FUTURE PAST

Australia, 1987, 83 minutes, Colour.
Imogen Annesley, Nicholas Ryan, Paula Duncan, Gary Down.
Directed by Rob Stewart.

Future Past is one of a series of Australian telemovies made in 1987-88 by the same company with such titles as Outback Vampires, I've Come About the Suicide, Computer Ghosts, Hard Knuckles.

These films used quite an amount of Australian talent - but tended to waste them on rather oddball plots, strained situations, send-ups, humour which might charitably be called juvenile.

This film concerns a computer whiz-kid played by Nicholas Ryan. He works in Video Ezy with the attractive Imogen Annesley. The film shows him as a rather nerd-like character, caught up in his fantasies which are visualised (generally, playing on film genres. He has eccentric parents, his mother, played by Cornelia Francis, has her own religious sect which is sent up and made to appear very stupid. His father is completely (and sometimes literally) under his mother's thumb.

Harlan, the hero, works at his very elaborate computer and comes in contact with a group from the future including a professor who is portrayed as fairly absurd. What happens is that a young man comes from the future back into the past and appears to be Harlan's grown self - a self-centred and smug exploitive man. The two clash in the present - while the professor tries to get the older Harlan back into the future. He goes back and buys the factory and seems to be in the centre of some kind of international plot (at least, judging from some of the Arab characters in traditional dress).

There are complications with Simone, the movement back and forth in the past, much playing with computers - which may indicate the kind of audience that was hoped for.

The film is fairly negligible - but was part of Australian film-making and television-making in the late '80s.