A 1970s cult classic?  No, this is simply one of the worst futurist movies ever made, scoring at the bottom of the 150 or so films I’ve reviewed.

Why did I watch it?  I am doomed to watch many bad futurist movies.  And, more specifically, I acquired it on videotape when a local video store went under some time ago, and am watching the tapes while I still have a functioning VCR.

The stats:

• Futurism: 2 — A hodgepodge of robots and other futurist elements, dealt with incoherently.

• Entertainment: 3 –The big “mystery” is telegraphed in the opening sequences, then nothing happens for the first 56 minutes.  After that, nothing interesting happens, unless you count mysterious gaps in plot and continuity.

• Plausibility: 2 –Robots, AI, and clones are not going to happen like this.

The highlights, such as they are:

• The robots are futurists: one explains that their world-domination plot is driven by the fact that “All our probability studies indicate that, if left alone, you’ll destroy much of this planet by the end of the decade. . . We don’t intend to be destroyed by your mistakes.”
• A character does at least coin a good euphemism for a preference for sex with robots: “A taste for the iron.”
• It anticipates the Wii by 30 years: people box via hand controllers, though they operate androids rather than virtual avatars.

I do not even get the benefit of educating my Netflix computer overlord about a really bad movie: Futureworld does not seem to be available on DVD.