Badlanders (1992) AKA Prison Planet

You know, the future gets away with a lot of shit. It's like the town psycho-kid, running around pulling the ears off bunnies and tacking them to your front door with a message scrawled in his poop about how he lost his grandmother's hair in your backyard. Everyone gives that kid, and the future-setting in books and movies, a wide-berth and mostly takes whatever it or he says or does as a product of its nature without question.

The future on other planets is even worse. It's like that psycho-kid's mom is some Whole Foods nut-job that only brings Paleo-Diet dishes to the Chicken Pox Party.

"Exactly what cave people ate...except for the cookware and the oven I cooked it in."

Meaning, it's one thing to be the kid spouting out nonsense and doing things that confuse and gross everyone out. But it's something else entirely to have the kid and his mom attend the first BBQ of the summer.

The same can be said for off-world, futuristic movies like Badlanders. The opener does that thing where a scrolling few paragraphs explains where we are and the situation we can expect as viewers. Short version? It's another world...in the future, bad things happen and there's an overthrown king. Or something. Doubtful you need more information than is provided in the title picture (top).

There's oppression.

We're escaping, or else I drop this thing! (Spoiler: he doesn't drop it)

There's some type of "wasteland." (Maybe it's the...Badlands. eh? eh?)

Scorched-earth places are SUPER popular in future movies...and doubly-so for space future movies. Apparently, so are cars?

There's swords.

Silly how swords are futuristic and historic and alien all at the same time.

And guns.

But not lazer* guns since bullets are just sound effects and don't require a VFX budget. (*90s spelling of laser intentional)

Leather vests and bare chests, but for some reason one guy is wearing a tie and a fedora.

And another guy sports a Spanish Conquistador hat.

Why not?

The movie wants to be Conan the Barbarian spiced up with some Mad Max with a hefty dose of Hell Comes to Frogtown as the main meat. But really, it's just boring. Boring like listening to someone relate the plot of this movie (of which I'll spare you since neither of us care). Although, that's not much of an analogy since it's the plot that makes this movie boring...

If the plot is what makes the movie boring, and relating the plot would be twice as boring. This.

Rather, it's mind-numbing...like reading about how cardboard is made while French-kissing sandpaper, or listening to someone tell you about the dream they had last night.

...and both my hands were sharks!!

It takes so much effort to maintain your attention to what's happening, let alone put it into some line of a plot. I mean, when one event only follows from the previous because they both played on your television screen, it's really tough to torture yourself into connecting the series of occurrences that happen.


And back we come to the analogy of the neighborhood psycho-kid and his mom. He might light fires in your backyard. His mom might send him over with a pitcher of cucumber water to apologize. He might even wear clown make-up while jumping rope on the hood of your car as his mother applauds.

Don't look him in the eyes!

But you don't try to put all of these things together in any rational way! That would be completely fruitless, as is watching this movie for any sort of entertainment.

Badlanders is available on Netflix...if you're into that sort of thing.