#AtoZChallenge Future Cops

Not all dystopian cop movies are about cyborgs; some of them are about flesh-and-blood people! All of these ones are on Rifftrax, not MST3K.

Future Force & Future Zone:  In the "future" of the late 80s and early 90s policing is turned over to scummy-looking guys in sleeveless jean jackets who have the power to instantly kill people based on orders they receive from one of those digital scrolling boards like they used to have at the DMV or some restaurants.  It seems like a much worse system, but I guess it works--somehow.

The late David Carradine stars as John Tucker, a member of COPS--Civilian Operated Police Systems.  In Future Force he get embroiled in a scandal involving the head of COPS and his loyal henchman.  They put a hit out on a reporter but instead Tucker saves her and in the process kills a lot of his coworkers.

The most unintentionally hilarious part of this is after a chase in LA, Tucker pushes a car over a cliff.  A cliff in downtown LA?  What the hell?  Since when did they start strip-mining downtown LA?  Tucker also has this power glove thing that shoots lasers or something and the funny thing is first that he keeps in the trunk of his car most of the time so he never has it when he really needs it and then he has a remote for it that all he has to do is keep pushing the same button and it does whatever he wants.  So as far as story logic, there's not much.

The sequel Future Zone kicks the stupidity up a notch as Tucker's son travels back in time to help him solve a case--and keep him alive.  I guess saving your crusty, beer-swilling dad is a pretty good use of time travel, though there are probably better uses for it.  And really, why does some mesh-shirt wearing schmuck have access to a "time portal?"

And again the power glove remains in the trunk when Tucker really needs it, though this time he doesn't even use the remote until the very end.

Omega Cop:  In this dystopian future the ozone layer depleting has caused society to fall apart.  A bland middle-aged guy who looks like a discount Ben Mendelssohn is the head of a police force of 4 guys who work for Adam West in a bunker.  They go out on a raid to stop some slavers but the three other guys die while bland guy survives.  Adam West won't let him back into the bunker so he stays out in the ruins of civilization to search for the bad guys.  In the process he picks up three women who occasionally help him.

About 11 months ago I talked about how weak the ending of this movie was.  There's no big fight between bland cop and the bad guy.  Nope, bland cop sets off some explosives and then he and the girls go off to Montana where it's not so bad.  Hooray!

As far as bad movies go it's not the worst, but it's pretty lame nonetheless.

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe:  If you need a guardian of the universe, who better than former professional-wrestler-turned-Minnesota-governor Jesse Ventura?  Um, almost anyone?

Jesse Ventura is a space cop from some planet who's lived for tens of thousands of years.  His old partner went bad and then escaped to Earth to impregnate a woman who gives birth to a son who's something called a "comater."  Which is...what?  Damned if I know.

Though Jesse Ventura captured his former partner the first time, he escapes back to Earth like six years later so he can kidnap the kid to...do something.  It's like, Step 1:  impregnate woman to make a comater, Step 2:  kidnap comater, Step 3: ??? and take over the universe or something like that.  The talk of an "antilife equation" seems lifted from Darkseid in DC Comics, but it's never really explained what it is or how it could be used.

Of course Jesse Ventura follows him and hooks up with the kid's mother as he protects them from his former partner.

Besides that the plot makes almost no sense, the action scenes are pretty lame and as you'd expect the acting is pretty bad.  For some reason Jim Belushi has a cameo as a school principal, though in 1990-ish he was still able to be in real Hollywood movies, so maybe he owed the director money or something.  Or maybe he's friends with Jesse Ventura.  Anyway, it's a pretty hilariously bad sci-fi action movie.

A fun fact is that Jesse Ventura and his opponent Sven-Ole Thorsen were both in Schwarzenegger movies like Predator and Running Man.  Even if you never saw those you probably saw Thorsen in Gladiator as the formerly-retired gladiator with the tigers and a golden mask.  So that was a step up.

At the end of the movie Bill Corbett cautions viewers, "For the love of God please take the right to vote seriously."  Unfortunately we didn't listen.