Hitch Magazine | Space Odyssey

Slipstream

(1989)

*

Slipstream is the other two-syllable, starts-with-an-S sci-fi movie starring Mark Hamill. You know, the one that no kid dreams of owning toys for. Hamill plays a renegade lawman who, in a post-apocalyptic future, has his hostage kidnapped by a scruffy ne’er-do-well played by Bill Paxton. At first, I wasn’t sure who the hero of the movie was, so it was hard to root for either of them. Especially Paxton, because he’s doing his Goofy Mullet Dope routine.

Anyway, Paxton learns that his hostage has magical healing powers, like restoring sight in blind kids. (Unfortunately, he does nothing about Paxton’s hair.) None of this matters, because it’s boring as shit (with Ben Kingsley and F. Murray Abraham, how could it not be?) and harbors an unhealthy fascination with hot air balloons.

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe

(1991)

***

Hard to believe that the Jesse Ventura onscreen here – one with an utter lack of personality – can be the same governing guy that people call charismatic. But yet he is, headlining his own terrible Terminator rip-off, as the 11,862-year-old Abraxas, an intergalactic cop known as a “finder.”

In the prologue, he’s “finding” Secundas (Mallrats’ Sven-Ole Thorsen), a Schwarzenegger soundalike seeking a fertile female whom he can impregnate with his hand, and Marjorie Branfield – she of the wide arse and smoky-chick hair – has the unfortunate experience of housing the nearest womb.

Here’s the part I still can’t understand: Secundas plants his seed in her to hide some “anti-life formula” that could result in the world’s end, knowing it will be in the resulting child’s brain. So years later, Secundas comes looking for the kid so he extract the formula. Why not save all the trouble and simply not given the formula away? Or God forbid, memorize it?

Anyway, wherever Secundas goes, Abraxas follows, ready to uphold the good of the universe. (Another thing: If the fate at the entire universe were at stake, why send only one guy?) Secundas ain’t above slaughtering innocents to find his child, who has never spoken a word and harbors the uncanny ability to make others wet their pants. Abraxas seems less interested in keeping the kid alive than he is in getting busy with Branfield. See, in all his nearly 12,000 years alive, he’s never kissed a woman.

Ventura is no credible action hero. In fact, without his trademark shaved head and beard, he looks an awful lot like a hospital janitor or a proud member of the crew at the corner Jiffy Lube. His constant blank stare and wooden line readings make me wonder if he was faring well in his role as a steel-reinforced cyborg or not acting at all.

It’s hard to imagine which was worse for Branfield: playing a love scene opposite Ventura or being married to Jim Belushi? The lesser Belushi brother has a cameo as a school prinicipal, and he plays it exactly like he did in The Principal.

Creature

(1984)

**

This Alien rip-off begins with the two dumbest astronauts in movie history (and, mind you, I’m including RocketMan) “accidentally” unleashing a hideous killer creature in outer space, which looks like a dookie log with teeth.

An American crew is dispatched to see what’s up; the squad includes Ferris Bueller’s dad, Joe Dante regular Wendy Schaal and a couple of harsh-looking women who could out-butch Sandra Bernhard. They’re eventually joined by that Teutonic freak Klaus Kinski, who talks thick-like through his enormous teeth and says things like “This creature is sly!” that are really funny only because of the way he says them, because this is, after all, that Teutonic freak Klaus Kinski. At one point, he grabs a woman’s breasts and crotch, and one wonders if it was even in the script.

It’s astounding what writer/director William Malone (who fared far better with House on Haunted Hill) can’t do on a $47 budget – a good $12.50 or so had to go to Kinski alone. The sets are so minimal, it looks like it was filmed on a high school stage, using students for supporting players and the band for the score.

Laser Mission

(1990)

***

Before hitting it big (and buying the farm) with The Crow, Bruce Lee’s son Brandon starred in the cheapo actioner Laser Mission, in which he plays an American spy. He’s dispatched to encourage defection in a Russian professor and laser weaponry expert, played by Ernest Borgnine. But at this point in Ernie’s career, the only thing he’s believable as is a consumer of vast quantities of pastrami.

As Ernie disappears, Brandon gets in deep with the Russian army and finds himself on the run, searching for Borgnine with his daughter, the blonde-haired, helium-voiced and breasts-forever-verging-on-escaping Debi Monahan. Together they have a chase in a VW microbus, shoot countless baddies with dead-on aim and bicker (“That’s mister asshole to you!”).

Brandon clearly has an easygoing charm that works for him, though he acts largely through his tank top. Monahan has … well, I mentioned the breasts. The production could only afford one song which they run into the ground: Knopfler’s “Mercenary Man.” And that’s David Knopfler, not Mark, so it’s not Dire Straits, but just plain dire.

Alien Species

(1997)

**

One night, a small California town is invaded by aliens whose spaceships look lifted from video games. As for the aliens themselves, they’re in decent rubber suits. But that’s the only thing decent in Alien Species, a shot-on-video no-budget affair that trots out all the clichés (the cowardly deputy, the heroic criminal) with none of the fun. “Bon appetit, asswipe!” is as good a one-liner as the scriptwriter could muster.

I would call this a backyard production, but someone dangled enough fivers in Charles Napier’s face to get him to play the sheriff. After a whole night of chaos and destruction, the movie ends with a stern warning: “Coming Soon – Alien Species 2: The Invasion.” Well, what was this invasion then? I’m just glad the sequel never got made.

The Eyes Behind the Stars

(1972)

**

After shooting in a field, a fashion photographer notices strange things on his pictures when he develops the film. Unperturbed, he returns to the scene and is abducted by a UFO. Soon the aliens pick up the model, too, and a crack investigation – headed by Martin Balsam – is underway!

This is one of those dead-serious and deadly slow UFO films that the ‘70s had a ton of, but distinctive in that it comes from Italy. Of course, all that this means to you is wacky electronic music and bad dubbing. Claiming to be true, Eyes was written and directed by one Roy Garrett, whom the credits note is a “Member of the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena.” Note that didn’t say “Deep-Pocketed Rich Guy,” or else the aliens might have had better costumes than fencing masks.

Cosmos: War of the Planets

(1978)

****

The War of the Robots

(1978)

***

These Italian Wars are but two of the many sci-fi flicks that popped up like mad in the late-‘70s, when everyone wrongly assumed any space-themed film would be the next Star Wars. Both sport goofy electronic scores, rudimentary optical effects and cardboard direction by Al Bradley.

If there’s a plot to the first half of Cosmos: War of the Planets, it didn’t get translated. For 45 minutes, the members of a spaceship push buttons, take orders from a computer named Wiz, go on a spacewalk where acid gets into the suit and have virtual sex in the “Cosmic Love” room (which has two settings – “violent or gentle”). Because they all wear red cloth helmets that obscure a majority of the head, it’s extremely difficult to tell the characters apart. Okay, so one has a beard, one is black (and gets the whitest dub of all of them) and a couple have breasts, but other than that, baby, they’re the same.

Then they visit a mysterious planet and a semblance of a story takes shape. They come across a Stonehenge-like structure that, when walked through, zaps you underground to a cavernous dwelling housing a race of mostly naked slaves that look like Blue Man Group with Mr. Spock ears. As they explain via telepathy, they’re lorded over by a boxy slot-machine robot that looks suspiciously like that non-threatening educational toy Tomy put on the market around the time. The last few minutes is one of those endings that makes you go, “What the--?” for several reasons, not the least of which is a crew member who inexplicably turns into a rabid, pustule-faced monster.

The War of the Robots doesn’t have the instant kitsch hook of Cosmos, and how much of that is due to opening with the credit “Antonio Sabato in” is anyone’s guess. Judging solely from the title, we expected something super-cool, until we saw said robots were not metallic androids, but rather albino eunuchs with Dutch boy haircuts and disco-gold suits.

The story has Sabato and his crew searching for a professor and his frizzy-haired assistant, who have been kidnapped by the robots, though honestly, neither of them seems interesting enough to save. In doing so, they encounter an underground race of humanoids with vaguely Darth Vader-esque helmets, burlap capes and bug eyes. One of Sabato’s crew members is a Texan with a blond ‘fro, and you haven’t lived until you’ve heard an Italian attempt to dub (emphasis on attempt) a Texas accent; the result is more like a learning-impaired black guy.

Robots cribs more from Star Wars than Cosmos, with an X-Wing-ish shootout and the use of lightsabers, albeit the cheap kind used in Hardware Wars. It also seems to crib from Cosmos itself, using the same boxy slot-machine robot! Early in the film, there’s also a spacewalk so similar to the one in Cosmos, I briefly thought I was watching Cosmos due to a mastering error. In truth, scenes from both films could be combined into one and the already flimsy narrative would suffer not.

At Robots’ end, Sabato and his love interest marvel at their victory with such feel-goodisms as “I feel fantastic!” and “It’s so good to be alive after being so close to death! I love life!” Mamma mia, that’s a spacey meatball!

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet

(1965)

***

Curtis Harrington’s simple AIP fantasy is about astronauts touching down on the planet Venus and finding prehistoric creatures and evidence of a past civilization. Actually, there are two separate teams exploring the surface, but I didn’t realize that for the longest time.

Almost immediately upon landing, one guy gets roped in by a giant egg with tentacles. There’s also a pterodactyl and hopping baby dinosaurs, as well as the astronauts’ own cool-ass robot. While they travel around in a hovercraft, Professor Basil Rathbone monitors everything from a safe distance (the moon). The niftiest scene is a lengthy underwater sequence, in which we see an octopus that looks like Wilford Brimley.

They Came from Beyond Space

(1967)

***

Amicus stalwart Freddie Francis directed this cheap but enjoyable sci-fi flick based upon a novel entitled The Gods Hate Kansas, a title they clearly should have kept.

After a formation of meteors falls on a farm on Earth, people find their minds controlled by the glowing rock, accompanied by an entirely inappropriate crime-jazz score. Luckily, our hero has a steel plate in his head, so he is immune to the aliens’ ways, but a spaghetti colander apparently does the trick, too.

And while “they” may have come from “beyond space,” they’ve taken up residence on the moon, where they’re lorded over by the Master of the Moon, played by Michael Gough, Alfred from the Batman movies. It’s hard to hate such a nice old man.




	The Unofficial Brentwood Communications 10-Movie DVD Sets Shrine and Info Center

			SPACE ODYSSEY (2002) Reviewed: Slipstream Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe Creature Laser Misson Alien Species The Eyes Behind the Stars Cosmos: War of the Planets Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet They Came from Beyond Space The War of the Robots



			BUY ME!

	Slipstream (1989) * Slipstream is the other two-syllable, starts-with-an-S sci-fi movie starring Mark Hamill. You know, the one that no kid dreams of owning toys for. Hamill plays a renegade lawman who, in a post-apocalyptic future, has his hostage kidnapped by a scruffy ne’er-do-well played by Bill Paxton. At first, I wasn’t sure who the hero of the movie was, so it was hard to root for either of them. Especially Paxton, because he’s doing his Goofy Mullet Dope routine. Anyway, Paxton learns that his hostage has magical healing powers, like restoring sight in blind kids. (Unfortunately, he does nothing about Paxton’s hair.) None of this matters, because it’s boring as shit (with Ben Kingsley and F. Murray Abraham, how could it not be?) and harbors an unhealthy fascination with hot air balloons. Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe (1991) * Hard to believe that the Jesse Ventura onscreen here – one with an utter lack of personality – can be the same governing guy that people call charismatic. But yet he is, headlining his own terrible Terminator rip-off, as the 11,862-year-old Abraxas, an intergalactic cop known as a “finder.” In the prologue, he’s “finding” Secundas (Mallrats’ Sven-Ole Thorsen), a Schwarzenegger soundalike seeking a fertile female whom he can impregnate with his hand, and Marjorie Branfield – she of the wide arse and smoky-chick hair – has the unfortunate experience of housing the nearest womb. Here’s the part I still can’t understand: Secundas plants his seed in her to hide some “anti-life formula” that could result in the world’s end, knowing it will be in the resulting child’s brain. So years later, Secundas comes looking for the kid so he extract the formula. Why not save all the trouble and simply not given the formula away? Or God forbid, memorize it? Anyway, wherever Secundas goes, Abraxas follows, ready to uphold the good of the universe. (Another thing: If the fate at the entire universe were at stake, why send only one guy?) Secundas ain’t above slaughtering innocents to find his child, who has never spoken a word and harbors the uncanny ability to make others wet their pants. Abraxas seems less interested in keeping the kid alive than he is in getting busy with Branfield. See, in all his nearly 12,000 years alive, he’s never kissed a woman. Ventura is no credible action hero. In fact, without his trademark shaved head and beard, he looks an awful lot like a hospital janitor or a proud member of the crew at the corner Jiffy Lube. His constant blank stare and wooden line readings make me wonder if he was faring well in his role as a steel-reinforced cyborg or not acting at all. It’s hard to imagine which was worse for Branfield: playing a love scene opposite Ventura or being married to Jim Belushi? The lesser Belushi brother has a cameo as a school prinicipal, and he plays it exactly like he did in The Principal. Creature (1984) This Alien rip-off begins with the two dumbest astronauts in movie history (and, mind you, I’m including RocketMan) “accidentally” unleashing a hideous killer creature in outer space, which looks like a dookie log with teeth. An American crew is dispatched to see what’s up; the squad includes Ferris Bueller’s dad, Joe Dante regular Wendy Schaal and a couple of harsh-looking women who could out-butch Sandra Bernhard. They’re eventually joined by that Teutonic freak Klaus Kinski, who talks thick-like through his enormous teeth and says things like “This creature is sly!” that are really funny only because of the way he says them, because this is, after all, that Teutonic freak Klaus Kinski. At one point, he grabs a woman’s breasts and crotch, and one wonders if it was even in the script. It’s astounding what writer/director William Malone (who fared far better with House on Haunted Hill) can’t do on a $47 budget – a good $12.50 or so had to go to Kinski alone. The sets are so minimal, it looks like it was filmed on a high school stage, using students for supporting players and the band for the score. Laser Mission (1990) * Before hitting it big (and buying the farm) with The Crow, Bruce Lee’s son Brandon starred in the cheapo actioner Laser Mission, in which he plays an American spy. He’s dispatched to encourage defection in a Russian professor and laser weaponry expert, played by Ernest Borgnine. But at this point in Ernie’s career, the only thing he’s believable as is a consumer of vast quantities of pastrami. As Ernie disappears, Brandon gets in deep with the Russian army and finds himself on the run, searching for Borgnine with his daughter, the blonde-haired, helium-voiced and breasts-forever-verging-on-escaping Debi Monahan. Together they have a chase in a VW microbus, shoot countless baddies with dead-on aim and bicker (“That’s mister asshole to you!”). Brandon clearly has an easygoing charm that works for him, though he acts largely through his tank top. Monahan has … well, I mentioned the breasts. The production could only afford one song which they run into the ground: Knopfler’s “Mercenary Man.” And that’s David Knopfler, not Mark, so it’s not Dire Straits, but just plain dire. Alien Species (1997) One night, a small California town is invaded by aliens whose spaceships look lifted from video games. As for the aliens themselves, they’re in decent rubber suits. But that’s the only thing decent in Alien Species, a shot-on-video no-budget affair that trots out all the clichés (the cowardly deputy, the heroic criminal) with none of the fun. “Bon appetit, asswipe!” is as good a one-liner as the scriptwriter could muster. I would call this a backyard production, but someone dangled enough fivers in Charles Napier’s face to get him to play the sheriff. After a whole night of chaos and destruction, the movie ends with a stern warning: “Coming Soon – Alien Species 2: The Invasion.” Well, what was this invasion then? I’m just glad the sequel never got made. The Eyes Behind the Stars (1972) After shooting in a field, a fashion photographer notices strange things on his pictures when he develops the film. Unperturbed, he returns to the scene and is abducted by a UFO. Soon the aliens pick up the model, too, and a crack investigation – headed by Martin Balsam – is underway! This is one of those dead-serious and deadly slow UFO films that the ‘70s had a ton of, but distinctive in that it comes from Italy. Of course, all that this means to you is wacky electronic music and bad dubbing. Claiming to be true, Eyes was written and directed by one Roy Garrett, whom the credits note is a “Member of the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena.” Note that didn’t say “Deep-Pocketed Rich Guy,” or else the aliens might have had better costumes than fencing masks. Cosmos: War of the Planets (1978) The War of the Robots (1978) * These Italian Wars are but two of the many sci-fi flicks that popped up like mad in the late-‘70s, when everyone wrongly assumed any space-themed film would be the next Star Wars. Both sport goofy electronic scores, rudimentary optical effects and cardboard direction by Al Bradley. If there’s a plot to the first half of Cosmos: War of the Planets, it didn’t get translated. For 45 minutes, the members of a spaceship push buttons, take orders from a computer named Wiz, go on a spacewalk where acid gets into the suit and have virtual sex in the “Cosmic Love” room (which has two settings – “violent or gentle”). Because they all wear red cloth helmets that obscure a majority of the head, it’s extremely difficult to tell the characters apart. Okay, so one has a beard, one is black (and gets the whitest dub of all of them) and a couple have breasts, but other than that, baby, they’re the same. Then they visit a mysterious planet and a semblance of a story takes shape. They come across a Stonehenge-like structure that, when walked through, zaps you underground to a cavernous dwelling housing a race of mostly naked slaves that look like Blue Man Group with Mr. Spock ears. As they explain via telepathy, they’re lorded over by a boxy slot-machine robot that looks suspiciously like that non-threatening educational toy Tomy put on the market around the time. The last few minutes is one of those endings that makes you go, “What the--?” for several reasons, not the least of which is a crew member who inexplicably turns into a rabid, pustule-faced monster. The War of the Robots doesn’t have the instant kitsch hook of Cosmos, and how much of that is due to opening with the credit “Antonio Sabato in” is anyone’s guess. Judging solely from the title, we expected something super-cool, until we saw said robots were not metallic androids, but rather albino eunuchs with Dutch boy haircuts and disco-gold suits. The story has Sabato and his crew searching for a professor and his frizzy-haired assistant, who have been kidnapped by the robots, though honestly, neither of them seems interesting enough to save. In doing so, they encounter an underground race of humanoids with vaguely Darth Vader-esque helmets, burlap capes and bug eyes. One of Sabato’s crew members is a Texan with a blond ‘fro, and you haven’t lived until you’ve heard an Italian attempt to dub (emphasis on attempt) a Texas accent; the result is more like a learning-impaired black guy. Robots cribs more from Star Wars than Cosmos, with an X-Wing-ish shootout and the use of lightsabers, albeit the cheap kind used in Hardware Wars. It also seems to crib from Cosmos itself, using the same boxy slot-machine robot! Early in the film, there’s also a spacewalk so similar to the one in Cosmos, I briefly thought I was watching Cosmos due to a mastering error. In truth, scenes from both films could be combined into one and the already flimsy narrative would suffer not. At Robots’ end, Sabato and his love interest marvel at their victory with such feel-goodisms as “I feel fantastic!” and “It’s so good to be alive after being so close to death! I love life!” Mamma mia, that’s a spacey meatball! Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) * Curtis Harrington’s simple AIP fantasy is about astronauts touching down on the planet Venus and finding prehistoric creatures and evidence of a past civilization. Actually, there are two separate teams exploring the surface, but I didn’t realize that for the longest time. Almost immediately upon landing, one guy gets roped in by a giant egg with tentacles. There’s also a pterodactyl and hopping baby dinosaurs, as well as the astronauts’ own cool-ass robot. While they travel around in a hovercraft, Professor Basil Rathbone monitors everything from a safe distance (the moon). The niftiest scene is a lengthy underwater sequence, in which we see an octopus that looks like Wilford Brimley. They Came from Beyond Space (1967) * Amicus stalwart Freddie Francis directed this cheap but enjoyable sci-fi flick based upon a novel entitled The Gods Hate Kansas, a title they clearly should have kept. After a formation of meteors falls on a farm on Earth, people find their minds controlled by the glowing rock, accompanied by an entirely inappropriate crime-jazz score. Luckily, our hero has a steel plate in his head, so he is immune to the aliens’ ways, but a spaghetti colander apparently does the trick, too. And while “they” may have come from “beyond space,” they’ve taken up residence on the moon, where they’re lorded over by the Master of the Moon, played by Michael Gough, Alfred from the Batman movies. It’s hard to hate such a nice old man.