In Honor of Idiocracy, 10 Ridiculous Visions of the Future to Be

With a view of a future that's so dumbed-down that its Oscar-winning hit movie of the moment is called Ass, Mike Judge's notoriously studio-sandbagged cult classic Idiocracy is a scary (and ridiculously funny) prophecy of what our country will become unless we start encouraging our kids to lay off the smartphone and read a book once in a while.

But Idiocracy, playing this Friday and Saturday night as The Belcourt's Midnight Movie in the "Science on Screen" series (see managing editor D. Patrick Rodgers' Critic's Pick here), is not the only film that gives us an outlandish look at what lies ahead. While everyone has their own subjective thoughts on which sci-fi films present the most preposterous future — H.G. Wells notoriously called Metropolis "a silly film" in a New York Times review — I think we can agree these 10 films paint broad dystopian portraits that, intentionally or not, make the future look like a madhouse.

1. Barbarella (1968)

Based on the French comic book, Roger Vadim's kinky space opera (which included co-writer Terry Southern throwing in his pervy two cents) showcases his then-wife Jane Fonda'€™s sinewy sex appeal, as she plays a space traveler who either battles weird aliens or bangs them.

2. Sleeper (1973)

Woody Allen's wackadoo dystopian farce is considered the definitive futuristic comedy. (It certainly influenced Idiocracy.) Allen plays a health-food store owner who gets cryogenically frozen and awakes 200 years later, where he finds America to be a very zany ... police state.

3. Death Race 2000 (1975)

Along with being a badass car movie from the '70s, this Roger Corman-produced, Paul Bartel-directed satire has David Carradine, a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone and others taking part in a murderous transcontinental road race in the year 2000.

4. Heartbeeps (1981)

According to this cloying '80s flop, in the year 1994, there will be (or was supposed to be) a lot of clunky-looking, servant robots, including two (Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters) who fall in love and run away together. And you thought Chappie was a dumb-ass robot movie.

5. Café Flesh (1982)

If Barbarella wasn't freaky enough for ya, you can track down this pornographic avant-garde cult whatzit about a future where horny people have to venture to a club to watch people do it, since sex makes the general population sick & a lucky few get it on for entertainment purposes. Written by Jerry Stahl, of Permanent Midnight, Bad Boys II and Alf fame!

6. The Ice Pirates (1984)

Two words: space herpes.

7. Demolition Man (1993)

Sylvester Stallone returns to the future once again, as a cryogenically frozen cop who gets unthawed in the year 2032 (with a young Sandra Bullock as his partner) when criminal menace Wesley Snipes gets unfrozen and wreaks havoc on a supposedly utopian ultra-PC society.

8. Tank Girl (1995)

Yet another futuristic flick starring a comic-book heroine, this anarchic, post-apocalyptic romp has Lori Petty (who was originally supposed to play Bullock's role in Demolition Man) as the title character, a then-unknown Naomi Watts as her sidekick, and Ice-T as some half-man/half-kangaroo hybrid.

9. Barb Wire (1996)

Here we go again with a comic-book adaptation with a female badass front-and-center. This time around it's Pamela Anderson, all leathery and boobalicious, as a nightclub owner/bounty hunter living during the "Second American Civil War," which is supposed to happen two years from now.

10. Battlefield Earth (2000)

As the kids would say, I can't even.