The Shape of Things to Come

Brilliantly, hilariously bad!
Up until I saw "The Shape of Things to Come," I thought Joe D'Amato's hysterically atrocious "Troll 2" was the best "so bad it's good" film out there. Well, I still believe that, but this movie comes in a close second. I suspect if you watched both films as a double feature, your head would explode under the endless assault of numerous scenes loaded with bad dialogue, ridiculous overemoting, and impenetrable plot points murkier than a cup of black coffee. This is a film so mind meltingly horrible, so offensive to every cinematic sensibility, that only lovers of bad movies who have fortified themselves beforehand should venture into this challenging territory. And even then I am not sure you will emerge unscathed on the other side. "Hey," I'm hearing people say, "How could a film starring Jack Palance and Barry Morse--set in a future where radiation from a series of robot wars wiped out the planet earth--be so bad?" That's a good question, grasshoppers. A very good question that I...

Get Down With Jack Palance
The onscreen written intro tells us that this film is taking place in the "Tomorrow after Tomorrow". So apparently in the next two days we'll have experienced the "Robot Wars" and have had to relocate to the moon coz Earth is too damn polluted and radioactive. The people of the moon colony come under attack by Jack Palance and his army of trashcan robots who do his dirty work. Palance hangs out on Delta 3, but he wants control of the moon as well. The wimpy moon people don't wanna take action, but 3 badazz renegades and a reprogrammed Palancebot aren't about to just roll over. So, before you can slap on your Skin Bracer, they're off to turn the tables on Jack Palance. First a quick pitstop on Earth for repairs. Meanwhile on Delta 3, about 7 people have formed a resistance against Palance's dictatorship. When they're not being fried to a frizzly frazzle by the Palancebots, they hide from these innovative, high-tech death machines by merely crouching in the grass about 2 feet...

"The Time Is The Tomorrow After Tomorrow."
I have two words to describe "H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come": oh, brother. I felt certain when I discovered that it was made in Canada in the wake of "Star Wars" with Jack Palance as an evil overlord, that the movie had extreme cheese potential, and not only was I right I had no idea how right I was. Of all the films I would have loved to see MST3K deal with this has to top the list.

The film starts with a ponderous crawler explaining the background of the film. In a nutshell we learn that the Earth has been destroyed in the great robot wars, that man has colonized the moon, and that (for some never explained reason) the human race is wholly dependent on the supply of a miracle drug, RADIC-Q-2, which is only made on distant planet Delta Three. What could possibly go wrong? After seeing the extremely cheesy credits (they are reminiscent of the original "Battlestar Galactica" without the realism), which reveal that the film stars Jack Palance, Carol Lynley, and...

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