• Written and directed by David A. Prior
• Starring
  • David Carradine
  • Robert Tessier
  • Anna Rapagna
  • William Zipp
  • D.C. Douglas

David Carradine’s had one of those odd careers. He’s been in a couple of well-known series, and then he’s filled the rest of his time in low-budgeters — usually as the bad guy, but sometimes as the nominal hero, as in this case.

Carradine is John Tucker, an officer of C.O.P.S. — Civilian Operated Police Systems, Inc., a private organization that took over law enforcement in 1991. (1991? This movie was made for video release in 1990; I’ll never understand the urge to have one’s movie dated so quickly.) Actually, they do very little of a policeman’s duties; essentially, they’re an organization of bounty hunters, running out of their cut-rate office every time their signboard brings up a name, a charge, and a bounty. I wonder, who’s doing the actual investigations, indictments, all of that? Oh well…

As is usual with these corporations, the CEO, Mr. Adams (who bears a disturbing resemblance to Mark Hamill), is corrupt. Miriam the newsgirl is going to do a series on C.O.P.S. corruption, and Adams wants her taken down before she shows her clandestinely-obtained video tape. (What’s on the tape? We never find out; Miriam doesn’t even know — she just reads the cue cards. Talk about gunning for the wrong person; the station can just find another newsreader and still show the tape.)

So Adams enters her into the computer with a charge of treason and a bounty of $100,000. Tucker gets to her first, and being a nice guy he does everything in his power to bring her in alive instead of otherwise — even when two fellow C.O.P.S. show up to take a share of the bounty and make sure she arrives dead.

Oh yeah, before I forget — Tucker has a sidekick, a wheelchair-bound computer whiz named Billy who gets him all the bounty announcements before they hit the office, and who has whipped up a super-duper-techno glovewhich can fire lasers and exploding missiles and violate the laws of physics (like when Tucker uses it to hold a car that is spinning it’s tires to get away from him). Of course, Tucker doesn’t keep the glove on him, so when a situation comes up that his fancy revolver won’t cover, he walks slowly to the back of his SUV, opens the hatch, opens the toolbox, pulls out the glove, snaps it on, turns around… and thanks his lucky stars that no one plugged him while he was doing all that in slo-mo. (And yes, that’s a stereo speaker masquerading as a mechanical part, right up there by the elbow.)

So Tucker realizes something isn’t right, and he starts protecting the girl, and Adams starts foaming at the mouth, and C.O.P.S. agents come gunning for them because now there’s a bounty on Tucker’s head, and there’s a C.O.P.S. chick who’s sweet on Tucker and let’s him go and disappears from the plot, and apparently Tucker and Miriam have sex even though there’s no indication that they like each other, and then Miriam effectively disappears from the plot… This is not a skillfully made movie. In fact, its best feature is to show how much writer-director Ted Prior improved between this and 1995’s Mutant Species. Not that the latter is in any way a good movie, but it’s still head and shoulders above Future Force.

Oh yeah, one other thing: the C.O.P.S. all hang out at a strip club (stripping was apparently included to get this film an R-rating) called the DMZ. That stands for (according to the sign) “The Demiliterized [sic] Zone.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 20
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 2
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0