LOGUN'S RUIN

LOGAN'S RUN (1976)
dir: Michael Anderson

LOGUN'S RUIN
Crazy #25, May 1977
w: Tom DeFalco
a: Walter Brogan

There's a city underground in the twenty-third century and apparently people come into the world fully formed, and once they live to be thirty, they are destroyed. Some resist this, and they are referred to as “runners”, and it's up to police, the “Sandmen” to find them and kill them. There's a daily ceremony called Carousel, where citizens turning thirty are publicly “renewed”. Logan (Michael York) and Francis (Richard Jordan) are two Sandmen who are best friends and enjoy their job.

The public renewals involve the citizens whose time is up to float into space and explode in the air. Most of them voluntarily do this.

At the apartment of Logan and Francis, they have some kind of service where they can summon up women to pleasure them , sort of a Grub Hub for prostitution. (Begging the question, does everybody have this or only Sandmen? Do they have to pay for it? Do the women have it too?). The woman Logan summons, Jessica (Jenny Agutter), happens to be part of the resistance that plans to escape to this sanctuary. She, like the runners, is wearing a ☥ symbol around her neck. At work, Logan's assignment is to go undercover and find the 1000 fugitives that are unaccounted for and the Sanctuary.

Logan finds Jessica to help him get past the Runners and into the Sanctuary. Her allies don't trust him initially. The first thing he needs to do to get through is to have his face altered so they think he's one of them. The doctor doesn't trust them either and is about to kill Logan on the laser surgery table but Logan pins him down.

Surprisingly, they didn't use Farrah Fawcett in this parody considering she was one of the biggest sex symbols of the seventies, part of the biggest power couple, and mainly, they would have sold more magazines.

The Sanctuary doesn't actually exist, but there's another barricade run by a robot named Box (Roscoe Lee Brown) who freezes all the Runners before they can escape. Logan and Jessica escape the city and find themselves in the outside world.

The outside world is the city of Washington, DC, which is now overrun with vines. There is an old man who lives in a building surrounded by cats. Logan and Jessica never knew someone older than them existed and want to bring him back to the world to show everyone. The citizens don't believe any of this and Logan tells his supervisor computer he has nothing to report. His lying short-circuits it making the city explode. Everbody runs out of the city and sees the old man. The old man is played by Peter Ustinov in the movie, here it's Jimmy Carter, who was always being associated with peanuts.