A bold vision of the future

 Um, that's a joke.

I went fishing for something old and campy last night, on the night before I leave on my trip to Broome -- and most of all, something short.

Amazon has a ton of really marginal crap, stuff Netflix would never consider offering, and that's one of the reasons I love it as an alternative. You don't really want the streamers to be indistinguishable from one another, do you?

I thought I was in the mood for cheap horror, and I guess the movie I ended up choosing was technically given that genre. But it was the prospect of seeing the 1969 idea of what the future looks like that caused me to land on Larry Buchanan's In the Year 2889 after passing over some other good contenders.

And you know what? The year 2889 looks pretty much like the year 1969.

It's a very quaint notion that it would take the human race all the way until 850 years from now, and more than 900 years from when it was made, to destroy itself via nuclear holocaust. In a way, that is a very idealized version of our trustworthiness with nuclear weapons, especially at a time when the cold war was blazing hot. 

Then again, I guess everything just develops very slowly in the mind of Larry Buchanan, given that there is not a single design detail in this movie that suggests a modicum of scientific advancement in those 900 years. 

Buchanan does not even remotely try to update the fashion, the architecture (what little of it we do see, just a single house) nor the speech patterns of his seven characters, which dwindle as the narrative progresses. To underscore the dwindling, the most sinister character sings "Ten Little Indians," which is apparently the sort of enduring classic that is still on everyone's lips nearly a millennium later.

Look, we should not expect much from a movie like In the Year 2889, which distinguishes itself from a movie like Manos: The Hands of Fate only because the story and the dialogue represent a slightly better application of competency. Technically, it's almost just as shoddy, with the camera repositioning itself in the shot if it wasn't positioned correctly, instead of just starting the shot over, and editing that might have been performed by an epileptic. 

I do think, though, that if you are imagining an ominous future for the human race, one that current audiences feel might be closer than they feared -- and you also plan not to do any envisioning of the changes wrought by 900 years on this planet, if only because you don't have the budget -- then you are probably better off calling it In the Year 2116, or some other comparatively close future. 

(I did wonder if the title was chosen to evoke a very distant future because the song "In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)" by Zager and Evans was also released in 1969. It would be like that year's version of The Asylum. I found myself singing the song all night, at the very least.)

In fact, the only thing that makes In the Year 2889 slightly entertaining from a genre perspective is some of the makeup and mask effects used to offer us human beings mutated by radiation. You get some Creature from the Black Lagoon vibes here and there.

For the most part, though, you just get 1969 humans wearing 1969 wardrobes and 1969 bathing suits talking like people from 1969 would talk, not to mention singing songs that were considered relevant in 1969.

Bold, ideed.