This movie turned me into a newt…. I got better.
Bleak Future (1997): 4 out of 10: I have had friends that would constantly quote their favorite movies (In particular Caddyshack.) And one source of these quotes was that vast work of Monty Python. The Python oeuvre is so influential it has spawned the adjective Pythonesque. Bleak Future is often a Pythonesque movie. Unfortunately, sometimes Bleak Future borrows a little too much.
Bleak Future comprises chapters broken up by a video on how the world ended. (The video is a definite nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but it is so well done and entertaining I didn’t care.) The chapters, however, are another story.
Filmed in super-8 in a desert wasteland, they are a spot-on parody of all those mindless post-apocalyptic movies of the last thirty years. These scenes comprise three main characters, a mute Scottish warrior with a Billy Baldwin haircut, a beautiful blond girl without an original thought in her head, and that guy who won’t stop doing those Monty Python impressions.
It’s the third guy known as Slangman that gave me fits. His shtick is on display throughout the entire film and it drove me to distraction almost immediately. Every other character is fine. Sure, some jokes are flat and overdone and there is a scene with the mutants so derivative of Python I thought they would ask for a shrubbery, but it is Slangman whose every utterance became the nails on my chalkboard soul.
Other than the small fact that the main character, who is in every scene, is a complete tool, this is a fairly entertaining film with a genuinely funny ending. Worth a look if you are a fan of post-apocalyptic movies, just beware of the mutants that say Ni.