ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eric Wrazen is a Technical Director and Sound Designer for live theatre, specializing in the genre of horror, and is the Technical Director the Festival de la Bête Noire – a horror theatre festival held every February in Montreal, Canada. You can see Eric as occasional host and performer on Bête Noire’s Screaming Sunday Variety Hour on Facebook live. An avid movie and music fanatic since an early age, this is Eric’s first foray into movie reviewing.

Preamble: Senti-Metal Movie Reviews believes that some things just belong together, like seafood and fine wine, pizza and beer, and of course… questionable B-movies and face-melting heavy metal! 

 A movie might have zero budget, bad acting, and terrible plotting, but just add a pounding metal soundtrack, and it magically becomes an instant party movie masterpiece! 

Exhibit A:

Future Hunters (1986)

Senti-Metal Soundtrack: Manilla Road – “The Deluge” (1986)

From the description: “A man from a post-apocalyptic future travels back in time to prevent the coming nuclear holocaust and enlists the help of a young couple.”

Upon waiting the first few minutes of Future Hunters, I was convinced that I was about to see a post-apocalyptic Terminator knock-off from Italy. About 40 minutes later, I realized that I was, in fact, watching a Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off from the Philippines. Wait, what?

I guess the title threw me off, and rightfully so, considering the bulk of this movie has nothing to do with the future, let alone any hunters from said future. 

OK, well there is one guy who comes from the future, and he’s pretty awesome, too. Our “hero” kicks off this adventure with an epic car chase-shootout-battle with a gang of typical post-nuclear apocalypse thugs. 

Note: the soundtrack during all this is bad 80s synth-rock…. Now is a good time to queue up our Heavy Metal pairing of the day…. The Deluge by Manilla Road.

I think Manilla Road is a perfect band for this movie because, they have the Philippine city in their name, and they are from Wichita, Kansas, which is pretty much as close to post-apocalyptic hellscape you can find! Go ahead and drop the needle on of The Deluge, track 1 during the whole opening sequence. Trust me – its an improvement.

 Around 10 minutes into the Mad Max-style mayhem of Future Hunters, our hunky hero is suddenly whisked away via mystical means to…. a dumpy stucco building some where outside of LA, in 1986, where he proceeds to save a lady archeologist and her milk-toasty boyfriend from a bunch of asshole bikers…and then (spoiler alert) he drops dead! Are you kidding me? What the hell just happened here?

It’s at this point that you’ll start to realize that this movie is not about Future Hunters at all, and is actually about the archeologist, Michelle (played by Linda Carol) and her boyfriend, none other than Robert Patrick… a few years before his rise to fame as the shape-shifting bad cop in Terminator 2. 

Patrick plays “Slade” an Air Force mechanic with a penchant for losing fights with every baddie who graces the screen and frequently insisting to Michelle that he doesn’t want to be involved in any of this crazy adventure. Which is a shame, because as it turns out, our boy Slade is a martial arts expert who can fly planes and helicopters while speaking multiple Asian dialects. 

And all of those skills come in handy because the bulk of Future Hunters takes place in Hong Kong and some south pacific island locations where Slade and Michelle encounter, in no particular order: Nazis, Pigmies, Albino body-builders, Kung-fu masters, Amazons and Mongols (none of whom come from the future, by the way). 

Without giving you a play-by-paly of the entire movie, I can attest that while some movies do their best to “check all the boxes” for their genre, Future Hunters checks all the action adventure boxes, and then adds some boxes from a few other genres and then checks those too.

Does it make any sense? No. 

Does that even matter? No. 

Future Hunters is not a great movie, but it absolutely never gets boring, and cranking up the metal gives it the extra juice needed to make it a really fun ride.  There are plenty of action scenes that go great with the kind of raucous power metal that Manilla Road dishes out, so any time you here that crappy synth music start in the movie, just kick in the next track on “The Deluge” album and enjoy the insanity.

Note: Both the movie and the Senti-Metal Soundtrack can be found on Youtube:

Future Hunters:

Manilla Road – “The Deluge”: