Fury, Future '38, and a few more films

Furries: An Inside Look (2010)
Streaming free at Vimeo

Unsurprisingly, Republicans and other people who are afraid of EVERYTHING are afraid of furries — folks who dress up as animals. This is a quick documentary, wherein filmmaker Curt Pehrson tries to calm such irrational worries by chatting with several furries, all dressed in normal clothes, explaining what they do and why.

Spoiler: Being a furry is harmless fun, and that's why they do it.

NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#282  [archive]
APR. 26, 2024

One of the interviewees laughs at right-wing media's fevered coverage of furries as if it's all an animalistic orgy. "Have you ever worn a fur suit? It's like wearing your sofa. Some people can barely walk in them, and they get to be 110° in the course of about 90 seconds. If you want to try strenuous activity in that, you go right ahead. I'll be here, ready to dial 9-1-1."

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Fury (1936)
Available on DVD from your local library

Fritz Lang made several marvelous, masterpiece movies. A lot of people think this is one of them, but it's not.

Joe (Spencer Tracy) is in love with Katherine (Sylvia Sidney), and also loves salted peanuts. Katherine doesn't care for peanuts, but her love is so deep she announces: "I love you, you love peanuts, so I love peanuts, too." The peanuts are a crucial plot point, so pay attention.

The mood switches from romance to mob violence when Joe is arrested and charged with kidnapping. He's innocent, but jailed awaiting trial, and the townsfolk aren't a'waitin' — they storm the jail and burn it down. 

Joe makes it out alive, and here's where the story goes salted nuts: He keeps his survival a secret, and Joe's two brothers are in on the ruse, telling no-one that Joe is still alive — as 22 townsfolk are prosecuted for his murder. But pretending to be dead doesn't stop Joe from eating and drinking at a crowded bar across the street.

During the trial of the mob, Joe listens on the radio, maniacally smiling, and director Lang makes his point via the prosecuting attorney:

"Your honor, in the last 49 years mobs have lynched 6,010 human beings by hanging, burning, cutting in this proud land of ours — a lynching about every three days."

That's frightening, and I'm glad there are fewer lynchings these days than in the 1930s. This movie may have helped with that. Respect, sincerely.

Here in 2024, though, I balked too many times at the unlikeliness of it all — that an entire town would band together in violence, trying to prevent a trial. That the sheriff would be the only person who believes in law and order. That a crowd would cheer and taunt a man, throw rocks at the bars of his cell, while the jail burns. That the state would seek the death penalty against everyone who'd been involved. Joe's Jekyll/Hyde flip to near-drooling insanity after the fire. Katherine's German expressionist response to all of this. And yeah, the recurring salted peanuts as evidence, and further wackiness too wacky to detail. It's a live-action Chick tract.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Fuses (1967)
Streaming free at Vimeo

Filmmaker Carolee Schneemann films herself having sex with her lover, but it's avant-garde, the opposite of a porno — you've rarely seen sex rendered so unsexy.

Images of books and a housecat and a run on the beach are juxtaposed against the brief, shadowy images of pubic hair, genitalia, and undulating flesh. There's no sound, and the film looks like it was unspooled and run through a washer, dryer, and maybe a dishwasher before being screened, leaving everything blotched and scratched.

I'm not sure what message or meaning is intended, but it's cool.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Future Force (1989)
Streaming free at Tubi

An opening voiceover explains, with a British accent, that crime was out of control in America by 1991, so all police departments were privatized. Within two years crime was under control. "The price, however, was a heavy one, for justice as we once knew it had ceased to exist."

David Carradine works for COPS, which, in this movie, is somehow the acronym for 'Civilian Operated Police Incorporated'. To keep the movie's wardrobe costs down, he wears a t-shirt and denim jacket as he kills people he's judged guilty of crimes. If anyone fights back, Carradine beats them or kills them, then walks away unbruised and unbloodied. He's RoboCop without the robo.

The movie is surprisingly slow, and unsurprisingly simpleminded. There was, apparently, no shitty role in any shitty movie that David Carradine wouldn't accept. 

Verdict: BIG NO.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Future Kick (1991)
Streaming free at Tubi

Don 'The Dragon' Wilson, a kick-boxer of some renown, stars as 'Walker'. He's some kind of corporate bounty hunter rounding up bad guys, but the movie quickly surpassed my limit for gruesome killings. I clicked it off after the decapitation, while the headless body was writhing on the floor.

Despite being about halfway through the movie, there'd been only one fight involving Don 'The Dragon' Wilson, and it was staged in such darkness that you couldn't really see the kicks.

Sadly, Meg Foster and Chris Penn co-star. 

Verdict: BIG NO.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Future Shock (1972)
Streaming free at Vimeo

In the early 1970s, Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock was all over the talk shows, but I never read it and couldn't have told you an hour ago whether it's fiction or non-fiction. Non-fiction, apparently.

This mini-movie (43 minutes) is based on the book, and seems to be an early critique of everything about modern culture — corporate capitalism, the "factory-like school system," marriage, group marriage, gay marriage, pornographic films, women's rights, riots, genetic engineering, cryonics, space exploration...

"Is technology always desirable? Changes bombard our nervous systems, clamoring for decisions. New values, new technologies flood into our lives. The pressure of fast change forces us to question all we've been taught. Sometimes technology can destroy, [like] an underground nuclear explosion. Amchitka. When will the next nuclear blast occur, and what will it do to us? Escape from change in today's society becomes more and more impossible. Change is necessary, but change itself is out of control. That is the challenge posed by future shock — to look deeply and clearly into today's world, to understand the consequences, that what we do today determines what tomorrow will be."

That's Orson Welles, who non-stop narrates in very dramatic tones, usually with a long pause before repeatedly repeating the phrase "future shock." Much as I love Welles, his on-screen narration is so worried and paranoid it's accidentally comical, and so's the horrific music that sometimes screeches at the audience.

Not that it matters much. Covering 110 topics in three-quarters of an hour ensures shallowness. I kinda suspect Toffler and Welles were right, that we're whirling too fast into the future — look where we are in 2024 — but the movie is an intellectual wading pool.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Future '38 (2017)
Streaming free at Tubi

The concept here, explained as if it's factual by Neil deGrasse Tyson, is that this is a sci-fi movie made in 1938.

Actually, it's a recent collection of bad puns and double entendres that never goes half a minute without another joke that's barely a joke. It's a comedy sketch that won't stop.

Most of the jokes fall flat, but that's on purpose, and between the groaners it somehow tells the coherent story of a time traveler from '38 sent eighty years into the future to save the world.

I rather enjoyed Future '38. It helps that leading lady Betty Gilpin (GLOW) is easy to look at, and also that she and leading man Nick Westrate (American Insurrection) are so determined at delivering this cleverly cracked material.

Writer-director Jamie Greenberg (Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?) has an endless supply of puns, and it's all stupid, but without being too stupid or assuming you're stupid. It's colorful, amusing, frantic, and never lags.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

The Futurists (1967)
Streaming free at Internet Archive

Narrated by Walter Cronkite, this is a disappointing documentary that looks into the future, where we're living now. Isaac Asimov and Buckminster Fuller are among far too many panelists, all of them white men, most with gray hair.

Do the math: eleven esteemed experts, in a TV special that's only half an hour long, minus commercials, works out to about two minutes per expert — a few sentences, or a compact paragraph.

Lord Ritchie Calder of Edinburgh University says, "Freedom begins with breakfast. You can have all the freedom in the world, but if you're not fed, not taken care of, if society is not taking care of your needs, then you're not free." Which is wise, but gets lost in the mist as we immediately cut to the next talking head.

Verdict: MAYBE.

4/26/2024   

• • • Coming attractions • • •     

Galaxina (1980)
Galaxy of Terror (1981)
Galileo (1974)
Gambit (1996)
A Game of Death (1945)
Game of Death (1978)

... plus schlock, shorts, and surprises

— — —

Now accepting recommendations for movies,
especially starting with the letter 'G'.
Just add a comment, below.

— — —

Illustration by Jeff Meyer. Click any image to enlarge. Arguments & recommendations are welcome, but no talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

 

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