Forbidden World
The realm of B movies has always been ripe for ripoffs of more successful cinematic items that have come before and no producer was more prolific in the making of low budget oddities than the legendary Roger Corman. In 1982, he produced one of his more famous efforts, a mash up sci fi hybrid that combined elements of Star Wars, Alien, and even Carpenter’s The Thing from the same year (did Roger get a sneak peak at the script?). Assigning a known stutterer named Allan Holzman as the director, what we get here is a laughably entertaining exploitation classic with outstanding set design (reusing sets designed by James Cameron for the previous year’s Galaxy Of Terror), enough gore and slime for three Hellraiser movies and copious amounts of female nudity from the two primary actresses featuring everything from the casual variety (i.e. top slipping down while reading in bed at night) to the outright and direct depiction of pointless lesbian activity (i.e. one cleans, massages and soothes the other one after a particularly traumatic episode). It also helps that most of the characters in the isolated location are depicted as being complete idiots (either on purpose or through plain old bad writing) despite several choice dialogue bits of just how “brilliant” they are in their chosen scientific field. The story gets under way proper as we meet our “hero”, Mike Colby in what amounts to him engaging in an outer space battle straight out of a static video game. Along with his cybernetic companion SAM (an android who is adept at combat but speaks with the breathy voice of a 12 year old girl), this so called “space marshall” is summoned from his journey home to investigate a distress call from a scientific base established out on a remote planet. Playing this lead character obviously meant to resemble a Han Solo type soldier of fortune, Jesse Vint comes across instead as resembling more Harry Dean Stanton’s younger brother with about half of the charisma and none of the acting chops, a guy who comes after the women on the base with a leering expression that would send most girls fleeing in real life but which here gets a more receptive reaction since he’s the star of this whole thing. And thus it’s not surprising to see that not long after his arrival on the base, he quickly beds down with the more mature blonde scientist (June Chadwick) and follows that up by going after the baby girl like lab assistant (Dawn Dunlap), creeping up on her while she’s taking a naked steam bath and even managing to steal some kisses (mere minutes after the death of her onbase boyfriend) before the situation at hand gets quite serious. That situation in question involves the scientists’ (unfortunate) success at creating a new lifeform organism, one which is designed to be so perfect that it is constantly changing form to adapt from one situation to another (dubbed a “metamorph”), having already killed one crew member prior to the hero’s arrival and now fixing to kill more once it releases itself from its current cocoon phase. Vint’s Colby immediately suggests just killing it and being all done, but he’s overruled by the idiot scientists intent on this being their big breakthrough that will lead them to Nobel awards for science and other such accolades. However, the idiot male lab assistant (future character actor Michael Bowen) has other plans, left alone in the lab to clean up the awful mess that the creature has made all while the creature in its cocoon sits there and watches him. When the stupid fool opens up the stasis chamber where it’s at for no reason whatsoever and then turns his back, he’s attacked and reduced to a shelled out human being complete with a hollowed out head but yet somehow still breathing. Unfortunately, the base’s security guy in charge of watching the various security monitors (future character actor Scott Paulin) misses this all important event when it happens, leading to the creature’s escape from the lab along with the security guy’s own demise when he goes to investigate a strange noise. From there, the mounting stupidity of these people in a life or death situation is one to behold: the lead scientist on the base (Linden Chiles) who had been advocating for the creature’s survival sticks his head into a pipe that the creature has just slithered into and gets eaten for his troubles; the token black guy on the base (Ray Oliver) suddenly feels the need to make a quick repair to the electrical equipment, squirming his way underneath the creature’s base to do so and paying for it dearly; and Chadwick’s beautiful blonde scientist makes a noble attempt to communicate with it (i.e. bargain for their lives) only to be impaled by one of its tentacles. In the end, the only character in the film who is NOT an idiot (and hence, the best performance in the film), a manic, chain smoking scientist played by Fox Harris (also known as the irradiated scientist in Repo Man) figures out that the creature’s almost pristine DNA structure can be disrupted and destroyed by cancerous human tissue and it just so happens that he has cancer himself which must now be cut out of him and fed to the creature to give it a puking, ignoble death (severe irony since the actor himself died in real life from lung cancer only a few years later). So, cancer saves the day and our creepy hero winds up having at least one leftover female to cuddle with at the end of this terrifying experience. What more could anyone ask??…
7/10