SPACE TRUCKERS I liked it. Stay the HELL away! Unable to "get it up", one of the film's villains says "Allow me a few moments to coordinate my seldom-used reproductive sequencer." Men never know when to give up the quest for 'tang. I confess, I only rented this awfully-titled movie because I think Debi Mazar's pretty hot. I wasn't disappointed on that level (she spends most of her screen time in her underwear!), and I was rather surprised by the rest. Space Truckers is kind of a throwback to the glut of extremely cheesy space operas that flooded screens in the early 80's, and while it often doesn't even look any better than these two-decade-old movies, it's usually more fun. It opens with a base on one of Neptune's moons coming under attack by a single kill-crazy robot which disintegrates and/or dismembers its prey (the script should've called this robot "Decapitron"). This robot massacres the entire bunch of fighting men, but the two guys in charge manage to shut it off - because one of them (Charles Dance) designed and developed it, and five thousand more like it. The other one (Shane Rimmer) plans to use them to conquer Earth, but has to be careful of who knows, so it looks like Dance is, alas, out of the picture for a while. Then it cuts to some awful country music (gah!) as space trucker John Canyon (Dennis Hopper) arrives at a distant outpost bearing a shipment of genetically engineered "square" pigs, which are kept in cruelly cramped square cages. I can't tell if this is a gag or a bit of commentary - same goes for when Canyon feeds one the rest of his hot dog (loved that shot of him applying mustard to it in zero-G). His load is ripped off by the unscrupulous station manager (George Wendt, who later, during the inevitable barroom brawl, gets sucked ass-first through a fairly small porthole). The trucker theme is carried through to an amusing extreme on the station, where even in deep space, everybody's a cowboy or a redneck and listens to country music. Since Canyon refuses to work for The Company which runs the station, he has to get an under-the-table shipment. (loved the entryway to the station underground) So he takes this Earth-bound shipment of "sex dolls" (yeah, I'll give you one guess as to what five thousand items he's shipping), and is joined by the waitress who agrees to marry him in exchange for a trip to Earth (Mazar) and an up-and-coming young trucker (Stephen Dorff). Along the way, they encounter pirates, black rocks (basically, asteroids, which are hard to see 'cuz they're black...though of course in deep space, they'd be hard to see no matter what color they are), and inevitably, some of those killer robots. Directed by Stuart Gordon (and written by Gordon with the recently-deceased Ted Mann), Space Truckers doesn't ask to be taken seriously for even half a moment. I mean...square pigs! It manages to out-goofy The Fifth Element in its overall look, though of course it's nowhere near as expensively work-intensive. If the overwhelmingly silly tone of things is one of the things you DID like about The Fifth Element, Space Truckers might be for you. The pirates are a fun bunch and probably the film's most successful aspect, with the Jolly Roger painted on the side of their ship, and even featuring none other than Vernon Wells as one of their chief thugs, looking a little chunkier than in The Road Warrior, but c'mon, it's Vernon Wells! They're led by...well, it's a bit of a spoiler, but oh well, it's Charles Dance, who rebuilt himself piece by piece after the mangling he took at the hands of his own robot, with a peg leg and everything, even rebuilding his own brain. Something tells me you'd have to have some work done on this in advance. Even his sexual apparatus is rebuilt - after a fashion (he boasts "I emit a low-amp electrical wang-pulse designed to drive women wild with pleasure!"). The makeup job on him is excellent; gruesome, but not afraid to be comical. The script treats him similarly, like when Dorff makes some disparaging comment about the prosthetics and Hopper quickly intervenes, "He didn't mean that, he respects the brave way you confront your disability!" Now, most of the effects in this movie are pretty bad, but endearingly bad. The ships and space stations all look like toys instead of models, but that's kind of refreshing in an age where movie spaceships are, obviously or not, usually computer-generated. The sets are similarly not exactly convincing (like the space-station truck-stop diner, with all the booths arranged along the inside of the spinning station diameter), but still, fun. Some of the dialogue is knowingly terrible too, like when Canyon sarcastically refers to Dorff as "a real space lawyer"...of course, if you live and work in space, you'd probably just call them lawyers. And there are more sound effects in outer space than usual in this one, surely prompting those "hard SF" people to shit their shorts in despair. Except for Hopper and Dorff, who are inexplicably bland for most of their time here, the cast is fun, particularly Dance and Mazar, who I was swooning over throughout. Any movie which gives me Debi Mazar in her underwear for this much time is going to appeal to me at least a little. The script is often very funny, and considering the budget constraints, the production design was allowed to go amok. Maybe the plot ranges from cheesy to dopey to silly and back again, but that's what makes it seem to fit in so well with those early-80's space operas, which surely most of us late-20's people must have some closet affection for. Space Truckers is enjoyably awful at worst, and a surprisingly enjoyable, out-of-time gem at best. There is very little here, effects-wise, that couldn't have been done twenty years ago (I'm thinking of a few shots of people disintegrating), and that's part of its charm. It's not done as an ironic, wink-wink-nudge-nudge tribute, but as a seemingly genuinely affectionate one, and of course completely lacks the pretentiousness of most modern cinema sci-fi. I dunno, I think it's worth seeing just for Dance and Mazar, though everybody in their right mind seems to hate this movie. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE