TERMINUS

CONTAINS SPOILERS?

Actually it would help if there were spoilers, because then there'd be some indication as to what the hell is going on in this mostly drab mid-1980s Franco-German future dystopia. Sometime in the future (2037, according to the IMDb trivia), Karen Allen is driving a huge truck across some wastelands: if she reaches the End Of The Line, she'll win her weight in gold. Meanwhile the gamesmaster, a 10-year-old genius, is reprogramming her onboard computer for reasons that are no more adequately explained than why that computer is a mechanically animated mouth called Monster, or why it's been given a jive voice.

Allen disappears from the action fairly early and is replaced by French pop star Johnny Halliday as a man with one arm called Stump. (I don't know what his other arm is called.) Stump takes over the truck accompanied by a small child who's escaping slavery. However, the evil mastermind behind it all (Jurgen Prochnow) has decided to close the operation down and sets another big truck against Stump. This has the power of invisibility and is driven by another Jurgen Prochnow. (Both Prochnow characters answer to a superboss known only as Sir, who is also played by Jurgen Prochnow, again for absolutely no reason, but this time he's wearing a silly wig.)

It's possible that all the mysteries of Terminus are answered in the original French version which ran more than half an hour longer than this 82-minute edit that's lurking in the murky depths of Amazon Prime. Maybe that will explain why Prochnow plays three roles, exactly why Stump lost his arm and why there don't appear to be any other contestants in the game. But that would depend on your tolerance for glum, and whether you're motivated to find out why Prochnow II's truck has a bunch of animatronic children in the back. Terminus is not quite awful enough to be a one-star disaster, but it's a close call: most of the film is pretty terrible and almost entirely uninteresting and the short version was way more than enough.

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