nice try sci-fi -- Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (in 3-D)

1983, d. Lamont Johnson - Amazon Prime (not in 3-D)

These static images of the title card(s)...

...are just as static when the film is playing

I have a fascination with 80's sci-fi movies.  As a kid I thought I'd seen all the ones worth watching, but as an adult I've been (very slowly) going back to the dredges and finding almost all of them are worth a watch, especially in a post-Star Wars context.  What lessons did studios, producers, writers and filmmakers take away from the space opera behemoth?  In the case of Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, beyond "make it dirty", not much.

Spacehunter opens with a brutally hokey title card and theme/credits that are 100% a rip-off of Richard Donner's Superman, only 100% crappier (okay, maybe only 95% crappier, those Superman credits have not aged well).  It's a strange thing, to be a space adventure but rip off a superhero movie as your introduction to the audience.  It immediately starts the film on the wrong foot, and the shoddy quality of the title sequence doesn't inspire much confidence for the rest of the film.

The opening shot of the film reinstills some confidence in the picture (however momentarily).  It's of a swirling galactic cloud, and the perspective is so unusual and surreal, it's quite impressive.  The camera pans into the cloud and that little bit of inspiration is immediately marred by what can only be described as contender for the ugliest space ship design put to screen, but the effects are still quite decent.

The voice over is that of a cruise ship director talking about the scene when suddenly the ship encounters some damage and parts of the ship explode.  From the outside we see glimpses of people scurrying on the massive ship, rushing to the escape pods.  Only one manages to fire off before the whole thing explodes.  The pod makes its way to the nearest Earth-like planet where it reveals a trio of what can only be described as "80's babes" (so much hairspray and thongs) as the only survivors.

Surprise..it's space babes

These "80's babes" are terrible actresses, coached through their emoting, that they clearly cannot be the protagonists of this feature.  They shriek as they encounter a cadre of mutants, the vibe screams Escape From New York, Planet of the Apes, and Mad Max all at once. 

It becomes rapidly evident this film does not want to rip off Star Wars, but it does want to rip off practically everything else.

what a hunk of junk

Our hero is introduced piloting what can only be described as contender for the ugliest space ship design put to screen with a voice over (is that Harold Ramis?) giving Wolff (Peter Strauss) his messages which make this man out to be a real loser of overdue rent and alimony type.  His ship's insides are even uglier that its outsides, a real trash heap of whatever the fuck was laying around the prop shop that week when building the set.  Star Wars decided to buck the Star Trek mold of clean design, and almost every 80's sci-fi movie followed suit.  But where Star Wars designs seemed to have purpose, other film's ships just wanted to look busy, as if garbage made things look futuristic (well the reality is 35 years laters we're drowning in so much garbage so perhaps they were right and the joke's on me).

Wolff is on the job of rescuing the three debutantes with his "80's babe" partner (greased back Annie Lennox hair, no pants), Chalmers (Andrea Marcovicci).  She proves the be the competent one of the duo. She fixes computers, lands the ship, preps the Mad Max inspired rover, and mans the guns.  If the 80's were far less sexist, she would be the protagonist of this film.   As it stands, the awesome Chalmers is unceremoniously killed off, revealed to be a robot sex doll, and melted down to scrap rather than even deign to try and repair her.  This film is unknowingly a pretty brutal cultural commentary on how women are treated.

Wolff gains the help of a local, Niki (Molly Ringwald), an orphaned Earther-turned-local who ingratiates herself on an irritated wolf. At 15, Niki (and Ringwald) still could not escape the film's "80's babe" leer, as Wolff forcibly bathes her, then, after highly inappropriate camera ogling, he proclaims "why you're nothing but a baby".  The dynamic the actors try to instill is of parent and child, but the filmmakers constantly seem to have other ideas.

This desert planet (which could've be a stub for Star Wars' Tattooine but instead is really just Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior) is nothing but a cesspool of natural and human made death traps, and toxic uncivilized cultures.  Ugly as they are, the production design on most of the vehicles is still impressive, given that they appear to actually usefully function.  All the denizens of the planet are grotesque, if they're not slathered in nigh unflattering makeup, they are wearing piles of rags that tend to be so cumbersome they interfere with the actors' ability to perform some in scene manual tasks.  By comparison Wolff's disheveled look is rather pristine.  

Michael Ironside plays Overdog, the big bad guy in this one, under a heavy mask of make-up which gives him the appearance of part vampire, part Skeletor, and he's strapped into a rig that gives him  huge metal pincers and a metallic lower torso that swings around on a crane arm connected to some sort of soul-sucking contraption that gives him an appearance like a insect hive queen (actually predating Cameron's Aliens, so there's something).  For some reason this grotesque being needs the life essences of "80's babes" in order to extend his longevity.  I don't know why the endless parade of mutants and whatnot don't satisfy, don't really care though either.

At one point Niki is thrown into Overdog's sub-par American Ninja Warrior-styled obstacle course.  It's meant to look incredibly dangerous, but likely due to safety concerns for the actors, it's obviously non-threatening (and the director is unable to shoot it in such a way to make it appear so).

Ivan Reitman produced this confounding attempt at a new adventure hero, may explain Ernie Hudson's rather charming appearance as Wolff's rival-turned-ally Washington (and also probably explains that maybe Harold Ramis voice over at the start).  The script, is not great, and Strauss doesn't have the swagger the character needs.  I can't tell if they're striving for Han Solo or Indiana Jones, but Wolff isn't even close to being like either.  Niki, meanwhile, is borderline insufferable.  The decision to play her both as a vulnerable ingenue, as well as a tough-talking, high-pitched, ceaselessly complaining annoyance undermines the character's toughness (like, she's survived on her own for years on this hell planet) and does a disservice to her core vulnerability (her loneliness).  Not sure why I would expect better out of a film like this.

In Spacehunter there's barely any space, barely any hunting, and certainly no hunting in (or for) space.  It is indeed awful, and yet, not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  If, like me, you're into sci-fi rejects of the era, it's worth a watch.