Future Fear

2018 AD. Geneticist Dr. John Denniel (Jeff Wincott) is enlisted by Lt. Anna Pontaine (Maria Ford) to help study an extraterrestrial virus being gathered by a space probe. Although Denniel has hated the military since his father was killed as a result of a still-classified experiment 30 years ago, he agrees. He and Anna become lovers and marry, and Anna becomes pregnant. The probe crashes in Africa, unleashing a plague that kills billions of people. Denniel comes up with the idea of breeding human eggs with genetic information from animals resistant to the virus, producing embryos from which they can harvest a vaccine. But Anna, who suffered a miscarriage that she blames on Denniel, develops a mother fixation on the test-tube embryos and wants to bring them to term, even though to do so will mean the lives of millions of people. Pursued by Anna, Denniel flies the embryos to a secure lab where he has secretly built an acceleration unit to speed up their development.

At the nearly abandoned lab, Denniel learns that the probe was purposely crashed by General Wallace (Stacy Keach), who wants to purify the Earth for a new Aryan race. Anna is Wallace's assistant, and both have been using Denniel to breed the new race. After various battles with Anna, Denniel gets the embryos to the acceleration unit--only to be met by Wallace, who has been monitoring his progress. Wallace admits that he killed Denniel's father when he sabotaged an earlier version of Wallace's genocidal plan. Realizing that she has been emotionally manipulated by Wallace for his fascistic plans, Anna helps turn the tables in a fight that leaves all dead but Denniel, who races to manufacture his vaccine to inoculate what is left of humanity.

Although FUTURE FEAR was only released, not produced by Corman's company, in has all the hallmarks of a New Horizons production. This tale of the eminent destruction of the human race is presented by a handful of characters in a few indoor locations, with the turmoil of the outside world represented by riot footage from what appears to be a Philippine film. It's the classic Corman formula of making do with the least possible resources, though there are moments when the makers of FUTURE FEAR seem to be trying to turn this to their advantage. On the other hand, the script's infatuation with the works of Lewis Carroll, while ambitious, is never sufficiently developed: the presence of an Alice-like little girl and her pet white rabbit is merely mystifying. At least Wincott, who resembles a beefed-up version of Jim "Ernest" Varney, makes for a fun hero and gets some humorous zinger lines; Ford, on the other hand, makes the mistake of taking her part seriously, which can be even funnier. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, profanity.) leave a comment