Space Rage

My review was written in June 1987 after watching the movie on Lightning video cassette.

"Space Rage", subtitled "Breakout on Prison Planet", represents an abortive early effort by video giant Vestron to enter the ranks of motion picture producers. Project went through innumerable title changes, including "A Dollar a Day", "Trackers 2180", "Trackers" and "The Last Frontier" and was test-booked at home in Stamford, Connecticut, for Christmas 1985 before further bookings a year later and current home video availability.

Numerous credits for "reshoots" and the tacking on of a very inappropriate soundtrack of hard rock songs indicate a lot of second thoughts went into the film, final version of which is a brief 77 minutes long.

Concept is to update, cheaply, prison film and Western formats to appeal to the public's fascination with sci-fi. Unreconstructed in look from his various Western roles, Richard Farnsworth portrays an ex-LAPD cop now living in New Botany Bay, actually the planet Proxima Centauri 3 in the 22nd century. He is mentor to various young guys including tracker (bounty hunter) John Laughlin, who drives a modified dune buggy and ruthlessly captures or kills escapees from the local penal colony.

Michael Pare, in a switch on his usually heroic casting, is an utterly evil prisoner who engineers an escape and kills people (including the warden/governor of the colony William Windom) in cold-blooded fashion until the underwhelming Wild West shootout with Farnsworth.

Special effects are meager and there is almost no futurism to the picture's design, an instant disappointment for sci-fi fans. A good cast is wasted, particularly Lee Purcell as token femme on vie. Westerns are ded and enough clunkers like this one will kill off the space opera as well.

Richard Farnsworth( recently nominated for an oscar for THE STRAIGHT STORY)plays a retired space ranger. An escaped prisoner(Michael Pare) goes on a rampage, and it's up to already-crotchety Farnsworth to stop him.

Yawn. This is some of the most dull filmmaking that is possible. The sets a cheap and resemble cardboard. The story is recycled from countless westerns. And, although the actors here have been good in other films, the acting is sub-par. If only someone could have figured a way out of making this 80 minutes so unbearably boring. There is hardly any action untli the end, and when it finally comes, you'll be sleeping.

SPACE RAGE is pretty poor. I see where everyone has cast very low votes. It makes me wonder how long it will take for this flick to reach the bottom 200.

Still, this is better than watching PIPPI LONGSTOCKING again. Now, there's a real painful experience!

Richard Farnsworth is one of my favorite actors. He usually gives solid performances, such as in The Straight Story, and The Grey Fox. He also does fairly well here, but the rest of the film suffers from a low budget, poor writing, and so-so photography. The Miller-Movie formula gives it a 4. Richard gets a 5.

Butt Money. Throughout this movie, you will hear this song. It's supposed to be called 'Blood Money,' but it sounds so much like Butt Money (was the singer holding his tongue?) that it's best if you refer to it as that. Butt Money...YEAAAAHHH!!

Cheaply produced music aside, the movie also suffers from not knowing what it is. It takes place on New Botany Bay, a planet of deserts (?) with a very familiar Southern California like landscape where prisoners are held and supposedly mine materials as part of their punishment. Also sentenced here is Richard Farnsworth, walking his way to a paycheck as some LAPD officer whose own stupidity lead to him being hit by a knife in some weird dream sequence. Called into action by...um...somebody, he dresses up in his old duds to dish out old fashioned justice. In a planet wide prison inexplicably called New Botany Bay that has only five guards and a couple of dune buggys.

Special notice to all the bad special effects, which include:

--prisoners obviously pretending to fire guns which are just toys with no muzzle flare or smoke,

--stunt doubles that, when hit by Farnsworth, do a flip in the air before turning into dummies who hit the ground and freeze all motion on the film,

--General confusion when they hit the 'industrial' area of this prison planet and the conveniently located roadside diner (?!) on this prison planet.

Bottom line: a very obvious attempt at something that went wrong. This is a prime example of something going very very wrong. This is the product of people with no talent, I'm sorry to say.

The question is, can a movie this entertaining really be considered a "bad" movie? My husband and I picked this up at a used video store for 99 cents simply because of the title and the fact that the box had the words "Vestron Pictures" on it (Vestron has been highly regarded as a mark of quality ever since I first acquired the legendary films "Suburbia" and "Class of 1984"). We were not expecting a movie as full of win as this one was. Your basic plot as is follows: Grange, this goombaesque thug from planet Earth, robs "the bank of the Moon" and is sentenced to a penal colony on a remote planet (I don't even remember the planet's name) to mine for bauxite and other minerals. The "governor" of said colony and the owner of the mine are exploiting the prisoners for labor. Walker, a bounty hunter (apparently one of only three on the whole planet) reminds the prisoners that there is no escape, because there's only one shuttle out of the whole planet and they'd have him to deal with. Then there's the nameless "Colonel", a retired bounty hunter who suffers from a haunting reoccurring nightmare. Much of the movie centers around "futuristic" car chases (dunebuggies with plywood slapped to the sides) with explosions galore. The planet itself looks suspiciously like Hemet, CA or one of those other dusty Inland Empire outposts. But what makes the movie truly shine is a surprisingly awesome soundtrack featuring several LA punk bands of the mid-80s. I seriously doubt that this soundtrack was ever pressed to vinyl, but it's definitely worth buying the movie just for the soundtrack. I can't even remember the names of the bands (they're listed in the credits) other than Exploding White Mice, because that was the only one I'd heard of before I saw this movie, but I'm definitely looking into them.

Basically, the movie is definitely not a waste of your time and would be best enjoyed with a 12 pack of beer and a few of your closest friends.