Dark Future Reviews

Director Greydon Clark's place in the pantheon of Trash Cinema is assured. This low-rent sci-fi outing is as quality-free as most of Clark's other films, but doesn't offer up the campy fun found in such memorable items as SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS and WITHOUT WARNING. In a sterile future ruled by androids called Synths, fertility is outlawed and human beings are kept as servants. Brave barkeep Kendall (Darby Hinton) has questions about life outside the "safe zone," and so foments open rebellion against the robot rulers. When the Synths kill humans and nab their offspring, a few human rebels steal back the baby and hide it. Unfortunately for the zone's scared inhabitants, Kendall's destruction of mechanical parts belonging to a pair of droids brings down heavier re-inforcements. Kendall's rebel pal Parrine (Gabriel Vaughn) betrays the infant's location to the Synths. Venturing off-limits, Kendall and collaborator Parrine follow the kidnapped child and its foster mom Birch (Andria Mann) to the cyborgs' headquarters. In the control lab, Kendall discovers that aging human "elders," who control the android army with brainwashing techniques, plan to kill the child and extract its vital organs to prolong their own lives. Kendall subsequently neutralizes many Synth-soldiers with the Elders' mind-control device, destroys some active androids, and reclaims the infant from the impotent elders as other humans file in from the underground world to witness a new deal for mankind. Greydon Clark and crew deserve some measure of praise for uncovering some nifty locations for this time-warped sci-fi penny dreadful. The praise stops there. Judging from the foreign names in the credits, DARK FUTURE was probably made abroad, where the crew may not have understood some of Clark's directions like "Action!" and "Print it!" Presumably to save a few pennies, the scripts announces that the cyborgs are only manufactured in two models; this means that the same actors can play identical Synths but that the audience has a helluva time keeping their villains clear. Although the special effects are adequate, the film's set decoration could be called MAD MAX manque. When the Synths relax after hours in dives that are supposed to reflect different eras of history, viewers will need medication to keep up with the movie's bastardization of historical modes; the designers aren't being resourceful, just careless. Clark occasionally moves the camera effectively (although this maybe the result of some on-location serendipity), but he has no gift for choosing talent or eliciting performances from the non-actors he chooses. Add to this thespic hideousness the lackadaisical cross-cutting, sloppy fight choreography, bad matching from medium to close-up shots, and tedious hide-and-seek chase sequences, and your total adds up to near zero-quality entertainment. Minimalist cinema of Clark's sort is like revisiting Ed Wood Jr., but without all the fun.(Graphic violence, extensive nudity, profanity.)