The Shape of Things to Come

Also known as HG Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, although there’s not many traces of HG in the mix here; this is a Canadian Star Wars rip-off from 1979 that looked pretty good in posters like the one above until you actually saw the end result. Wells’ 1933 book was swiftly made into a stuffy 1936 movie that sticks more closely to the original concept of following the development of Earth through the next few centuries; The Shape of Things to Come da movie features Jack Palance as the ‘rabbitmaster’ of the moonly domed city of New Washington, and we’re just getting started with George McCowan’s laughable feature.

‘The time is the tomorrow of tomorrow…’ intones the opening title screed, but it all looks a lot like the innards of a disused Canadian power station circa 1979. Mankind has got itself into something of a mess in the wake of the Robot Wars; we’re all dependant on a miracle drug called Raddic-Q2 which we import to the community of humans living on the moon from the far off planet of Delta 3. Rabbitmaster Omus (Palance) disrupts the supply to threaten the Earth with his deadly robots, or ‘rabbits’ as Palance pronounces it, forcing our hero Jason Cabal (Nicholas Campbell) and his stuffy dad (Space 1999’s Barry Morse) to steal plastic model spaceship Starstreak to head to Omus’s equally plastic headquarters and ask to see the manager.

The Shape of Things to Come is a cheap as chips film, but that cheapness is striking to behold; the crew obviously located a room with an exterior view of a giant buckyball structure which looks great, but they might have bothered to take down the rather ratty curtains hanging at the window before shooting. They probably has their hands full re-writing the script; ‘I’m going to take a look at these suicide robots…You are the dark lady of the sonics!’ There’s oodles of tech talk, from ‘cobalt override’ to ‘time dilation’ and ‘locational transference’ but it all adds up to the good guys storming the impregnable fortress, the old man sadly dying, then everyone escapes, there’s a big explosion and everyone is happy. Like the similarly bonkers The Humanoid, it’s Star Wars on a tatty shoestring, with Anne-Marie Martin and Oscar-nominee Carol Lynley struggling with high maintenance late 70’s hairdos to maintain and serious VPL issues with their costumes.

Nobody dons a magic helmet quite like Jack Palance, and the veteran distinguishes himself with a typically overripe performance as Omus, not helped by a revealing two-tone tan jumpsuit with dark patches that suggest evidence of several waves of incontinence. Omus appears via a 3D video link which looks kinda snazzy, except Palance appears to have been placed on a rotating turntable for a high-tech effect which kinda ruins the gravitas. The robots do look cool on the poster, but risible when they appear, and the blonde moppet children that Jason Cabal ends up rescuing are so naff they’d make the Ewoks look kick-ass. Best watched as a comedy, The Shape of Things To Come is an affront to the mind and the eyes; if HG Wells had imagined that this is the kind of cut-price future his writings would lead to, he probably wouldn’t have bothered getting out of bed.