Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
"Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" falls in line with the truly tone-deaf, idiotic 3-D movies that were released in 1983. I did not watch this in 3-D nor did I happily enter any theater in 1983 to watch it, and thank goodness for that. Despite some fairly dim moments of humor, "Spacehunter" is a dreary, badly filtered mixture of junky desert warfare from "Mad Max" mixed with "Star Wars" galactic adventures, only it is less galactic and more desert-prone.
Spacehunter is a reckless bounty hunter (Peter Strauss) who is made to resemble Han Solo but with a five o'clock shadow. The guy is a seemingly suave bore and has a female android (Andrea Marcovicci, mercifully exiting the movie early on) who sleeps in a chamber and is scantily-clad in his dilapidated junky ship. I did not realize she was an android until 10 minutes later. Spacehunter intercepts a signal where three women have crash-landed in a desert-barren, plague infested planet known as Terra 11. Once he arrives, there is a pirate ship and some minor conflict and a very young, naive, grimy-looking Molly Ringwald as Niki, more of an orphaned brat who won't shut up than the Brat Packer she eventually became. There is a pale-faced villain named Overdog (Michael Ironside) who is kept alive with various electrical cables and has two enormous claws. This nasty villain seems to love watching young, nubile girls undress before his very eyes before making them go through a deadly obstacle course involving fire and traps full of sharp blades.
Aside from all the women appearing scantily-clad and poor old Molly being forced to wash her hair, "Spacehunter" has the barest amount of camaraderie and humor between Strauss and an old friend played winningly by a bald Ernie Hudson. These two should've been the focus of this "Star Wars" rip-off instead of the bratty, sometimes incoherent Niki who wouldn't mind wearing diapers (Yep, you heard that right). The film is a one-dimensional effort overall with no consistency or reason of being other than to quickly cash in on the 3-D craze, advertising itself as the first 3-D movie in the 1980's to be set in space! Only most of the movie is set in a wasteland known as Utah, filling in for Terra 11, that is shot with various hazy camera filters so that it looks worse in reddish brown 2-D than 3-D. "Spacehunter" has no real story, no real colorful villains, no depth, no sense of adventure and hardly much in the way of well-choreographed action. Even the Overdog's lair, the Forbidden Zone, looks robbed of visual imagination - it looks like a dark, cavernous nightclub in underground New York City crossed with a dingy auto repair shop. Watch any Star Wars movie instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment