Double Feature review time!
Ever see those “two movies on one disc” specials for 5 bucks at the local mega retailer? Ever wonder what quality of movies end up on those bargain bin discs? I’ve got the answer for you-the Bad Movie Game kind of movies.
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I just picked up the two-movie set: Krull and Spacehunter; Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. These two movies grabbed my eye. I had vague memories of Krull from seeing it as a child and had no idea about Spacehunter, but it stars Molly Ringwald and Michael Ironside so the disc magically gravitated into my blue cart and made the trip home with me. Typically these type of discs have a good movie and a crap movie. I figured that Krull was the good one based on my memories from childhood.
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But first, why were these two movies together at all? What do they have in common? They both made 16 million at the box office, they both came out in 1983, they are both “sci-fi action adventures” and they both have great one liners. This is where the similarities end.
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Let’s start off with Krull since I had a fondness for it..
Boy, the people who made Krull must have really loved Star Wars. There is a princess in peril, a dashing hero prince to rescue her, dead parents, galactic bad guy with magical powers, laser pistols and swords, old guy mentor who sacrifices himself for the Hero, And a final showdown with the bad guy where the hero uses his new powers to defeat ultimate evil.
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The movie cost 47 million to make and only made 16. It feels like a fantasy movie that suffered some change in leadership at the studio late in the script stage. My theory is the changing of the guard resulted in the new studio heads saying, “we need to make this a space movie, Star Wars made all the monies, we need to make a space movie, not this swashbuckling fantasy movie that we were planning on, go get the janitor to jam some space stuff into this movie.” Voila! The bad guy goes from a shape shifting wizard with a magical castle and magic staff-wielding soldiers into a space conquering alien monster with a location hopping space ship/castle and some alien worms in Stormtrooper armor with laser shooting staffs.
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Problems with this movie were mostly limited to the strange marriage of sci-fi and fantasy. There were long stretches of silence as the group traveled that should have been used to fill in the plot or just be done away with. This would have been a good movie if it had simply been a sword and sorcery flick. The effects were mostly good (especially the spider queen and the Cyclops) and the sets were lavish. This movie needed a producer to tell the set, costume and effects departments “NO you cannot spend that much money on embroidered vests, Bauhaus castles and rubber monsters that will be on screen for 30 seconds. We are in England, can’t we find a REAL castle to use?” This movie needed to be budgeted for 20 million tops. It may have actually been a better film for it.
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The good stuff about this movie
ERGO. Ergo is great. I loved his interactions with the kid and he saves the day for me.
“I am Ergo the magnificent. Short in stature, tall in power, narrow of purpose and wide of vision. And I do not travel with peasants and beggars. Goodbye!”
The plot is simple and you never lose track of what’s going on. There are many lines that make good joke setups and I had to stop myself silently riffing the entire movie. The strange castle and bad guy are creepy. In the end it was a good one-off movie but I’m not likely to watch it again.
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Verdict: Nanar minus. I liked this movie, it was good enough and is normal enough if you can just ignore the space stuff and assign it all to “magic”. Be sure to watch out for the violence against a lonely hay cart near the beginning and the terrible blue screen near the end. I’m sorry it cost 47 jillion dollars to make, that was too much to spend on this and is therefore a flop. But hey, you get to see baby Liam Neeson as a Bandit.
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Next up is the other movie on the disc- Spacehunter; Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. It’s a total crapshoot on this one, good actors but the poster looks terrible and I’m unfamiliar with it.
Boy, the guys who made Spacehunter must have really loved Star Wars. There is a Han Solo knockoff (Peter Strauss) that owes lots of money to someone, an android who fixes their creaky old ship, a partially mechanical ultimate bad guy, a pretty girl that needs to be rescued (three of them in this version), laser pistols that look like silver squirt guns and deserts, lots of deserts.
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The movie cost 14 mil to make and made 16. It’s technically a success. It feels like a Mad Max meets Cowboys vs Indians plot. The Hero has to go to this planet full of mutants who are lead by the bio-mechanical Lord Overdog (Michael Ironside) to rescue three girls in spandex. He meets Molly Ringwald and Ernie Hudson, gets to drive all over in a cool truck, sees lots of scrap metal vehicles and cool mutant effects. Nothing that happens is very well explained but there sure is lots of it! The action keeps moving along without regard to continuity or plot development until the final showdown where the hero chooses to save Ringwald from the Overdog and a battle to the death ensues.
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Problems with this movie are mostly with the lack of plot development. A few good lines here and there would have oriented the audience so we could understand why and where we were. Scenes just happen, like a few minutes of film were cut between them, moving from deflated sumo monsters to underwater Amazonians with no explanation. I think this movie was lost in the editing room and the Directors’ lack of filmed coverage.
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The good stuff about this movie
EVERYTHING. The mutants are cool, the scrapyard vehicles are cool, Overdog is cool. The movie is chock full of great lines from every character, but Overdog gets the best one I’ve ever heard from a bad guy.
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SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE, Michael Ironside, 1983, (c) Columbia
Overdog yelling as his minions die in the chaos of battle ”You imbeciles! You crawling, festering refuse! How can you all fail at the same time!”
I rewound the movie a few times to hear it again. The lament of every movie bad guy.
Verdict: NANAR!
Molly Ringwald is pretty good as the wasteland waif, Ernie Hudson shows up to save the plot every half hour and our Hero is not as dumb as most movies would make him. If the plot had been understandable it would have been a great movie. As it sits it makes a good background movie, or you can watch it and laugh. Perfect for bad movie night because of the strange things happening almost all the time in its short run time.
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There you have it, two movies on one disc that are both Nanar. Very similar and yet so very different. I urge you all to try them out.
Want to play the Bad Movie Game? 