My first experience with ‘Spacehunter:
Adventures in the Forbidden Zone’ was a chance discovery of a
poster for it being sold on Ebay. As I’m sure you’ll agree, the
poster’s pretty fucking cool. Having bought the poster based on
that impulse, I realised that I’d probably have to watch the actual
film if I wanted to display it; unless I wanted to be that guy and
nobody wants to be that guy…
It’s an unusual experience these days
to be watching a film based only on the poster and a weird TV spot
with about 30 seconds of footage. It’s hard to avoid advertising
for films these days, what with endless repeated Youtube adverts and
twitter #’s. Marketing for films has become about media saturation
rather than audience enticement. It’s nice in a way that a 31 year
old movie poster is still bringing in an audience, a real credit to
the handmade poster art of pre Photoshop Hollywood
The film
follows Wolff, an ex-solder turned salvager, who intercepts a
distress call and sets out to rescues three women stranded on a
hostile planet. Now the hostile planet, Terra XI, is home to a group
called the Zoners, who kidnap the stranded women and take them to
their capital in the forbidden zone. The women’s only hope are
Wolff and Niki, a teenage native of the planet who’s come along for
the ride.
The plot is pretty much what you
expect, or at least it will be if you’ve seen Star Trek, Star Wars,
Mad Max or any number of other films it has been ‘inspired’ by.
Wolff is Han Solo, to the point of being dressed the same way. The
Zoners are just the Marauders from Mad Max 2. Although littered with
stolen ideas and concepts, ‘Spacehunter’ feels more like a loving
scrapbook of ideas than a calculated attempt at making quick money.
It would be easy to imagine this film being made now as a loving
homage to 1980’s adventure films.
Watching ‘Spacehunter’ reminds me
just how much I miss practical effects in films. I miss model shots,
pyrotechnics and genuine matte paintings. For those who feel the same
as me, this film delivers in spades. Although the production team
were clearly limited financially, no expense has been spared
creatively. The miniatures in this film are particularly impressive;
I had trouble at times working out what was shot full size on
location and what was filmed miniature in the studio. The film in
general looks really nice, the production design and cinematography
is really strong and interesting.
I don’t like to criticise the
soundtrack, as criticising Elmer Bernstein’s work seems wrong. The
soundtrack is really nice but as with most of Bernstein’s scores it
sounds incredibly old fashioned. You could easily take the soundtrack
and attach it to a film from the 1960’s and nobody would notice. That being said he kept being hired because he was good, even if he was a bit too traditional at times.
Now while looking and sounding nice is
something this film does surprisingly well, the actual script content
isn’t quite as strong. The dialog is kind of weird for
example. The structure is fine and makes sense but a lot of the
conversation is weird and unnatural. It doesn’t help that parts of
the script are purposefully weird. Niki and the rest of the ‘Scav’
population speak in a weird planetary dialect. Now movies such as
‘Blade Runner’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange’ handle this alternate talk with a
reasonable level of skill, ‘Spacehunter’ not so much. We get
random new words based on old ones thrown into the dialog. For
‘thought’ we get ‘brainworked’, for ‘truthful’ we have
‘trustwords’. I feel bad about knocking this language, as I
really love this kind of attention to detail when creating a world.
It does help make you feel the world is alien but in ‘Spacehunter’
it’s as much interesting as it is annoying.
The script is also a bit weird in terms
of gender politics. Before the end we’ve had women kidnapped and
put in cages, robot sex slaves and Amazonians. That being said the
actual relationship between Wolff and Niki is more a father-daughter
dynamic than anything else and saves the film somewhat. That being
said, that’s only because Peter Strauss and Molly Ringwald play the
relationship that way. There are some scenes where she is trying to
flirt with him, which considering she was 14 and he was 35 when it
was filmed, this is slightly weird to say the least. But as I say
they play up the family angle and it works. It’s nice to have a
film where the main relationship of the film isn’t romantic in
nature.
As much as I like Molly Ringwald in
this film she always seems a bit out of place. She has quite a
distinct California accent that doesn’t work with her ‘Scav’
speak. In addition she seems a bit out of her league in some scenes,
although considering her age and her large amount of lines she does a
remarkable job.
The real issue is that Peter Strauss is
clearly a more experienced actor than her and sounds more confident.
He is meant to be the fish out of water in the film but sounds
confident and she is meant to be used to the planet but sounds very
out of place. Most of the dialog in the film has been re-recorded
later and looped in. This only heightens the difference in experience
as Ringwald’s lines often sound slightly as if they’re being
read, not performed, when compared to Strauss's.
I suspect Ringwald was brought in as
she was very popular with teenagers when the film was made. This is
in much the same way that Kit Harrington, from Game of Thrones, is
airlifted into projects to save them now.
The cheapness of this film is its
biggest issue. Several edits in the film are noticeably bad and one
part even uses reversed footage. These are the usual signs that
reshoots were not possible. To the film’s credit it doesn’t let a
lack of budget stop it from creating what it wants to create but this
does have issues. Near the end of the film Molly Ringwald is being
menaced by a cybernetic man who is trying to drain her life-force
from her. With the budget being what it is however, it looks more
like she’s being menaced by a Lego Bionicle with
a human face.
I like this film; it’s from a
different age of Hollywood. This is from the days when mid to low
budget films could still exist without being horror films or stoner
comedies. This film is not trying to sell anything but itself and
for the most part it does that pretty well. If you like the poster
you will like this film as it’s exactly what you expect and more.
When a film is limited in its budget it tends to focus on character.
I found myself genuinely caring about these characters by the end and
wishing them well on their further adventures. If this film were
given a 30 year later sequel, as Mad Max is getting I’d definitely
give it a watch. Although I guess, like Mad Max, you’d probably
need to do some recasting to get those kids in seats.
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