Oblivion (1994)

Touches You

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

A B-movie hybrid of sci-fi and Western. It feels like the latest of all '80s movies, and it could have played nicely on USA Up All Night. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be one of the better movies to play on that program. It has a couple of things going for it, but mostly it's lame. It has no story and no energy, and after about a half an hour, it starts to feel interminable. The leads are mostly unknowns, and are fairly uninteresting. It has a few recognizable supporting actors, like George Takei, Julie Newmar and Isaac Hayes. Takei and Newmar are just there to deliver awful jokes in the form of Star Trek and Batman references. Thankfully, Hayes spares us from any Shaft references. The humor is generally awful. Whenever it tries to be funny, it flops to the ground. I did enjoy the costume and character design. The bad guy in particular looks great. Okay, very cheesy, but the film does know what it is. And I loved the undertaker, named Gaunt (Carel Struycken), who is basically a reference to The Seventh Seal. And, while not a good actress, Musetta Vander is gorgeous as the villain's henchwoman/girlfriend. They made a sequel to this film which is a bit higher rated on IMDb. I won't be seeking it out, though.

Boy, this movie is like a circus: a variety of bizarre and colorful characters and events spiced up with fun & cheesy special effects. I think this movie might have created a total new subgenre on it's own by mixing sci-fi/western/comedy/horror/drama/revenge flicks all together. This movie spawned from production company Full Moon, which was at it's best - in my opinion - during the late eighties and the first half of the nineties. OBLIVION, though not their best movie, is a fine example of how crazy they can get.We've got: Spaceships, a 19th century western town with money-machines, a green alien lizard-man with an eye-patch, a cyborg-deputy, a faggot-mariachi, giant stop-motion scorpions, an S&M/Gothic-babe with a whip (Musetta Vander can lick my neck anytime), an over-friendly grim-looking undertaker, an Indian with too much brown make-up and a bad long-hair wig, a drunk Japanese dude (George Takei giving us silly STAR TREK inside jokes), midgets in a barfight, a coffin-shaped coroner's house, pyramids (huh?), an empath protagonist, a poisonous Manh-Ding, Bingo on Thursdays, Indian magic, a grande finale in the Badlands,... ehr, I'm gonna stop now, 'cause the list's getting awful long here.This movie also has a cameo by Isaac Hayes (the man can't act, but is funny as hell), a double roll by Andrew"Djinn"Divoff as the lizard-man Redeye and a dumb hustler Einstein (slightly hilarious) and a delicious performance by hot-babe-dressed-in-leather Musetta Vander as the whippin' Lash. (Musetta also stars in MANSQUITO, which is like a b-movie cross-over between THE FLY and MIMIC, so go see it, you pulpy movie-lovers!)What about the story of OBLIVION? Hell, who needs a story if you got all the above-mentioned ingredients? But there is one, and it's full of stupid and funny dialogues and situations. I recommend this for 90 minutes of pure ridiculous nonsense. Now, somebody please give me the sequel, OBLIVION 2: BACKLASH. I have to see it!

Why did someone ever take the trouble to make this movie?? The only thing good to see in this movie is the foxy bad girl Lash.., other than that it has it all to make this movie suck: bad story, special effects that even for 94' qualify as worse than the worst, jokes that make one laugh out of misery and last but definately not least, some serious bad acting!!Some aspects that give a good idea about this movie: out side of town you may encounter enormous clay scorpions that kill upon sight, apparently one can read the future in a cup of coffee if you look in a special way, playing bingo during a funeral is considered normal, all street lights have fans connected to them (dont ask why, its the future ok?), there are frogs about a feet high that kill you when ur scared, when u chop off a cyborgs hand it turns into a flame thrower, ah well, need i say more??when should anyone see this movie?? either when you're with a lot of friends who are all drunk (including yourself), or when u feel the time has come to see a bad movie that just stays in your head because its SO BAD!!!

The special effects of this movie are, especially for its time, laughable and used in such an over-emphasized way that you can't deny their terrible existance.The acting redefines the term "terrible overacting" at the hands of Meg Foster and Richard Joseph Paul, where julie Newman and Andrew Divoff just redefine "bad".***spoilers***The charm in this movie can be found in two things: First is the excellent casting of Carel "Lurch" Struycken as the mysterious psychic Gaunt, who can sense where and when people will die and is always there.The second are original finds, the combination SF-Western is obviously original, if terrible, but other finds are more original, like the gunman Zack Stone being able to sense the pain of the people he shoots (though his acting falls short here).Overal...don't see this movie, except if you love that ol' hunk-o-brutal Carel Struycken, as any self-respecting Dutchman should.