Space Wars: Em Busca da Deepstar

To me, Michael Paré brings back my childhood, the B movies that were at the same time awesome and ridiculous. It's easy to understand why the first thing that pops up when you google him is "how old is Michael Paré?". Well, he's 65 and he now plays in these independent movies that are as low budget as they come. But they are also fun.

In this one, stupidly called Space Wars because there are just a bunch of people on ships shooting at each other and nothing at the scale of a war, three parties are engaged in finding either a legendary space treasure or each other in order to enact revenge. The CGI is ludicrous, the green screen effects are obvious, the acting is almost terrible, the story is pathetic. Yet I enjoyed it. Not because of any inherent technical quality of the film, but because someone scrapped to get this done, did whatever they could to make it happen and had fun doing it.

Bottom line: a ridiculous movie, but one that fills me with nostalgia for the films of old, where the greatest achievement you could think of was getting the movie done and the rest was the pure joy of performing.

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.

This movie is not very exciting. The special effects are CGI. How I miss stop motion animation like Robocop 2. The matte paintings, models, and a decent new science fiction movie with some gratuitous nudity. I mean if you are going to make a low budget science fiction movie, write cheesy dialogue, cheaper cgi then can't you throw in something worth while like A pair of naked boobies? I mean either write Oscar worthy sentences or throw in some flesh scenes to make it worth the 90 minutes that are required To view this. Space Wars is just boring. Maybe they can make a remake of it and add in exceptional quality dialogue and an occasionall nip slip.

It's a dream I have. Skip it and watch Life-force from 1985.

When checking out the preview and the average score for this movie, I had serious doubts. A low-budget Sci-Fi film with a preview that doesn't entice usually end up as poor fare.

At times the lighting was iffy, the graphics decent but not blockbuster, and the internal ship sets seemed a bit cramped; but a solid story with pretty good acting cancel out the minor flaws. Also, the pacing should be noted as excellent. At no point did my attention waver.

Space Wars: Quest for the Deepstar delivers in its quest for entertainment. I recommend that all Sci-Fi fans give this movie a chance like I did.

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.