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.

Another one of those "SOS because monsters are attacking us" low budget sci-fi flicks. Starfleet sends a rescue team to the barren planet Zeta after two exploratory teams go missing. This mission is of the utmost importance as they were hoping to begin colonization on this Earth-like rock within two months. Once the team of six (four men and two women) get there, they discover everyone dead due to some weird rock monsters (to be said in Fred Schneider voice). In the post-STAR WARS age, it is weird to see something this cheap on screen. Co-directors Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler certainly seemed ambitious, but only had enough money to create some cheap space suits (motorcycle helmets) and maybe three sets. The monsters are most likely paper mache and are never given a good glimpse. The surface world stuff (shot in some desert) is actually pretty well done. Emenegger and Sandler had an extremely prolific two years after this film, producing close to a dozen cheap-o sci-fi flicks (with titles like LABORATORY, LIFEPOD, TIME WARP) before disappearing in 1981.

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.

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?

Rather than a cheap fifties or sixties sci-fi picture set in 1980, here we have the novelty of one actually MADE in 1980, which of course now looks if anything even more dated; and paradoxically less futuristic than if it had been made fifteen years earlier (fuzzy sound, awful haircuts, they all wear ugly Ugg Boots and drink from big, chunky brightly-coloured plastic coffee mugs, and there's a grating synthesiser score by co-producer/director Robert Emenegger).

It's all played commendably straight however, and must be one of the last Z-budget sci-f's not done as a parody of earlier ones. The plot is obviously borrowed from 'Alien' (and visually the exteriors also recall 'Planet of the Vampires'), the cheesy sets and costumes reminiscent of 'Blake's Seven'. Although there are supposed to be two of them it always looks as if there's just the one stalker.