The Killings at Outpost Zeta

The Robert Emenegger/Allan Sandler directing team are back for YET another science fiction movie. It seems that over the course of four or so years that they made every type of science fiction film possible, and a few impossible. This is one of their more straightforward outings, a straightforward riff on ALIEN with astronauts being taken down by a mysterious alien creature.

The problem with the output of these guys is that their films just don't have the budget to convince for a second and that remains the case here. THE KILLINGS AT OUTPOST ZETA has a cool title and that's about it. Otherwise we get poor scripting, an almost total lack of suspense, and a final reveal of the menace that'll have you laughing rather than frightened.

The cast is headed by Jackson Bostwick, who was equally poor in the same team's ESCAPE FROM DS-3, and Jacqueline Ray, who later starred in the equally abysmal BEYOND THE UNIVERSE. While I continue to admire the efforts of these guys to churn out sci-fi fare on a non-existent budget, there's no denying that the majority of their films are simply rubbish.

Unbelievably bad Alien knock-off (made just a year later). Everything is bad; the script, the acting, the effects, all bad. Yet for some reason it still has charm. There's an innocence to it that almost makes you feel, 'Bless 'em, they tried!' Not enough to save it from a 4/10 though.

I know this was made in 1980, but crimeny.. they made ALIEN in '79, and it was at least scary and felt like a "space documentary"... KILLINGS AT OUTPOST ZETA feels like a nice, long, painful root canal. Unbelievably slow, with a two-note soundtrack played on a xylophone, this movie is good for degreasing engines and killing brain cells. The only high note is watching TV's SHAZAM and Paul Comi (Lt. Stiles from Star Trek) stumble through reams of boring dialogue while wearing motorcycles and moon boots that apparently double as "spacesuits"... most of the movie takes place in one room made of painted sheet metal! Avoid at all costs.

Well, I remember watching the movie back in my childhood, and I remember it as being a rather good sci-fi horror movie. One that definitely left a mark on me, because I recall the rock-like creatures killing people. So as I had the opportunity to sit down in 2021 and watch "The Killings at Outpost Zeta" again, of course I did so.

Turns out that my memory was not as accurate as I wanted it to be, because "The Killings at Outpost Zeta" was not a great movie. It was, at best, a campy low budget space horror sci-fi.

But they were using moon boots and motorcycle helmets, for the love of... And then there were their laser pistols, which were essentially little more than just long hollow tubes.

While "The Killings at Outpost Zeta" had spirit and drive, it wasn't an outstanding movie. And I was actually sort of fearing that my memories of the movie would be a lot better than the movie actually turned out to be. And that was the case. I suppose I should have left it with the good memories.

The acting in the movie was bland, and the wasn't much of any overly great things to experience here as the actors and actresses stumbled through pretty poorly-written dialogue and had a very simplistic storyline to work with, actually.

The creature design was just downright laughable actually. They were rather simplistic and poorly made, if you take a step back and look at it objectively.

And the visuals when the spacecraft was flying around in space was pretty laughable and bad to look at. So "The Killings at Outpost Zeta" doesn't harvest any points for having great visual effects either.

Pretty interesting that three writers could collectively manage to come up with so little. I can't fathom what writers Peter Dawson, Allan Sandler and Robert Emenegger were thinking here.

My rating of the 1980 movie "The Killings at Outpost Zeta" lands on a mere three out of ten stars.

So much for fond memories of a once-thought to be a great horror sci-fi from my childhood, huh?

Have you ever watched a film that is so bad you end up thinking "If that film got written, funded, produced and made, just how bad would a script need to be to be rejected?" (see: Congo)

Killings at Outpost Zeta will not answer your question, but it does lower the bar for bad film making to an altogether new level.

This film seems to be the result of taking the worst aspects of Dr Who and Space:1999, combining them into some kind of soulless monster and then stretching the already thin premise out to near monomolecular extremes. Imagine a film student's first attempt at a movie, and then take away any spark of creativity.

Just awful. Avoid at all costs.