FUTURE KICK (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

My fuzzy memories of this Roger Corman production didn't bode well for the re-viewing, but my main motivation wasn't entertainment. I decided that in the near future I ought to view one of the movies featuring kickboxing-champ-turned-actor Don "The Dragon" Wilson in order to represent him on THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA. Given that motive, I decided I might as well review Wilson's first "superhero-adjacent" movie.

In contrast to the majority of martial-arts prodigies who have taken a shot at acting, Wilson showed a natural charisma early on, when Corman featured him in two made-in-the-Philippines martial arts films, BLOODFIST and BLOODFIST II. Presumably Corman or someone in his organization was impressed enough by box-office returns to fast-track Wilson into a cheapjack SF-adventure, co-written by Catherine (BLOODFIST II) Cyran and the FUTURE KICK director Damian Klaus (his only movie credit to date).

The setting is a future-Earth in which the wealthiest people have committed the ultimate upper-class flight, emigrating to a moon colony. The script doesn't say why this move causes the rest of the world to fall apart, so that Earth consists mostly of titty bars, street-gangs and criminal businesses, one of which deals in illegally obtained body parts. But specifics aside, KICK is an obvious retread of every SF-tale involving "haves" and "have nots" since METROPOLIS.

Wilson plays Walker, a "Cyberon" (cyborg) who was originally designed to fight crime. However, in film-time Walker's the last of his kind, for the organization that created the Cyberons found them threatening, possibly because the cyborgs were a little too law-abiding to overlook corporate perfidy. Walker alone escaped destruction, and though there's the implication that his former masters would like him killed as well, this never becomes important to the story. Though there's no reflecting on Walker's day to day existence-- it's not even clear if he needs to eat-- he maintains his existence as a bounty hunter because that gets him involved in the principal conflict.

It's a pretty muddy conflict, though. On the moon a VR scientist named Howard, married to wife Nancy (Meg Foster), takes a shuttle to Earth to consult with his employers (who DIDN'T emigrate to the moon, I guess). He contacts bounty hunter Walker for some reason, but then Howard gets randomly killed by a thug who harvests organs for "New Body." (If this were an intelligent movie, some comment might've been made about the poor feeding on the rich for once.) When Nancy doesn't hear from her husband for a while, she comes to Earth to investigate. Facing indifference from overworked cops, she finds Walker and hires him to avenge her husband.

All of these badly edited scenarios exist just to set up kickboxing scenes between Walker and various gang-bangers, a martial artist played by Chris Penn, and the organ-stealer. The fights are watchable but aren't even the best from the oeuvre of Don Wilson, and there's no attempt to generate chemistry between Wilson and Meg Foster. There's a final "trick ending" suggesting that maybe the whole exploit was the creation of VR tech, though this too is sloppily delivered, so that it's confusing instead of arresting.

If FUTURE KICK was a bag of popcorn, it would be one where all the kernels either got burned or failed to pop. The only glimmer of quality appears when the taciturn Walker gets a little talkative with Nancy, reflecting on how the other Cyberons were his only family. Wilson puts some feeling into these lines, and his ability to convey simple but strong emotions may have more to do with his long B-movie career than his kickboxing skills.