No Good Very Bad Movies 1: The one that's worse Than Galaxy of Terror.

 

Title: Dead Space

What Year?: 1991

Classification: Improbable Experiment/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

With this review, I’m getting to something I’ve thought about for quite a while but still meant to wait a little longer for. In the course of 150 reviews on this blog, I have frequently and vocally denied that I have ever tried to cover “bad” movies for their own sake. In fact, as I have also mentioned repeatedly, I have set quite a few of the very worst movies I have encountered as too dull, too incoherent or simply too incompetent to be of further interest. After continuing to see others cover the movies I review on “worst” movie lists, however, I decided that sooner or later, I needed to let loose and do one of my own, both of the ones usually nominated by others and those I would choose from my own experience. To start the lineup, I’m going with one of the very first movies I considered for review, which I had meant to get back to. The random kicked in when I finally took another look, and very quickly decided that underneath the unremarkable movie I remembered was a terrible movie conceived from an even worse idea. With that, I introduce Dead Space, a remake of a knockoff by none other than Roger Corman.

Our story begins with a space captain and his trusty bot besting a group of space pirate types portrayed with vastly outdated special effects that still look far better than anything we’re going to see. While effecting repairs, they get a distress signal from an isolated research outpost. There, they discover a group of scientists trying to combat the universe’s deadliest diseases by engineering an even deadlier virus to combat them. When one of the crew becomes infected, the virus creates a torso-bursting mutant that begins picking off the surviving staff. It’s up to the captain to save the day, but the secrets of the creature may lie with a scientist already dying of the deadliest disease of all!

Dead Space was a production of chronic offender Roger Corman, directed by Fred Gallo. The film is widely regarded as a remake of Corman’s 1982 film Forbidden World. Both films reused effects from Battle Beyond The Stars. The film starred Marc Singer of Beastmaster as the captain and the emerging Bryan Cranston as the ill-fated scientist, with Laura Mae Tate as the quasi-romantic interest and Rodger Halston as the robot Tinpan. The movie’s total running time is about 72 minutes, raising the possibility that it was intended for the home video market, though no sources have disputed whether it was released theatrically. It was released on disc by Shout in 2010, combined with Corman’s The Terror Within. It has since become available in digital form, including free streaming on certain platforms. Most if not all releases are in “full screen” format, possibly indicating transfers from VHS.

Moving to my experiences, I watched this movie soon after starting Space 1979, along with Forbidden World, after first discovering the surreal poster. I very seriously considered reviewing it then, which would have made it my first review of a ‘90s movie, but Forbidden World suited my purposes far better. What stayed in my mind was the strange redundancy of the later film. When Corman got his start in the 1950s, it was common and understandable to remake recent films for audiences that were unlikely to have access to the originals. In his 1980s renaissance, it would have been downright promising to remake a few old “classics” like The Day The World Ended or Attack of the Crab Monsters. But to remake a movie less than a decade old in ca. 1990, while low-budget ‘80s sci fi like Corman’s own Defcon 4 were ubiquitous in video stores, was at best an exercise in excess. Still, it might have been worthwhile, if Corman and crew has used the time to deliver a better movie. Alas, if anything, it seems carefully tailored to underperform the first movie.

This is as good a point as any to introduce what I find to be the strangest and most jarring aspect of the film: It has the ‘90s “feel” down better than movies made even later in the decade, except that what it feels like even more is a 1990s TV pilot. This in itself wouldn’t have to be a bad thing; I made the same observation about Corman’s Fantastic Four, which worked well enough to offer a new angle on that murky and ill-fated project. Here, however, there are no such mitigating circumstances. Apart from the well-done robot suit (or at least the head thereof), even the elements that generally “work” seem cheap and inferior, from the nearly immobile creature to Cranston’s underwritten character, and it’s all in the service of a premise and story we’ve literally seen before. The one further virtue of the movie is that it doesn’t have the level of plot jumps, pseudoscience and general nonsense the Forbidden World or Crab Monsters did, but the absence goes a long way to draining away any residual sense of fun.

What I still feel like I’m not getting to is how uninteresting the movie is. I suppose this is the reason I never really tried a “worst” lineup before; for me, the true worst of the worst are the ones that don’t even give me a lot to complain about. Anytime I try to think of something to say, I don’t get much further than a comparison to movies that are far more interesting, including more than a few I would otherwise consider as bad or worse from Corman himself. Galaxy of Terror borders on unwatchable for the “cringe” factor alone, but its horrors were the outworkings of an interesting idea. Defcon 4 looked as cheap and ugly as dirt, but it portrayed an ugly, dirty world.  Fantastic Four was like a train wreck that hit another train wreck, but it tried to do things nobody had tried before. What this movie really feels like is a subversive satirist trying to sell out and not even getting paid for it. Everything that made Corman’s films entertaining or at least interesting, the creativity, the energy, the antiauthoritarian-from-within tone, is thrown overboard, and all we get is a short, dull exercise in mediocrity.

That still leaves the “one scene” in my usual formula. If there’s anything at all worth further comment, it’s a battle between Tinpan and the monster. As the 50-minute mark approaches, the captain and the robot follow the monster to a cavern outside. Of course, things go badly, and the pair retreat to the base, where they stand just outside firing into the convenient atmospheric fog. The lady scientist emerges to help the captain inside. That’s when the creature comes out of the mist, providing one of the better sightings of the thing. The rig looks better than in the original movie, but is possibly even more immobile. Its main features are a gaping mouth full of wonky, rather blunt teeth and what look like a pair of oversized mantis limbs. The bot tries to counter by swinging a laser rifle, which just makes both combatants look pitiful as they flail or slap vaguely at each other. The captain tries to go to the rescue, despite the lady scientist’s best efforts, declaring, “He’s my friend!” Before push can come to shove, the robot falls, and the mist lifts enough to show that his top half is separated from the bottom half. For all its flaws, it’s a well-executed sequence with just a little emotional weight, which is more than can be said for almost anything before or since.

In closing, I only have a little more to say about this movie, and “worst” movies in general. The saying goes that perfect families are all the same, but every dysfunctional one is unique. On informed appraisal, the opposite is true of movies. The “good” and for that matter “so bad it’s good” movies are the ones that find themselves in their own way. The worst of the worst fall to a level where they are almost indistinguishable. They’re all cheap (or look that way); they’re all badly made and written; and they’re all insulting, muddled or entirely dull. What I have found most telling in looking at others’ ideas of the “worst” movie (see Plan 9 From Outer Space and Troll 2) is that they are in fact the ones with just enough creativity and audacity to be memorable and interesting. With that in mind, this particular film finds its own special kind of mediocrity, above all as a waste of money and indisputable talent that could have been put into a better project. It’s not “the worst”, but it’s the kind of movie that’s less entertaining than many that are worse, and things are only going downhill from here.

 

As a bonus, here’s my new rating system for this feature, because I definitely needed one.

 

 It’s Okay!!! (3/3): More or less carried over from my Revenant Review scale. A film of interest, subject to controversy, criticism and/or poor box office. Characterized by generally good writing, production values and conceptual development. May include intentionally “over the top”/ satirical works.

Who Cares??? (2/3): A film that meets minimum standard of production values, without inviting further interest. Usually characterized by varying combination of derivative or undeveloped concepts; unengaging characters, dialogue and acting; and exploitative treatments of dated themes and topics.

 

Dear God WHY??!! (1/3): Directly carried over from Space 1979, a film that is offensive just for existing. Characterized by any combination of bizarre and/or willfully offensive concepts; incoherent and insulting plot, writing and dialogue; extremely poor acting and production values; and frivolous use of explicit content.

 

Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR): A tribute to the LJN Defender; a film that falls below or outside minimum standards of professionalism, competence and in some cases conventional storytelling and narrative. Usually applicable for historical and foreign films; “lost”/ banned films; TV/ direct-to-video movies; and other films not given a general US theatrical release.

 

Disqualified!!!: Movies I refuse to watch again or at all, within my standing rule of at least one complete viewing within 2-3 days of review.  Oh, yeah, they’re out there. And with that happy thought, I’m calling it a day.