`Future Zone' is the sequel to `Future Force,' which was a good idea gone totally bad. David A. Prior took a lot of good elements and wasted them in that movie. He had a big name star in David Carradine, and he either didn't utilize this star power or didn't direct the star right, as Carradine just didn't seem to have the heart to be in the movie, looking completely bored. Prior took good music from Steve McClintock and Tim James and put it in all the wrong places and at the wrong decibels. He took good villains (William Zipp and Robert Tessier) and a good plot and squandered them with stilted dialogue and bad pacing. But with this sequel, you wouldn't have known this was the same director. Prior does everything that he did wrong with `Future Force' and corrects it.
Here it seems like the events of the first movie have been forgotten except that Carradine is still a hard-nosed bounty hunter, but now he has a wife he neglects, and it isn't the same character he walks off with in the first film. One day, his life is saved by a young hotshot whose shooting skills rival that of Carradine himself, and this youngster (Ted Prior, of all people, doing some of the best acting in his career) beings to hang around with loner Carradine. We know when we first see this character that he is really from the future, and I for one as able to put the pieces together about who he really was before it was revealed, but it was still neat. David Prior's writing was so much better that the ease at which I was predicting events didn't matter because I was enjoying it all so much. The music, though not by the same good musicians as before, was better placed, and the dialogue much better. Best of all was that Carradine did a three-sixty, getting into his part and having fun doing it. While the movie still had some flaws, it was good enough for me, and way better than its predecessor. Zantara's score: 6 out of 10.
