In an era where streaming services dominate the entertainment landscape, Tubi stands out by offering a diverse and expansive library of films at no cost to its users. With its eclectic mix of genres and eras, Tubi presents a unique opportunity for movie enthusiasts to explore hidden gems and revisit classics. Clearly curated by true cinephiles, their catalogue promises not just entertainment, but a broadened cinematic horizon. Whether you’re a fan of indie flicks, blockbuster hits, or cult classics, Tubi’s extensive library ensures that there’s always something new and exciting to watch. Join us as we delve into the adventure of watching a movie a week on Tubi, where hopefully you find your new favorite movie or at least an interesting gem worth recommending.
One of the upsides to not watching a lot of newer movies is that it frees up a lot of time to catch up on stuff I never saw. My watchlist is impossibly long and at times it feels a bit like homework when I think about trying to get through it all. Most of the time I deal with that by rebelling and refusing to even look at my watchlist when it comes time to settle in on a Friday or Saturday night for a flick. Instead, I point the Roku at the Tubi app, and peruse the gutters, hoping to find a good piece of trash to pass the time with. Forget all the Oscar bait and navel gazing indie crapola (mostly stuff I got from Sailor’s endless lists anyway) that is stacked six pages deep on my letterboxd watchlist. What I’m looking for is the kind of movie you don’t take home to meet the parents.
I’m looking for a movie like…Future Kick.
Now if you’ve never heard of Future Kick, that’s ok. I watched every martial arts flick that found its way to cable back in the 90s, and I never saw Future Kick either. Which is too bad really, because it’s not a terrible movie. If you consider what the budget probably was for it (I’m betting less than half a mil) and then compare the entertainment value of this movie to just about any big budget movie produced these days, Future Kick is actually pretty impressive.
Released in 1991, Future Kick was produced by Roger Corman’s New Concorde Pictures and written by Catherine Cyran and Damian Klaus, who also directed. The film stars Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Meg Foster, Chris Penn, and Eb Lottimer.
Writer Catherin Cyran had a prolific career, amassing several credits to her name as writer, director, and producer, even earning a Daytime Emmy nomination for her work on The Disney Channel’s White Wolves: A Cry in the Wild II before sadly passing in 2022 at the young age of 59. Future Kick seems to have been director Damian Klaus’s only directorial effort, and I couldn’t really find any other info on him.
Future Kick takes place on a future, dystopian earth, circa 2025, where all of the wealthy elites now live on a colonized moon. Life is pretty grim for the people stuck back on earth, and to escape from their misery, they plug into elaborate VR stories concocted by Meg Foster’s husband Howard (played by Jeff Pomerantz, who I was convinced was Patrick Bergen until I finally looked it up about halfway through the movie). At the start of the film, Howard is testing a new VR story, which might still be a bit buggy. Before heading off to earth on business, he warns Nancy (Meg Foster) not to be messing around with it while he’s gone. Do you think Nancy listens to him? If you said no, you are correct. Congrats. If you said yes, you are stupid and belong on some other movie site where stupid people are. Some place like [redacted].
Anyway, upon reaching earth, Howard proceeds straight to the strip club and gets up to some philandering and blackmail before being killed by New Body, the company he is trying to blackmail. New Body is basically what it sounds like, a company that will replace your old body with a new one. Never mind how they get the new parts…
When word of Howard’s death reaches Nancy, she heads straight to earth to get justice for the man she loved. She’s determined, but the police are bogged down in cases and blow her off. Distraught and with no one else to turn to, Nancy enlists the help of Don Wilson’s character, Walker, a Cyberon bounty hunter who is the last of his kind. For whatever reason, the totalitarian government on earth is no fan of the Cyberons and is actively engaged in hunting them down and terminating killing them. Walker agrees to help Nancy for a price, and they begin to unravel the complex mystery surrounding Howard’s death. But what they will find is not pretty, and Nancy will have to reconcile her husband’s duplicitous nature with the man she thought she knew and loved.
One of the things that stood out to me about Future Kick was how much world building the filmmakers were able to do on this shoestring budget. I mean, the budgets of modern blockbusters routinely surpass 200 million, and, for whatever reason, I rarely feel immersed in the worlds they are trying to create. Future Kick is cheap. Make no mistake. But it’s real. The sets and SFX are tangible. They may be a bit cheesy at times, but you don’t doubt that they are real elements that the actors interacted with and that were photographed. Through really skillful use of sets, practical effects, and lighting, Future Kick, a ridiculous martial arts sci-fi B movie manages to craft a world that feels real and lived in. And though the writing and acting is hokey, the world that’s been created helps immerse you into the story and get past the silly dialogue and hackneyed story.
But when you sit down and decide to watch a movie like Future Kick, you’ve already allowed for the fact that corners will have been cut, that there will be some level of cheesiness, that you might see a boom mic in a shot, that the acting will be bad, the dialogue will be stilted, or you will recognize recycled shots from other Roger Corman movies. In fact, for many of us, we are counting on the fact that movies like Future Kick will have these kinds of faults. Hell, it’s half the reason we watch movies like this on Tubi.
And while Future Kick is never going to get a Criterion release or find itself the focus of reappraisal by Letterboxd film hipsters, despite its glaring flaws, it’s an entertaining and atmospheric sci-fi movie that is worth spending 90 minutes with on a Saturday night. And that is why Future Kick is our Tubi Movie of the Week.