Dark Future (1994)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Great Film overall

As Good As It Gets

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

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.

When I was a kid I had this film on VHS and I use to watch it again and again, until I lost it. I remember it was really scary movie to me at that time, I even had a few nightmares about the Synths chasing me, so this movie means much to me. Since this movie isn't well known, it was hard to get another copy, so I kinda gave up hope to see it again. But now after many years I decided to watch it again and I bought it on internet, hoping that this movie will be still very enjoyable to me as it was when I was a kid. And I must say that I enjoyed every minute of it. I'm a big post-apocalyptic movies fan and I have seen a lot of them, but this is still one of my favorite. It's not one of those toxic wasteland post-apocalyptic movies it's more similar with movies like Terminator or Cyborg 2, but it has some originality in it, like cyborgs who have conquer the world, but have left some people alive to satisfy their human desires. I have already mentioned that this movie use to be scary to me, so I guess I have to explain why. What use to scare me, was how powerful and merciless those cyborgs were and how well it was portrayed. Even a main good guy, was afraid of them. There were few scary scenes where people are fighting cyborgs and those people looked so helpless against them and those cyborgs seemed to enjoy killing. And also those Russia's streets where it was all filmed, reminded me of a neighborhood where I grow up, that made this film look even more realistic to me. Action scenes are also worth mentioning. Though this film is made on a low budged, I think that action sequences looked great. OK, maybe sometimes it was to slow, but I've seen many action movies of that time who were made on a bigger budged but had a much worse action sequences. In this movie, there was some shootouts which looked pretty good, especially in those scenes where people who get shot fly few meters back and then crush to some table, that looked pretty impressive. Darby Hinton showed some great kicks (he was studying Jet Kun Do, Bruce Lee's fighting technique). What's about acting? Well I've read some other comments on the internet which said that acting in this film was horrible. I disagree with that. It wasn't nothing special, but it was good enough. Personally, I think that Darby Hinton and Leonard Donato where really great. Other actors were good too. I liked the soundtrack, it gave this film a creepy atmosphere. It's also well directed, because like I said, there is always that creepy atmosphere in this movie and that is probably what I liked the most in this film. So, if you like post-apocalyptic films, you must see this one, it's a really dark vision of future.

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