Future Zone
Both Future Force and Food of the Gods have sequels, and both sequels are bad. The primary difference between the two is that Future Zone actually does follow up the events of Future Force and features a couple of the same actors, while Gnaw: Food of the Gods II has about as much to do with the original as Troll II does with Troll. I will obviously be watching both, but I'm doing this one first.
Absolutely nothing has changed since the first movie, as John Tucker is still a grouchy asshole working for COPS, the Civilian-Operated Policing Service, which is still massively corrupt, and still keeps his robo-gauntlet in the boot of his car where it's hard to get to during tense moments. While investigating the bombing of a freight ship, he meets a guy in a see-through shirt who looks kind of like a knockoff Patrick Swayze and desperately wants to work with him for some reason. This dude turns out to be Tucker's son from the future, who has come back in time to prevent him dying in a junkyard shootout before even finding out he is to be a father. That's technically a spoiler, I guess, but it's not as if the audience hasn't figured it out way before the supposedly climactic reveal. The director still likes feet.
Rather to my surprise, there are ways in which Future Zone definitely improves on its predecessor. For one thing, they certainly had more money. Although much of the movie still takes place in junkyards and old warehouses, there are a few actual sets, like a bigger COPS headquarters. We get to see some decent pyrotechnics and a couple of halfway-impressive car crashes. The thing the film-makers seem proudest of, however, is that this time they actually have a guy with a gun in a real helicopter! Several shots seem chosen just to emphasize this. The script also manages to avoid having anything like Roxanne or the guy with the rocket launcher, characters who show up out of nowhere to resolve a situation and then vanish again.
Unfortunately, in terms of plot coherence Future Zone manages to be a marked step down, which is actually kind of impressive when Future Force made so little sense to begin with! In Force, Tucker got involved because he was the first to get to Simms. In Zone he happens to shoot a few guys who were involved in the drug trade that led to the ship getting blown up, but that's rather distant from the central conflict behind it, and the fact that most of the culprits die immediately severs Tucker from situation. News broadcasts tell us that the explosion is under investigation, but we don't get any sense of Tucker taking a personal interest. He just goes straight home to get yelled at by his wife.
The wife's name is Marion. Reading a plot summary of this after having seen Future Force would probably lead you to assume that this is Marion Simms from the first movie, but I'm honestly not sure. I mean yes, at the end of that movie they drove off into the sunset in his banged-up SUV, but if it were meant to be the same person surely they've have tried to make the Marion in this installment resemble her! Marion in Future Force was a tall, elegantly dressed brunette trying to advance her career. Marion in Future Zone is a short blonde in leopard-print lingerie who spends three hours cooking a meal for Tucker and then calls him and whines about him not showing up. Anna Rapagna in Force was merely a mediocre actress. Gail Jensen in Zone is an actively bad one, with a grating delivery that makes me want to smash my computer screen with a sledgehammer.
Tucker's general unwashed-and-unkempt-ness, Marion's trashy outfits, and the hunk-of-junk nature of Tucker's vehicle makes it very funny to me that the two of them apparently live in a lovely suburban house in a nice neighbourhood.
Home life aside, through the rest of the movie we still don't get the idea that this ship bombing investigation is one Tucker feels is specifically up to him. When Patrick-Swayze-Looking-Guy, whose actual name is Billy, offers him a tip to help identify the ship's owner, Tucker takes it because he figures Billy will give it to somebody else if he doesn't, but his motives are purely financial. Later, Billy observes that “somebody wants you off this case”, which is jarring to the audience because we haven't really gotten the idea that Tucker is on this case, and he certainly never seems to want to be. The impression is that David Carradine is fed up with this movie and wants to go home, and he has passed that attitude along to his character.
I also feel like the script hadn't been through very many drafts before they started filming, partly because of this failure to get Tucker properly invested in what's going on, and partly because of a glaring inconsistency. Tucker and Billy first meet in an impromptu quick-draw contest, and Tucker, impressed, asks “who taught you to shoot?” Billy replies, “you wouldn't believe me, but I learned from the best.” The obvious implication here is that Tucker will teach his son in the future... but later Billy remarks that he never knew his father, and we eventually learn that Tucker was supposed to die before Billy was even born! So who did teach him to shoot? Did anybody actually read the completed script? If so, how did they miss that?
Removing the line would also do wonders for the suspense. We knew this guy was a time traveller from the moment he appeared in a beam of blue light, because we all saw The Terminator, but the line about I learned from the best combined with his refusal to use a name for the teacher pretty much seals the deal that this is Tucker's son and/or protégé. From there we just spend the rest of the film waiting for Tucker to figure it out himself, and it's a little annoying that they save it for the very end because we never really get to see anyone try to deal with this information.
Billy Tucker is, by dint of the situation he's in, the most interesting character here. Ted Prior is not a great actor, but he manages to do one thing nobody else in the cast does, and that's shed some light on his character's thoughts without having to talk about it. Tucker is Billy's hero, and he is barely containing how absolutely giddy he is to havemet him. His glee at the cars he's driving and the music he's hearing is also evident, and even though we later find out he's got a bigger purpose in coming here, it would be easy to believe that this is something Billy is doing purely for fun.
That brings us to possibly the only thing in the movie that actually makes the viewer want to think. Everything we see in Future Zone makes this look like a terrible world to live in. The streets are filthy, the city is full of crime, drugs, and terrorists, the music is bad, violence is everywhere, and the people look like they smell of BO and cigarettes. Yet to Billy, this is the Good Old Days, an era he knows only through the romanticized tales of his elders, and he behaves like a kid who's found himself in the Wild West. He runs around punching people and shooting things and acting like it's all a jolly lark, until the possibility of consequences suddenly slaps him in the face.
The first thing this leads us to wonder is what the hell is Billy's future like, if this seems like a fun era to hang out in? We never get any answer to this, and we have to wonder if Tucker's survival will make that future better or worse.
The idea of consequences is the other place where Prior manages to pull off an acting moment. Billy took his trip through time in order to prevent his father's untimely death, but there's a moment in which he finds his meddling may have resulted in the death of his mother, and therefore his own non-existence, instead. This is clearly troubling to him and he clings to the fact of his own presence as reassurance that Marion must still be alive. Up until now he has had some idea what's going on and where he needs to be from reading about the incident, but now he's flying blind. He tries to articulate this without revealing the truth to Tucker, and is very clumsy at it, but the audience gets the idea and it's surprisingly effective.
When I compare Future Zone to its predecessor, the strengths and weaknesses of it kind of even out. It is neither better nor worse, but I guess at least it's bad in different ways. There is, however, one thing I absolutely will not forgive it for. In Future Force, when Tucker finally pulled out the remote control for his robo-gauntlet, he used it to beat the stuffing out of a guy while Tucker himself just hid behind a wrecked car – that was the best thing in the movie. In Future Zone, the remote comes out during the bit when the guy in the helicopter was shooting at them, and I was suddenly paying full attention as I hoped I would see the gauntlet punch the helicopter right out of the sky. It wouldn't have saved the movie, but it would have been awesome.
Tragically it was not to be. Tucker just puts the thing on and shoots a laser at the helicopter instead. I hope at least somebody in the writing room suggested punching the helicopter and they decided against it for budget reasons, because not to have even thought of it seems very out-of-character for these guys.
