After Star Wars changed the world, each part of that world wanted its own Star Wars. Italy cooked up Starcrash; Japan produced Message from Space; and Canada clocked in with H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come. Quite a mouthful, eh? Based in name only on Wells’ 1933 speculative novel, Shape is an all-around square effort (under)funded by schlock specialist Harry Alan Towers (Five Golden Dragons) and directed by Frogs’ George McCowan.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away On the tomorrow after tomorrow, according to the opening crawl, people fled Earth after the robot wars left it polluted, and colonized the moon. It also tells us that we are dependent upon the miracle drug RADIC-Q-2, which is produced only on the distant planet Delta III.
In and of itself, that is not necessarily a bad thing; the situation changes when Delta III ruler Omus (Jack Palance, Tango & Cash) decides to withhold 100 percent of the drug’s supply in order to blackmail the moon’s New Washington into making him supreme commander of the moon and Earth. Clad in a cape that makes Palance’s character look like an AARP-sponsored superhero (superpower: craps bigger’n you), he’s basically Big Pharma price hijacker Martin Shkreli. (Given that Shkreli was negative 4 years old at the time, the film indeed predicted Things to Come. Mind, consider yourself blown.)
Powered by dated Honeywell computers, the senators of New Washington negotiate neither with terrorists nor past-their-prime matinee idols in the nadir phase of their career, so whereas viewers may expect a war among the stars, the battle instead is waged — per Towers’ iron grip on the pocketbook — on the farm pasture of Québec. Among those fighting the good fight against Omus and his boxy, walking robots with arms constructed from shop-vac hoses: The Dead Zone’s Nicholas Campbell, The Boogens’ Anne Marie-Martin (her hair lively with considerable, just-been-conditioned bounce) and The Poseidon Adventure’s Carol Lynley.
Effects for this sagging space saga run the spectrum, from quite nifty to rather embarrassing. Budgetary woes weep loudest in the practical settings and costuming, particularly spinning pound-cake pans used as a torture device and protective helmets that are nothing more than inflated plastic bags placed over the actors’ heads — both examples fine for Saturday-matinee fare of the ’50s, but hopelessly out-of-touch by the high-bar standards of the George Lucas generation. Perhaps worst of all, The Shape of Things to Come fails to connect narratively; if Towers jettisoned everything from the book but Wells’ title, why settle for a tale of politics? For every minute that limps by, those robot wars of the aforementioned crawl sound all the more appealing. What we were given can be summarized by a line uttered by Campbell after experiencing Shape’s no-frills version of 2001’s famed stargate sequence: “What the hell was that all about?” —Rod Lott
Much more fun is to be had. Borseti could have done a better job in editing the conversations of the few people who are so long-winded, they venture into unrelated tangents. For example, I don’t care what the director of 
What’s an upstanding British chap like Mark Baines (Roy Jenson, 
Through taking a camera into Chinatown Fair during the famous New York City arcade’s final days in 2011, freshman filmmaker Kurt Vincent found the story he wanted, and also a better one he had not foreseen. 
And yes, the documentary is that, but what also emerges from that construct is what makes the movie special: a story of the fabled American dream made reality for Sam Palmer. A Pakistani gentleman, Palmer was not the founding owner of the place, but he was its heart. In the days of gorillas hurling barrels at chivalrous plumbers, of defending Earth from symmetric lines of invading aliens and, in the arcade’s rare non-video attraction, of a live chicken that danced and played tic-tac-toe, the kindly Palmer trusted the young men whom no one else would and created an all-inclusive community in our nation’s most iconic melting pot — a task as daunting as conquering