Logan's Run

Straight from the future of the swinging seventies, it's Michael York in a jumpsuit and a bunch of chicks in sarong dresses! This seminal science-fiction film, starring York, Richard Jordan, Jenny Agutter, Peter Ustinov and others, is the highest quality cheese-fest you are ever likely to witness. While this film is anything but timeless, it is an amazingly well-conceived vision of a utopian society existing in post-apocalyptic (or something) America.

The plot of the movie starts out simply enough; people live in a utopian society in which they need not actually do anything but run around and have fun — also known as have sex. Apparently in this future you can just push a button and order up a sexual partner, a process I expect the Japanese to automate and make available by about 2010, the time when director Joseph Kosinski's remake of this movie will be released. At the age of thirty, residents must undergo a ritual called "Carrousel" in which they float through the air and are either "renewed", in which case they may be permitted to live, or in which they go up in a flash of sparks. (In the remake, this happens at the age of 21. Perhaps they found younger actors this time, some of them looked damned near forty in the original.) Those who try to run away instead of doing this are called "runners" and there is a group of elite police called "Sandmen" who are tasked with hunting these runners down. York and Jordan are the best of the best, the elite Sandmen who get all the exciting jobs.

Anyway, Logan dials-a-ho and gets a woman who says she doesn't want to have sex after all — apparently even in a utopia, women are still teases. Their subsequent conversation eventually leads to Logan's being sent on a mission to locate Sanctuary, the place where runners go when they successfully run. Chaos ensues.

There's a lot you could criticize about this movie, but most of it is due to the movie being made in the seventies. Cheesy (but pleasantly flimsy) costumes on the women, absolutely corny music, and models that look like they were built by a kindergarten class (it's the WORLD OF THE FUTURE!) definitely do a lot to detract from the picture. But the acting is quite good (York == Ham, but other than that) and a relatively seamless world is created. About the worst thing they did to this movie was include Farah Fawcett; every moment she is on the screen is a painful one. Director Michael Anderson must never have heard that one about how sometimes, less is more.