Space Mutiny (1988) Review

Space Mutiny (1988) is considered one of those “so bad it’s good” movie classics that has appeared as a popular #mst3k episode. As I’ve run out of kung fu movies that I want to review at the moment (or maybe that I’m simply burnt out on), I decided to turn my attention to general bad movies. Space Mutiny features only Reb Brown as someone I somewhat recognize as part of the B/C movie genre. When I read that he worked on Yor, the Hunter from the Future (1983), I could see how this type of movie was in that general format but I could not recall ever seeing it myself. Nonetheless, in my masochistic quest to see numerous bad movies, I figured out of sheer boredom it was time to dive into this one.

To be honest, the backstory of Space Mutiny to me is far more interesting than the movie itself. Out of context, it seems like a typical low budget endeavor you’d see on a Saturday morning back in the 80s around 1-2pm when most people were out doing something with their lives (which is how I managed to become aware of Yor, the Hunter from the Future). When you combine watching this bottom of the Best Buy bargain barrel with the production history, the movie becomes far more fascinating, which is partly how it hooked me as I have a general love of learning about old sci-fi productions.

But before going into the various backstories of this misadventure, I need to discuss the plot a bit. Believe it or not there actually was one here and it’s vaguely coherent because of how the dialog makes a futile attempt and sounding sci-fi-ish, but stumbles in emphasizing the key parts to really make things stand out beyond clumsy. Nonetheless, the idea is that a bunch of people are on a ship called the Southern Sun and are seeking to colonize a new world. Apparently, this ship is described as a “generational ship,” meaning people have gone through several generations in this mission without success of their core mission. In turn, the general failure thus far has caused certain people aboard to become disgruntled, hence the title of the movie.

If you were a fan of Battlestar Galactica, you would almost think this movie could’ve been an homage because of the reuse of the footage. The show starts off with blatant stock footage from a Battlestar space battle. Along with that apparently they rented exterior pieces for a mere 20k. I don’t know how they managed to get away with the stock footage part but obviously the incorporation made the film actually look good special effects-wise in isolation. But I think any real fan would be insulted quickly once they realized this was no Battlestar movie.

For the actual non-Battlestar moments, we get the command center where the crew orchestrate this sudden inexplicable battle. The dialog is pretty bad as are the costumes. In fact, the dialog is far more vulgar compared to a typical Battlestar episode. As for the costumes, I’m almost convinced that someone went dumpster diving in the late 70s/early 80s behind the Flash Gordon movie, Buck Rogers and Battlestar lots in acquiring a good deal of these outfits. The outfits seemed more appropriate for an Olivia Newton-John workout video than a space opera with spandex, lame and nylon/polyester blends and odd designs.

At some point, one of the craft crashes into the bay where someone called a professor (maybe linked to Scooby Doo and A Mummy Too episode???) dies in a fiery explosion while our hero, Dave Ryder played by Reb Brown, escapes. The ship’s commander’s daughter runs to seek out this mysterious, unnamed professor but is held off just before this ship explodes. In turn, the incident causes initial tension between Ryder and the daughter, Dr. Lea Jansen played by Brown’s IRL wife Cisse Cameron.

As mentioned before, some of the crew are unhappy about their disposition on this voyage. Enter Kalgan (Take Me Away! j/k different spelling) who can’t stop laughing when we encounter him. It’s like this guy was force fed laughing gas or perhaps used a ton of drugs to convince himself to do this embarrassing role. But he’s clearly a one dimensional psychopath and he goes around in one of these engineering rooms to sabotage the ship around the time the unnamed professor lands. His goal is to force the ship to change course towards a constellation where some pirates exist so they can jump ship. It really makes you wonder how this guy even came into contact with space pirates if this ship never was able to colonize anything at all. But that is part of these lack of details that come out of nowhere.

Speaking of coming out of nowhere, there’s this random subplot of these Belarians that show up and infrequently are interjected when convenient. Honestly, they look like someone in the casting department went to a local Pic ‘N’ Save or some costume shop, found a few ladies in the belly dancer aisle and said, “You, you and you. Want a job?” As far as I could discern, they mostly were used as this weird sexual innuendo thing going with psionic or mystic power that never was fully developed and mostly just waved their hands around. Oddly, they actually have quite a bit of impact on the story but don’t really get involved with the main characters.

At any rate, the plot is kind of a slog as most of it is the good guys slowly trying to determine the cause of this explosion while the bad guys are hunting down anyone who interferes. For instance, there’s a nerdy engineer guy who tries to communicate with one of the Lieutenant Lamont on the bridge. Somehow the bad guys intercept the signal and decide to hunt down the engineer then Lamont.

During a celebration which at some bar, some people do this shitty ass hula hoop dance with crappy music playing. It’s just horribly embarrassing especially as Lea shows up. The problem with this character is that the actress was a nepo hire and really was far from qualified to play this kind of part. She looked completely out of place here and this scene made it seem like one of the Golden Girls accidentally had wandered onto the set in an Alzheimer’s episode. It always upset me that poor Yvette Mimieux would get knocked for her short curly cut in Disney’s The Black Hole, but the truth is that Yvette was one of the prettiest women around and a supreme babe at her peak. Lea looked like she ought to have been Dave’s mom much less the heroine in this rotten story.

At any rate, Lamont gets escorted out as Dave and Lea take notice by the Enforcers (lead by Arn Anderson; j/k but he would’ve made this film at least semi-credible since the actual Enforcers were less intimidating than a kindergarten class). Lamont is rudely killed off (and later shown as being alive in a no-sell moment in the bridge as though this were an episode of GI Joe; all this being the result of cheap, lazy editing/directing) so Dave and Lea pursue these enforcers in what looked like stolen bumper cars that had some cardboard attachments with gray paint to make them appear sci-fi-ish. Eventually, Dave and Lea catch up to the pair and blast them into non-existence. And by the way, these Enforcers have some really crude costumes. These two clowns wore cheap ski masks and a lame jumpsuit that look like they were probably custodians that washed the toilets at night.

We end up back in the command room where the leader of this ship, Commander Alex Jansen played by Cameron Mitchell, and Captain Scott Devers played by Sting in his cyberpunk days (j/k it’s some guy called Graham Clarke, as opposed to graham cracker) discuss what may have actually happened during the initial explosion. They pinpoint it on Kalgan and the Enforcers because apparently they have the most to gain from this situation. Kalgan is a Flight Commander, a job that isn’t explained in terms of importance/significance as to why such a position would benefit from joining up with pirates.

Also, I would like to note here that Alex Jansen is like a space Santa Claus version of Commander Adama, if Adama somehow managed to live another 500 years and grow out his beard. This guy has an outrageous sparkling robe that doesn’t really seem to fit the position of someone who would be in charge of a ship like that. On top of that, Alex has this annoying habit of rambling on about peace and hating war, despite apparently having Colonial Vipers that can blast the fuck out of Cylons. I did read too that Cameron was annoyed by that beard since it caused him hardships in eating as well as getting his son Chip and daughter Camille roles on the movie, really signifying the nepotism territory for this thing.

Back to the main story with the heroes as Dave and Lea encounter some quack pot doctor. Some people are frozen Enforcers for which the doctor explains their purpose as potentially being redeemable. The ones that aren’t redeemable are tortured and dumped into space. Dave does some Steiner math calc to figure out what he’s up against while Kalgan hunt them down. Another meaningless fire fight occurs so the audience doesn’t become completely bored.

Then we’re taken to the weird ass Belarians subplot. Actually, Alex does show up here so I guess these Belarians only didn’t interact with Reb and his wife. But they do their little jiggly thing so Alex can gain more insight about the real conspiracy. A meeting is called with various people in leadership where Dave is named the new Flight Command while Chief Engineer MacPhearson played by James Ryan. Again, I’m only crediting this guy because he has a link for his wiki page. But these people are just so obscure that I recognize almost nothing they’ve done when I examine their credits. Anyway, MacPhearson is a cripple with a bad leg and he tries to shoot down Alex’s epiphany.

We eventually get a really awkward sex scene with Reb and his wife that was not appealing at all followed by more Belarians with their wiggle waggle to pad time. And if you think I’m making this up, apparently the film maker added this part because the actual movie came short. Frankly, if they eliminated the Belarians subplot, the movie would’ve flowed a lot better just because they really add nothing most of the time. One might say eye candy but they’re hidden behind veils and their costumes are neither sexy nor appealing.

Another copypasta Cylon – Battlestar fight happens where the Cylons job out. Whereupon the good guys get a little celebration. And with Dave’s newfound position, he gives a rah rah speech while MacPhearson stares resentfully at him, cluing us in that he’s a traitor. He does give a pretty good line, calling Dave an “asshole” which got me a laugh. I mean, to be fair, Dave is a bit of a putz. Dave is basically the hand me down version of Flash Gordon with almost no personality nor giving us a real reason to care about him since the stakes are so low.

Back in the bad guy’s spot, some person types away at some janky computer. Before I start ranting on the scene itself, I’m going to rant a little on the computers here. First, I’m actually surprised they managed to get a computer of any sort back in ’88 for this movie. A lot of the computer “graphics” in the movie are at the Atari 2600 level of quality. Granted graphics weren’t even close to being decent in ’88, it’s hard to complain but there would be a few major jumps coming soon in just 5 years. Of course, everything here just looks like gibberish to me.

The typist hands Kalgan a dot matrix print out explaining the good guy’s defenses. However, MacPhearson stands around to point out the one weakness. Kalgan is sitting with some nameless woman who just grins the entire time, which convinces me she was sharing in whatever substance Kalgan was on to make him laugh constantly.

Anyway, Kalgan tracks down Lea, who inexplicably is still at the place where she was having sex with Dave. This time she’s cutting the bushes and Kalgan tells her, “Nice place.” Naturally, Lea is suspicious of Kalgan because he doesn’t invite her into a stress relieving bath. Again, J/K but Kalgan does give her a great line in telling her, “You’re much more attractive with your mouth shut.” He’s not entirely wrong because god is she annoying.

That allows Kalgan to send a message to Alex. Kalgan actually is kinda great here because he pulls Lea up and down by the hair. Obviously, this increases Alex’s stress and he completely underreacts nonchalantly. His captain advises him on the situation as it’s clear that they need to prepare for battle. Here’s where the ordering of the movie just makes no sense because the captain tells Alex there’s only one person who is capable of fighting, which obviously is Dave. But it’s been previously established that he can fight and lead so this part of the scene is meaningless and adds nothing beyond Cameron getting to underreact.

Dave is summoned to the bridge where for no reason he has to sneak around to get there. One enforcer gets ambushed by Dave as a second one tries to help in a poorly choreographed fight. I have to be honest here, the melee fights in this movie are awful. They make almost all of the Bruceploitation movie fights seem like match of the year candidates by comparison. Slow, discombobulated, awkward, obvious misses, etc. I might bitch a lot about the indy mudshow goofy flippy do shit that the Taiwanese acrobats do but at least those scenes are fairly complex in nature and athletic. One other comment here is that the Enforcers in these scenes have the addition of goggles so they look like Snake Eyes from GI Joe, if Snake Eyes was completely incompetent and the opposite of cool.

At any rate, we get the gratuitous damsel in distress scene for the movie where Lea in her leotard is strapped unconvincingly to a gurney and is pushed to a bunch of lame looking hoses and tubes. Kalgan explains that the device is akin to going to a dentist for which she would have no clue about. But I can’t help but think this is almost like an even worse version of The Black Hole hospital scene with Yvette Mimieux/Kate McCrae. And again, people ridicule that scene for being low budget with the foil cap but I’m of the mindset that the production crew simply stole some random hoses and pipes from the plumbing section at Home Depot to assemble this contraption. As Kalgan tries to ask for Lea’s father’s contingency plans, she issues out a banshee-like scream that offers no sympathy nor empathy from me about her plight. If anything it just reinforces Kalgan’s earlier statement about her keeping her trap shut.

In the meantime, Dave continues not going towards the bridge and causing mayhem where he pleases. This time, he takes out two more Enforcers and strips one down to don the guy’s attire. As that goes on, Kalgan turns on the teeth cleaning machine and starts zapping Lea who squeaks like some mouse. MacPhearson shows up, coughs to get their attention as he looks on at Lea’s operation and gets escorted back towards the engine room to allay suspicion. That one scene is strange because for a brief moment, it seems that MacPhearson may have felt sympathy towards Lea. But it’s never indicated whether he had any romantic interest towards her so I have no idea what that was for.

Actually, I partly due because it does clear away the riffraff except for one balding jabronie, who gets seduced by the unseductive Lea into freeing her. Sadly, I buy her escape more than Holland showing up at the nick of time because Dave also shows up not at the nick of time but right after Lea frees herself. But it is infuriating that the bad guys used some shitty straps that barely worked on her to tie her to the gurney. Not really a damsel in distress.

Regardless, they make their way to the bridge, encountering more Enforcers and have additional poorly choreographed fights. One Enforcer signals into Kalgan about losing Lea and Kalgan gives a great, “IDIOT!” line before driving off in his bumper car. You really start to wonder how this ship managed to survive this long with this level of competency from their security team. Truthfully, this part of the movie becomes more like The Black Hole because the pair ambush more Enforcers and add the goggles (rather than the glass face plates from the Humanoids) to disguise themselves as they head back towards the bridge. I don’t know if it was intentional in terms of the similarities between both movies but considering the fact that they used Battlestar footage and had costumes from that late 70s/early 80s sci-fi period, I wouldn’t be surprised if they used The Black Hole as part of their inspiration.

Back on the bad guy’s turf, Kalgan loses it and decides to execute the attack plan for full scale mutiny. Their people are sleeping in some cheap looking bunker and are awakened by a red klaxon. This part looks similar to the Battlestar military bunkers except these are supposed to be the bad guys. They hi five each other and you almost want to cheer them instead. Earlier, Kalgan rants about being undermined by incompetent people so it’s a really weird juxtaposition here where you kinda feel bad for everyone under this guy. I mean really it’s just one or two people who are causing this raucous. And even then it’s hard to understand their real motives outside of being impatient.

Gradually, Lea and Dave make their way back to the command center where Lea reunites with her father. They reveal that MacPhearson is a traitor for which Alex is dumbfounded. Naturally, Dave decides to go solo to show he’s a badass (even though he isn’t) and it’s basically a long countdown to the finish from here between the Enforcers and everyone else (namely Dave). We get a bunch of god awful laser fights in this lair that actually was a factory of some sort where the bulk of the filming was done.

At some point, Lea joins Dave and they corner MacPhearson who gets lit on fire. The Belarians continue to be interjected with a shitty robotic female voiceover in a deux ex machina type of fashion. Kalgan, who apparently got knocked out earlier, wakes up in a second wind as though he were the Terminator. Again, this is stupid because this is more of a babyface move. But it’s confusing because he growls like Mer-Man from He-Man so I guess we need to continue to hate this guy. But frankly I’m not liking anyone in this movie by this stage except Kalgan’s girlfriend, who conveniently is never shown again.

There’s a brief moment which makes me hate both Dave and Lea even more as they argue over who saved whom. Lea comes off as a bitch and Dave acts like some arrogant fuck twat. As they head towards the bridge, we get another bumper car chase scene. Kalgan goes completely psychotic and knocks Lea off the bumper car with Dave still on. Dave shouts at her, “Are you okay?” and Lea just brushes it off with a calm, “I’m fine.” I mean this is Shakespearean levels of talent right here. My god. I’m in awe.

This bumper car chase just goes on forever. I guess Dave’s vehicle malfunctions while Lea has been chasing them all along. I mean, these cars must really be terrible if someone can chase them on foot. Dave curses his vehicle, which I find highly amusing. Lea is shown just what a brainiac she is by standing in the middle of an aisle so the psychotic Kalgan car run her over in the move of the night. I mean, it can’t be that bad right since these things are so fast you can outrun them on foot.

Kalgan continues to laugh psychotically as Dave gets his bumper car back online and aims it at the incoming Kalgan. Dave launches himself off as Kalgan’s felicity turns to hopelessness as he hits the other bumper car head on for an explosion that is way more epic than it has any right to be. We see Kalgan get lit up three times in a row in a fiery blaze that made the previous Viper explosion in the docking bay seem like a match stick being lit. Also, Dave gives Kalgan the one armed salute which I found funny and out of place here. He rushes back to Lea who has no sold the bumper bump to demonstrate that those things shouldn’t have exploded in that manner and asks what happened. Both have a small love scene where Dave is summoned and mentions something about marriage, which receives an incomprehensible mumbled response from Lea. Then in the underbelly, I’m guessing that Kalgan wakes up from the dead, although I was honestly confused if that could have been MacPhearson since both got burnt and had a strikingly similar generic appearance.

But what a crap show. The way some of the reviews describe this thing makes it seem like it’s the funniest thing on the planet. I was waiting for the various so-bad-it’s-good laughable moments but truthfully those were fewer than expected. Honestly, I think this movie was brutal to stomach because the acting was so atrocious. I think the actors were half assing it most of the time, although I do imagine they had fun doing it. But it’s not hammy like Raul Julia as Bison from Street Fighter (1994) or even where someone was trying to elevate what they were doing despite all the obstacles like Frank Langella as Skeletor in Masters of the Universe (1987)

Some people even got praise like Cameron Mitchell and James Ryan but I think it’s just that the movie is sunk so low by the god awful performance from Cisse Cameron that you inadvertently believe both guys were doing a reasonable job. I think they just looked at this thing like another paycheck.

The only parts that looked good obviously were the stock footage of the Battlestar clips. My thought was that if the movie had been cut down to 30 minutes and removed anything Cisse Cameron or the Belarians were involved in and rebranded it as a lost episode from Galactica 1980, it would have almost been watchable. You could have pitched Cameron Mitchell as an overweight, Santa Claus version of Commander Adama trying to reclaim his ship since a lot of episodes from Battlestar could have their cheesy moments.

But Cisse Cameron and the Belarians just killed this movie for me. I would buy Cisse Cameron being some distant relative like an aunt in Full House but she has no business being part of a sci-fi movie where she’s a lead of any sort. Anytime someone complains about Yvette Mimieux and her short curly hair, I’m simply going to point to this movie as a counterargument. And the Belarians were obviously filler.

I will say that the for the non-Battlestar fight scenes, the laser blasts and explosions did reasonably look decent all things considered. They obviously copied existing sounds for the lasers but at least the look was competent. And the general direction wasn’t incompetent. Like you didn’t have lingering shots the way a Manos: The Hands of Fate or the equally wretched Megan is Missing would.

For the non-Battlestar setting though, the overall look was really monotonous. I read that it was shot at a warehouse or power plant and it looked that way. You had three types of scenes: the bridge/command areas, the more industrial zones with pipes and numerous levels with ladders and the garden that looked more artificial than a Duplo Lego garden. For some reason this monotony made me think of Ultima 8 and how most of area is set in this gray landscape. One of the more humorous side notes was that the warehouse had windows which would cause sunlight to enter and that they added some reddish tint that got eliminated in the final edit. I think the sunlight worked because at least you could see things in these shots compared to say Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave.

One of my favorite background notes here is that the director had disowned this film. Apparently, he was contractually obligated to put his name on this thing or at least direct it. I guess the guy even wrote it under a pseudonym. Either way, it’s clear this person was far from proud of his, um, accomplishment here.

I suppose my own interest in this movie came as a result of the poster associated to it. The poster reminded me of an old Origin game called Wing Commander. Maybe the 4th release of Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom with its cover gave me similar vibes here. While I never played any of the Wing Commander series, I thought both had slightly similar cover art. The difference though (besides the fact that one is a game) is that the game actually had some name brand actors that would give the game nice credibility.

Beyond that though, I must admit to being very disappointed. I was expecting to laugh a lot more for sheer incompetence rather than being bored. Perhaps, my mistake was not experiencing this movie under the MST3K umbrella. But I imagine that would be the Cliff Notes version just like when one watches Manos using the MST3K shield. Otherwise, this movie is completely forgettable and mostly just bad.