaled by the leg of a chair. RIP...


Kendall finds the synths in their brainwashing session and figures out that by just putting his laser gun on top of the machine running the video, it will cause the thing to get stuck in a loop thus holding the mass of robot guards under the spell? Sure, why not...


Then we cut to the weird cloaked dudes about to do.... something to the baby? Extract its blood with a laser for cloning or something? Who knows. But again they use a real baby and I'm just sitting here thinking where that 28 year-old kid is now lol. Kendall breaks in and fucks up the one guard not under the video spell with a cane he steals from one of the patrons before shooting it with the baby laser...


The movie ends with the mass of humans arriving at this castle somewhere in Russia (where this was filmed... in the dead of winter... lol) and Kendall telling the patrons "we're free" before one final shot of a brainwashed synth...


I really appreciate this type of Good Bad Movie™ because it's completely under the radar. Nobody's talking about this one as something fun to watch so it feels more special. In fact, the few online reviews are pretty horrendous lol. Maybe I'm the only person on earth who likes this and — you know what? — that's fine by me.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 588 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 590 ⫸

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Dark Future is a 2019 American sci-fi film directed by Greydon Clark. In the 21st century, most of mankind has been wiped out by a plague. The few remaining people are forced to live in an underground world, serving as prostitutes and slave to cyborgs that now control them. When the first baby in 30 years is born, a bartender leads a revolt against the part-man, part-machine creatures that seek to capture the baby for their own ends. It was released on February 9, 1994.