Space Wars: Quest for the Deepstar

Had a blast watching this popcorn indie Sci Fi action adventure film. Reminded me of growing up in the 80s and renting it at a Mom and Pop Store before Blockbuster existed. Michael Pare and Sarah French had a great chemistry and how to play off each other in their roles. They play Father and Daughter adventurers looking for the Deep Star that could give them whatever they want and bringing a loved one back to life with the liquid essence of the person who passed away and transferred into a cyber human hybrid. The film score is like listening to a space opera performed by Joel Christian Goffin. You can tell Garo Setian put his labor and love into it.

Know what? I reckon the eponymous "Deepstar" saw the storyboard and post-haste fled into hiding! That left space scroungers "Kip" (Michael Paré) and his feisty daughter "Taylor" (Sarah French) faced with quite a search to track it down. Along the way they realise that they are not the only seekers of this dream-fulfilling gizmo - beware "Dykstra" (Olivier Gruner) - and that the universe is really quite a perilous place! This has video game written all over it with the dangers seemingly increasing exponentially until the prize is (or isn't in their grasp). The visual effects are passable, but the rest of this is pretty sub-par(sec) stuff that is clearly a labour of love for those behind it but it's really just a labour for those of us who recall the heady days of the "Outer Limits" - from about 1963! To be fair, it moves along quickly enough but it's all rather unsahsamedly predicable gung-ho stuff you may smile at - risibly - before you immediately forget all about it.

How can you not like this film? Reminiscent of those 80, early 90's Michal Pare and Oliver Gruner flims. Good cheap entertainment. If you liked. Nemesis or The Philadelphia Experiment, you gonna like this.

Ya the storylines are weak and the CGI maybe was more expensive than the actors pay but who cares?? Just throw in an old drive in with funky speakers and that consession stand or make yourself some popcorn and pizza and just sit back and enjoy what the 80's was like.

Films like this pass the time where as you dont want to get too serious for a sci-fi series you need to binge to get to the next episode,

I immediately noticed the very bad casting, all the actors lack charisma and personality and their acting is boring if not ridiculous.

The first half of the movie is just a sequence of actions with very few dialogs, so it's almost entertaining. Nothing spectacular or original. It feels like some washed out guardians of the galaxy, and we follow the heroes as they keep putting themselves in trouble. The CGI looks like a video game with some very bad green screens.

But that's where the film takes another turn for the worse, and the poor writing and acting take over the action scenes. It feels like they ran out of money and decided to focus on the character psychology. The film completely loses its pace and collapses into absolute mediocrity.

If you want some cheesy 60/70s sci-fi movies, watch Starcrash or Barbarella, they are better than this.

Really, the title of this review says it all. In the 1970's there were a number of cheap Italian knock-off sci-fi movies that were cheap, flashy and stupid. They also had STYLE.

This is pretty much a homage to those movies but with better effects and better actors. Yes, the script is stupid and the lines are awful but incredibly the actors do actually manage to give them some weight. Not a lot of weight, it must be said, but that they managed it at all is very much to their credit. The script manages to throw in some surprises, while (sigh) still including the many predictable scenes you come to expect from low budget movies

It's a very silly movie but it's also a remarkably enjoyable one that manages to decently punch above its low budget and a lot of credit goes to everyone involved in its making. By way of disclaimer - I was NOT involved in the production in any way, nor do I know anyone who was. Nobody goes out of their way to make a bad movie. They try to make a good movie, and with the limited resources available to them they came reasonably close to it.

So, get some popcorn, turn off your brain and enjoy it for what it is. A romp.

Oh, and I just noticed that someone else called their review "The 1970's called, they want their movie back" Ah well, I clearly wasn't the only fan of cheap Italian sci-fi knock-offs.