Dead Space

I saw Alien. I loved Alien. Dead Space is no Alien. Take Alien and leave out Sigourney Weaver and other credible actors, remove artful direction by Ridley Scott, eliminate wonderful special effects, extract suspense, banish a sensible, thought-provoking script, exile any kind of passion in the material and you have this mess of a film called Dead Space. What a complete bore! Master thespian Marc Singer stars as the space vigilante out to help a space station in the middle of cheesy special-effects land. Soon due to biological testing, a metamorphic mutant is created to fight disease only it ends up becoming a behemoth of evil trying to kill every person alive. The mutant goes through several excrutiating special effect stages including an adolescent stage where it resembles not a little a mini-Godzilla. The film was a test of my endurance not to fall asleep or fast forward or turn the television off. Roger Corman produced this innate rip-off and he should be ashamed. At least if you are not going to use something original, try and do some justice to your source. The film is so bad that there is even a softcore sex scene which happens in a dream! The only dead space in this film was the 80 minute void that I can never replace! Whew! Bow Wow!

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs

The plot,as it were,has Marc Singer as a character called Captain Krieger who along with his robot,er,Tinpan (Rodger Hall), zooms about the universe doing not a very lot,it would seem.Until,that is,he answers a distress call from a research facility by the name of Phaebon,where a potentially lethal virus has been discovered.Before long,all manner of hell has broken loose and the virus (that,by the end,has somehow inexplicably taken the form of a giant monster) must be stopped.

Only 70 minutes long.Only 10 characters featured.Yet Dead Space still manages to be a total Dead Zone of a film.

I was enticed to view this very obvious B movie on account of a nice looking cover of a skeleton in a spacesuit.Needless to say,none of the characters featured are ever seen in spacesuits and neither are any of the characters astronauts.Misleading advertising or what?

And the actual film itself is nothing worth watching,despite it's (extremely) compact running time,with it's droll script,bland characters and special effects that could be bettered by the standards of a Wrigley's Spearmint Gum advert.

Tinpan was cool,but that was a robot who belonged in a much better movie.Actually,he's a very,very poor man's C-3PO,but I've got a thing for robots (nothing sexual,but,you know).

12 year old DTV garbage is still garbage.Tinny and one mildly effective jump scene are the only reasons why I feel in any way lucky to have seen what should by rights be in it's DTV grave yard by now.*

It started cheap looking, then it continued cheap looking, and it ended cheap looking.

This movie is pretty much Alien without Ripley, on a $30 production budget.

The story and the monster are both Alien. A small group of people, hunted by a xenomorph looking monster.

I think they had blank shooting guns on set, and I thought the malfunctions were part of the script, but they had so many, maybe their prop-guns were just bad and they didn't work right.

The movie was illogical, the guns (even when they were operating) didn't hurt the monster(s).

I would say 2 stars, but I add +1, because of the "Walter White" actor (Bryan Cranston). So... 3/10.

The filmmakers apparently had enough money to be able to afford decent makeup effects, but not enough for a creature that would move around and attack convincingly. We never get a chance to see the "monster" move from one place to another - whenever that happens (supposedly), the camera focuses on the "terrified" reactions of the humans that are nearby. And when a man is attacked by it, he simply seems to be holding an inanimate object against himself so that it won't fall to the ground. This is still not the worst "Alien" rip-off around (the two "Xtro" films are even worse, for example); it's actually sufficiently entertaining if you've got 68 (!!) minutes to spare. (*1/2)

From the Roger Corman factory comes this extremely forgettable remake of his 1982 production "Forbidden World". The Beastmaster himself, Marc Singer, stars as Commander Steve Krieger. Exactly what he's a commander of, I don't know, but he picks up a distress signal from the scientists on the planet Phaebon. These morons have been monkeying around with genetics and viruses and they've managed to create a mutating, evolving life form. It's up to Steve to save the day, with some occasional assistance from the doofuses around him.

If people seek out "Dead Space" for any reason, it's likely because they learned that it was a very early credit for the Emmy winning actor Bryan Cranston. Because of him, the acting is a hair better than you'd usually be subject to in a LOW rent production like this one. Directed (not so well) by Fred Gallo, it's routine through and through, and highly uninspired. The makeup and creature effects are actually not that bad, thanks to the efforts of Gabe Bartalos, an old pro at this sort of thing. If one is already familiar with "Forbidden World", they'll experience a fair bit of deja vu, as this version sticks pretty close to the original plot.

Singer is passable as the hero, and the ladies (Laura Mae Tate, Judith Chapman, Lori Lively) are pretty. Randy Reinholz delivers a useless performance as an equally useless character named Tim. Cranston does his best given the circumstances.

"Forbidden World" wasn't exactly a movie crying out to be redone, and "Dead Space" itself isn't a movie crying out to be watched very often - if indeed one watches it more than once.

Four out of 10.