Future Schlock

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Future Schlock
Directed byBarry Peak
Chris Kiely
Written byBarry Peak
Chris Kiely
Produced byBarry Peak
Chris Kiely
Starring Mary-Anne Fahey
Mike Bishop
CinematographyMalcolm Richards
Edited byRay Pond
Barry Peak
Production
company
Ultimate Show
Distributed byValhalla Films
Release date
  • 1984 (1984)
Running time
85 min
CountryAustralia
LanguageEnglish
BudgetA$40,000 [1] or $80,000 [2]

Future Schlock is a 1984 Australian film. It was the first of four movies made by the team of Barry Peak and Chris Kiely who ran the Valhalla Cinemas in Sydney and Melbourne. The movie was known in production as The Ultimate Show. The producers claimed they managed to recoup half the amount of money they spent on the film. [1]

Contents

Joh Flaus in the Age wrote "The verbal gags really aren't strong enough for the performances and the scenes are too spotty with the result that the strain shows. The secret of successful ribaldry is relaxation. Future Schlock doesn't have the control of its material to relax — it just sags now and then. An energetic but gratuitously crude parody which lapses too often into parodying itself" [3] Jason Romney in the Melbourne Times says "Future Schlock is certainly entertaining but makes us think as well, as much by foregrounding the techniques which we often take for granted, as by its content" [4] The Sydney Morning Herald's Anna-Maria Dell'oso says "Compared with the expensive US celluloid idiocies of the school holidays, however, the home-made Future Schlock would appear to be a masterpiece. With less sex than Bachelor Party and less violence than Footloose, the Valhalla's Future Schlock is at least vaguely original and certainly ... different." [5] Cinema Papers' Mark c noted "The most disappointing aspect is the film's failure to pinpoint its comic vision which runs a gamut of styles from cheap satire and self-mockery through gross effects and goonish surrealism (Ronnie is mistaken by the Squad first for a budgerigar then for both Cisco and Pancho in disguise). This lack of unity in the material, coupled with performances ranging from spirited in the leads to downright amateur, results in a fairly benign film, against all intentions." [6]

Cast

References

  1. 1 2 David Stratton, The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry, Pan MacMillan, 1990 p333
  2. ↑ Mark Spratt, "Future Schlock", Australian Film 1978-1992, Oxford Uni Press 1993 p147
  3. ↑ Flaus, John (27 April 1984), "Buffs choice", The Age
  4. ↑ Romney, Jason (3 May 1984), "Buffs choice", The Melbourne Times
  5. ↑ Dell'oso, Anna-Maria (6 September 1984), "Weird, perverted and crazy, but it beats the usual holiday fare", The Sydney Morning Herald
  6. ↑ Cinema Papers, Mark (July 1984), "Future Schlock", Cinema Papers, p. 181


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