Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Lost Future

THE LOST FUTURE is one of those dreaded SyFy Channel movies. We don't have cable, but I see one of them on DVD now and then, like this one. Perhaps surprisingly, it's a pretty good little film. I'd never heard of it and put it on our Netflix queue only because Sean Bean is in it, and watching the first season of GAME OF THRONES earlier this summer made me a Sean Bean fan. (Speaking of GAME OF THRONES, I really liked the first season, although I didn't blog about it. I've wanted to read those books since they started coming out, but have you seen how long they are? I don't have the patience for that. So I'll settle for the TV show, which I thought was great and also thought was a perfect metaphor for the American political system, but that's neither here nor there, and I'm digressing even more than usual.)

Back to THE LOST FUTURE. This is your basic post-apocalyptic cavemen versus mutant zombies action yarn, with lots of running around, shooting arrows, and hacking with swords and axes. Sean Bean's role is actually fairly small. He plays a grizzled frontiersman who's part of a brotherhood devoted to protecting the scattered tribes of humans from the mutants. Along with two guys and a girl from one of the tribes (all of whom are 'way too clean, well-fed, and good-looking to be living in such primitive conditions, by the way), he sets out to recover the stolen cure for the disease that turns people into zombies. Since an ancient copy of THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN plays a small part in the plot, there's a nice bit where they wind up traveling down a great river on a raft, only to wind up in what appears to be the war-ravaged ruins of Manhattan.

The special effects are okay but nothing special, the acting likewise except for Bean, who lends the proceedings some much-needed gravitas, and the story moves along at a nice clip. THE LOST FUTURE is hardly a great film, but I thought it was an entertaining hour and a half.