3/27/07: Future-Kill (1985)We’re still waiting for those Duke lacrosse students to finally be freed from their frame-up. In the meantime, let’s celebrate another fine group of frat boys who ended up in similar dire straits—and, like our Duke students, they were even set up by a corrupt Leftist. (Allegedly, we'll add, since it seems like a good idea to add "allegedly.")
Future-Kill was filmed in Austin, Texas, during a brief period when it seemed people would be excited over the reunion of two members from the cast of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Edwin Neal—who played the squirrelly hitchhiker in
Chainsaw’s opening—wrote and produced this vanity project in hopes of becoming a Freddy Krueger. Instead, he made a laughable film that remains historically sound.
A bunch of actors you’ll never see again play some wild University of Texas frat boys. As punishment for tarring and feathering a rival frat guy, they’re sent off to kidnap one of the mutants who populate downtown Austin. These aren’t real mutants like in the
X-Men movies. The mutants of
Future-Kill are young anti-nuke activists who prove their dedication by dressing up like extras from a Billy Idol video.
The idea is to grab a mutant and bring him to a frat party. That sounds more like an intervention than a kidnapping. Unfortunately, the frat guys grab Eddie Pain. He’s the leader of the mutants, and also the only one with the nerve to stand up to Splatter—played by Edwin Neal. Splatter is a former employee of a nuclear site who’s been hideously deformed by radiation. We learn where he was hideously deformed when a foolish femme mutant pulls down Splatter’s pants in a doomed attempt at creepy copulation.
Anyway, Splatter represents the radical arm of the mutants. At the end of that arm is a gloved hand with razor blades and spring-mounted spikes. Splatter likes to complain about white-collar weekend protestors, and he really hates mutants who talk to the press. Yes, Splatter is so deranged that he doesn’t even trust the media to be on his side.
Splatter uses the frat boys’ attempted kidnapping as an opportunity to kill Eddie, and frames the students for the murder. From there, we’re basically watching a remake of
The Warriors, except this time all the characters—including the undercover frat boys—are wearing make-up.
Here’s the fun part: A female mutant (played by an actress we’ll never see again) helps out the boys even while insisting that she’s part of a non-violent movement. She eventually figures out where she’s wrong. Also, she has to acknowledge that maybe dressing up like idiots wasn’t the best way to get conservatives to be impressed by her cause.
Meanwhile, the frat boys are a lot like our heroes in
The Zero Boys. They don’t have a difficult time beating the mascara off the various mutant guys who attack them. In fact, the burly jock frat guy who’d usually be treated as the weak link is instead the constant hero. His recurring battle cry: “I wanna get back to the frat house!” By the end of
Future-Kill, we all wanna get back to that frat house and raise a keg to justice.
And here’s a 22-year-old SPOILER: It turns out that nuclear energy is safe enough that you can practically stand in the same room as it microwaves Splatter.
Make it your own: The schlock fiends of
Subversive Cinema have put out a fine
DVD of
Future-Kill, although we don’t yet have the technology to salvage the lousy sound recording on the original film. You’ll want to crank it up. There’s also some filmmaker’s commentary. We haven’t bothered to listen yet, but it hopefully goes into some detail about how in hell they got H.R. Giger to design
Future-Kill’s movie poster.
Now, here’s a nostalgic moment: We were going on a first date in 1985, and the gal told us to choose the evening’s movie. Two films had just opened that had our interest:
Future-Kill (which we’re pretty sure was marketed in the South under the title of
Splatter) and Martin Scorsese’s
After Hours. We went with
After Hours, which gave us the questionable honor of then having a second date. We later caught a screening of
Future-Kill on our own, and it turned out that both films had similar plots. Scorsese went on to win an Oscar, though.
