Dark Future (1994) User Reviews

Garbage

[bensonmum2 · 2/10 · 4 October 2019]

This thing is so bad that I can't be bothered to come up with my own plot summary. Here's the one from IMDb: "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."

Dark Future is complete and utter garbage. Everything imaginable is about as bad as you'll find in a movie. Acting - bad. Plot - bad. Special effects - bad. Music - bad. Cinematography - bad. Sets - bad. You get the idea. I'll bet that even the catering was bad. Director Greydon Clark made some reasonably enjoyable trash during his career (Final Justice and Satan's Cheerleaders for example), but with Dark Future, he hit rock bottom. It's absolutely horrible.

There are two things that keep me from raring Dark Future a 1/10. First, there is at least one interesting idea involving using the baby to somehow keep some old dudes alive. Of course, it's not fleshed out and it's handled poorly, but the idea is there. Second, I'm trying to limit the number of movies I rate a 1/10.

2/10

Sci-fi cheapie shot in Russia

[Leofwine_draca · 3/10 · 4 May 2017]

Low budget B-movie director Greydon Clark had been working in various exploitation genres for a couple of decades when his made this 1994 science fiction effort which was shot in Russia with a Russian supporting cast. It's even lower budgeted than his early productions and suffers from an endlessly rambling narrative that copies THE TERMINATOR in its depiction of a future society ruled by robots who have subjugated mankind. The overacting is very poor indeed although I did get a chuckle from the Ben Affleck lookalike who plays in support. The only time the film picks up is for a few brief action scenes incorporating cool spark effects when the androids get shot and some bloody squib hits for the human casualties. It's a shame about the toy guns, though.

A lesson in film making incompetence.

[ben-winterburn · 1/10 · 17 April 2023]

Where to start. The film is terrible. The Synopsis - a plague renders humans sterile. A group of aging oligarchs run what's left of the world from a civic building of some sort in Russia. Their rule, such as it is, enforced by sex crazed cyborgs. Yeah it's as good as that sounds. I've seen high school plays that were better acted and made more sense.

The "cyborgs" wear Russian naval survival suits for some reason, Complete with cervical flotation at the neck. Spiffy! The cyborgs, we are told via exposition dump, are wired up to mimic the human brains of what used to be their living human progenitors, who were the mercenary army of the oligarchs. As such the cyborgs still have the human instinct for drinking and whoring, so they go to a theme park populated by human slaves. At the park the cyborgs hear a baby cry! The humans aren't sterile after all!

Once the truth is known, park bartender, Kendall (played by Darby Hinton who seems to be the only one who received his certificate from "how to be an actor in 7 days", I digress) decides to start a revolution. His compatriot Perrine who looks and sounds like the Gestapo man from the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, wears round glasses so you know he is slime. Are you still following this?

Kendall seems well informed about historical events prior and up to the oligarch takeover, where he gets this info is unexplained.

Things I noted of interest and points of unintentional humor.

1) due to the lack of budget for proper actors and choreography the action scenes are hilarious. The slave human tactics look like something an epileptic toad might have come up with. Taking cover beside cover rather than behind it, and drawing down on the backs of your opponents and then waiting upwards of a minute for them to turn around and shoot you first being highlights.

2) A woman with an infant enters an airduct at ground level, crawls along laterally some distance and exits some six stories up in another building. Amazing.

3) For some reason the cyborgs have space laser pistols and force fields, but don't have radios to tell each other or the oligarchs what is happening in the theme park.

4) In the final fight, a cyborg takes 3 point blank shots from a laser pistol and is not seriously affected. Prior to this every cyborg has died instantly from a single shot. Kendall decides to fight the cyborg with a cane snatched from an oligarch. His fight with the cyborg looks like an altercation between two Tai Chi practitioners.

5) The oligarchs are all bearded old whitemen (obviously) But the human salves are all young. If the population is sterile where are the young slaves coming from? If they are the last of the pre plague humans why don't they know anything? If they are clones why don't the oligarchs clone themselves? Or produce cyborg bodies for themselves, instead of the ridiculous plan to use the baby to make potions of longevity (tm)?

6) The oligarchs apparently stay on the surface doing....? But send their robots to the pleasure parks?

The dialogue and story are something a 13 year old might write for their homegrown comics. The special effects what you'd expect from the early 80's not 1994. The direction and flow are abysmal. This movie is on par with Robot Monster for cinematic turkey of the century.

BOMB.

un-polished,B-class quality with a good script idea

[Mike-336 · 5/10 · 23 September 1998]

In this made-in-Russia, un-polished, B-quality film I'm left with a feeling that it should have been better. If this story had stayed as a short story (in printed form) it would have been more enjoyable, but in this screen rendering, it falls flat. The directing, acting, production quality, and overall feel is not one of quality. I rate video's by the $7.00 test. I would have felt cheated if I had payed $3.00 to see it at a theater let-alone $7.00......Mike

When even Rifftrax can't save it.

[TokyoGyaru · 10 February 2021]

It's so bad, a fake "American" film that's very obviously not American made. You can tell by how they're styled, their standards of beauty, their expressions and behaviors, etc. I could tell they were either Russian or German (The glasses guy with the strong accent is CREEPY!). The way it's shot, the sets, the costumes, the writing, the everything--wrong! Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, shot on VHS, looked better, was better acted, and was far more interesting on what was probably a smaller budget.

Cyborgs versus Humans

[Uriah43 · 3/10 · 30 December 2021]

This film takes place in the future after a plague has devastated humankind leaving only a relatively few number of people enslaved to cyborgs who use them for their own pleasure with absolutely no regard for whether they live or die. For their part, the people have been conditioned to not only accept their station in life but to also believe everything they have been told by their cyborg masters. So, after being brainwashed into believing that they are all sterile, the birth of a child creates an immediate problem for the cyborgs who realize the impact this would have on the overall nature of things should this development ever be brought to light. Now rather than reveal any more, I will just say that I had some hopes that this might turn out to be an interesting sci-fi movie, all things considered. Unfortunately, it didn't take very long for me to realize that this would not be the case as the low-budget nature of this movie came into full view almost immediately--with bad acting, weak scripts, cheap-looking sets and everything else one might imagine. That being said, although this was clearly not a good movie, I liked the basic plot for the most part and for that reason I cut it some slack and rated it a little higher than it probably deserves.

Big ideas, but so little budget...

[Aaron1375 · 3/10 · 29 July 2020]

I do believe that 90% of the budget for this film went to the flaming cans that littered the pleasure place, or was it the forbidden zone? A film by Greydon Clark, not the Hobgoblin one, the other. Yeah, I didn't know there were two bad directors with the same name either. This one does put out slightly better films than the Hobgoblin one, but that is not saying much. A film set in the future, Greydon's done that before, but in this one he does something totally different! He leaves out any explanation as to what the old guys' plans were! Oh wait, I don't think he ever explained why the aliens abducted those two in The Return either and I bet he has left a lot of unanswered questions on the table...maybe he was thinking sequel?

The story has humans in the future living in some underground city that people that are sort of cyborgs come for fun. For reasons unknown, the city is full of flaming cans...not even joking, a character is fleeing at the beginning and you see can after can after can on fire! Well, later some of the cyborgs come and start doing their thing, but here a baby crying, which sets off a bartender dude that looks like a blonde Don Mattingly who thinks now is the time for a revolution! Why not? The cyborgs are not tough at all, most going down with a single shot. While trying to protect the baby though they end up going beyond their strange pleasure place, into the real world where old guys want to do things to the baby to extend their lives that do not look fulfilling at all...

The premise has some good points, but the execution and parts of the story bring this film to the normal Greydon Clark circa 90's film is. Why the cyborgs need sex is anyone's guess and why the old men who are human make the humans live in such randomness is beyond me. Why all the themed rooms? Makes little sense, but I did like how the place seemed like a really cool maze.

So, it is not very good, just goes all over the place and in the end it leaves so much stuff on the table that I am curious if a sequel was made or planned and possibly scrapped. I did kind of like the underground world that was very maze like, but it really seemed odd that cyborg guys would need such a place to relax and sit a spell. It makes less sense that a bunch of old men would want to continue living in smelly cloaks with no women controlling the cyborgs in the horrible orange jumpsuits as that does not seem like a fun life. Oh well, just a movie with no answers to many questions such as why were there so many flaming garbage cans underground!

Filmed in blah-0-vision

[skinnybert · 4/10 · 5 March 2024]

OK: it's not very good (as others have made abundantly clear) -- but it's NOT a one-star or two-star film. Shots are reasonably in focus, the pacing is approximately good, and there are visuals of reasonable interest. The central idea is stretched a bit thin, however ... about as thin as LOGAN'S RUN, but somehow less convincing. The static ball entrance is actually pretty good -- really the only memorable thing in the whole film -- and the gun-zaps look good as well. But when the plotting runs thin and the scripting does likewise, we can't help wishing for at least someone charismatic to hold our interest. The closest we get is flaming barrels and Andria Mann crawling head-on in a low-cut top, which together essentially sum up the whole movie.