This week , Questionable Taste Theatre takes on a movie I saw only once, two years ago, and while in some ways I can’t forget it, in a lot of ways I really tried, so the plot synopsis should be pretty fun.

So, it’s a given that a lot of science fiction movies reference Blade Runner. Not up for debate. It’s just how things work.

However, there’s homage, and then there’s Natural City.

Some of you might have seen part of Natural City without even knowing it. You might have turned it on, thought, “Eh, I’m not that into Blade Runner right now,” and turned it off after a few seconds. You might have watched several minutes before you realized that it wasn’t actually Blade Runner. You might be like me, and watch the entire movie, and STILL be surprised you didn’t actually watch Blade Runner.

But it’s totally not Blade Runner! Totally not.

…um, totally not.

…um, totally not.

So in Natural City, a crumbling futuristic metropolis, there are humans, and cyborgs whose expiration dates can be enforced by an elite squad of cops. One such cop, who goes by R, has fallen in love with a dancer cyborg who has three days to live, and he’ll break every law in the book and dump his suspicious cop partner if he can save her and take her to the magical place away from the city where they can live together without losing her to her expiration date. (I said no! It’s a totally different movie!)

However, when a band of renegade cyborgs breaks into the city and comes after R and his fellow cops, he’ll have to balance his loyalties as he tries to stay alive long enough to help the cyborg he loves!

(Dude, it’s not Blade Runner, okay?! Damn, why do you keep asking?)

I kid, I kid! It’s easy to make fun of this movie as being a total rip-off of Blade Runner. However, I think that does the movie an injustice. It also ripped off a ton of other movies. (I mean, it might surprise you that all the pictures below are from this movie and not half a dozen other sci-fi movies. It surprised me, too!)

On the other hand, derivative images aside, there are enough interesting and semi-original images in this movie to make it look damn cool. In fact, the less you know about what’s going on, the cooler it looks. The trailer at the end of this entry makes the movie look all AMAZING and ROMANTIC and ACTION and DANGER and THINGS!

It’s a bug hunt cyborg hunt, man!

It looks like there’s a lot of amazing effects and soul-searching going on!

I have the theme from Ghost in the Shell running through my head for some reason. Huh, that’s weird.

It looks like cop is pitted against cop!

“I said, ‘What is UP, Mr. Ander – oh, never mind.’”

But if you read the subtitles, this is one of those movies where a lot of things are totally avoidable. R, our “hero”, steals a girl off the streets so he can inject his girlfriend into her brain, which is fine – no one said the guy was classy. However, in his quest to get this girl back to his girlfriend he talks a lot about how much his partner means to him, right up until his partner is taken hostage by cyborgs, at which point R gives him a big Peace-Out and lets his partner get shot-ass. Then suddenly he’s filled with remorse and/or a need to kill all cyborgs, which – seriously? Avoidable.

But no, he’s too worried about getting his kidnapped mind-dump victim to his girlfriend and the illegal doctor before his girlfriend drops out. Then they’ll go live in the floating Virtual Reality cemetery thing anyway, I guess? The plans here seem constantly interrupted by agile villains and loaded staring.

This is from Natural City. You might know it as MYST.

I don’t even know how to really sum this up – I will not lie, the ending surprised me, but it was the sort of surprise where I yelled “AVOIDABLE” at the TV and immediately deleted the whole thing off my TiVo. However, I still think about it a lot – mostly because every time I see the Blade Runner DVD on my shelf I think, “Man, buddy, remember that movie that really ripped you off?”

But at the end of the day, this movie has a first name, it’s D-E-C-K-E-R!

Spot the Decker in this picture!

Enjoy the trailer. It’s one of the ones where they include so much dialogue that you’re already tired of the plot, but they still over-explain.