Future Shock

This movie is a compilation of three separate movies. The last one is "Mr. Petrified Forest", which is the Masters Thesis film of Matt Reeves, which he completed for his Masters in Film at USC. He fund raised, wrote, directed, cast, edited, etc., every aspect of "Mr. Petrified Forest". Subsequently, USC sold his Masters Thesis film, which was incorporated into this theatrical, commercial film. No one connected with "Mr. Petrified Forest" received any monetary compensation, including the actors, crew, director, writer, editor, etc,. when it was incorporated into this commercial film. USC should not have sold it!!!! Perhaps there are copyright infringement issues. It is an outrage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is a horrible movie. All three stories are bracketed with a psychiatrist hypnotist line which is unnecessary and all the stories are bad. The first is about wild wolves and some lady, there are some things that don't make sense, but the hypnotism thing makes up for that. The second one, with bad Bill Paxton as a maniac roommate should not be viewed by anyone. The last one, sadly the best is almost incomprehensible which I guess makes it better than the other garbage.

Imagine a woman alone in a house for forty five minutes in which absolutely nothing happens. Then this goes on twice more. The writing is flat and lifeless, and jokes unfunny, and the bad acting keeps you from caring about any of the characters, even when they battle wolf packs and get beaten up by fraternity goons. Anyone that ranked this movie higher than a two is not fully sane.

This film is not a masterpiece and I shall not pretend that it is. However it does offer some surprisingly fresh and effective ideas and is overall and enjoyable watch.

Segment one is surprisingly tense for a film with a clearly tiny budget. The lead actress' performance is strong enough to sustain the segment, the camera-work creates a good feeling of isolation and vulnerability, and the downplayed musical score adds to the sense of dread throughout. This is the simplest short and uses this to its advantage.

Segment two veers into a more darkly comedic tone. It works due to the entertaining performances of the leads and the effectively surrealist atmosphere. However overall this is the weakest segment, mostly due to feeling out of place with the rest of the film.

Segment three is the best, due to its less goofy attempts at dark comedy over the last segment. It actually offers a fairly entertaining and in depth character study and offers some fairly complex ideas on the nature of mortality. The writing is good, the acting is solid and the humorous moments are well integrated.

Overall I was very impressed by this simple yet effective anthology. Its low budget charm and snappy writing really created an enjoyable tone for this one, and I highly recommend it, despite its quirks.

The other reviewers have gotten close, but they've missed it: This movie takes two entirely unrelated short films (I'd guess student projects), adds them together with writer/"actress" Vivian Schilling's newly-filmed segment, and links them all with a weak "virtual reality" device plotline. So the producers only had to shoot a third of a movie. And the bonus is, they get to claim that Bill Paxton is a major player in the film. As far as the segments, I particularly enjoyed the "afterlife" one with the guy who chokes on olives, if memory serves. Still, the other reviewers sum it up pretty well: it's bad. Very bad.