What was this movie that I thought was Futureworld?

March 6, 2013 11:23 AM

Sci-Fi movie identification halp. Watched a movie when I was a kid that I thought was Futureworld, viewed Futureworld recently, beginning and ending are totally different. And yet certain things/scenes meshed. Am I imagining things? Maybe meshing two different films?

As near as I can pin it down, I viewed this on regular broadcast TV sometime between 1979 and 1983. Started out with a guy running away from something at night, guy crosses a perimeter and is zapped by a laser fence. Movie segues to a reporter in his apartment narrating a story to his automatic typewriter (at one point, typewriter beeps and guy has to spell out a word). At the end of the film, guy has to escape whatever facility with girl in tow, he gets them outside the perimeter by smashing the laser fence pylon with a tree branch, and once outside he realizes she's the robot double and has to go back to get the actual girl.

So, yeah, that's clearly not Futureworld. But! I remember some scenes in the middle of the movie (skiing on Mars, robot boxing, guy using a disembodied robot arm to scare the girl, maintenance guy putting the robot face on a welding mask so as to bypass the security), and the storyline is pretty much the same (reporter goes to this cool facility, finds out the truth of the operation and must escape to tell the world).

IMDB and wikipedia contain some information on a short-lived series titled "Beyond Westworld", but none of the episode descriptions match what I remember.

Do you remember anything like what I described in the first paragraph?

posted by disconnect to media & arts (11 answers total)

Was is the film Westworld?
posted by humboldt32 at 11:37 AM on March 6

Came to suggest Westworld. humbolt32 beat me to it.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:41 AM on March 6

I happened to re-watch Westworld recently, and none of the things in your description match the movie. My guess is some ripoff of it, but I don't know what, offhand.
posted by rmd1023 at 11:57 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

Logan's Run?
posted by Jason and Laszlo at 12:07 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]

I was going to suggest Logan's Run as a possibility.....
posted by zizzle at 12:14 PM on March 6

I'm thinking Revenge of the Stepford Wives, The Stepford Children or The Stepford Husbands.

Same genre of "Hey, these aren't people, they're ROBOTS!" All were made for TV.

Logan's Run had that Laser Fence, but I fall asleep after we leave the city and go into the wilderness.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 12:31 PM on March 6

Seems like an extreme longshot, but no way that it's Cherry 2000, is it?

(Logan's Run doesn't seem right to me.)
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 1:01 PM on March 6

I'm pretty sure I remember this. I think that it was a one-off TV movie from the late seventies called something like "Future Crime". I definitely remember the laser fence and the typewriter.
posted by octothorpe at 1:12 PM on March 6

The description definitely doesn't match Logan's Run.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:13 PM on March 6

The Final Eye (aka Computercide). The typewriter scene is at about 3:30.

Found via Wikipedia's List of science-fiction television films.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:56 PM on March 6 [5 favorites]

You know, I could be audited today, lose an arm in a thresher accident, and find out my dog ran away, and that answer would still make it the best day I've had in a long damn time. Seriously, this is the scratch to a 30-year-long itch. Thank you.
posted by disconnect at 8:09 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]