Movie Review: Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone (1983)

Genre: Science Fiction  

Director: Lamont Johnson  

Starring: Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald, Ernie Hudson, Michael Ironside  

Running Time: 90 minutes  

Synopsis: A tourist spaceship explodes in a faraway galaxy, and an escape pod carrying three surviving women crash-lands on a dangerous planet. Space adventurer Wolff (Peter Strauss) is interested in the reward money and races to rescue them, but after partnering with scrappy local girl Niki (Molly Ringwald), he faces competition from fellow-rescuer Washington (Ernie Hudson). The planet is full of dangers, but the biggest threat is Overdog (Michael Ironside), a half-man half-machine crazed scientist who rules over the forbidden zone and wants the captured women for his pleasure.

What Works Well: Some of the garage-level hardware is imaginative, and Elmer Bernstein's music score deserves an entirely different movie. Sidekick character Chalmers (Andrea Marcovicci) enlivens the opening 20 minutes.

What Does Not Work As Well: Filmed in 3-D, this soulless mix of Star Wars and Mad Max is hampered by a low budget and the mis-casting of Peter Strauss and Molly Ringwald: he is charisma-free, and she is whiny and annoying. The flat script lacks wit and anything that resembles character depth or a thematic arc, surrendering instead to a choppy episodic structure overwhelmed by cheesy sets and stiff derivative action. The three captive women are vacuous non-entities, while Michael Ironside as the antagonist looks impressive but barely features apart from some cartoon-level villainous hollering.

Key Quote:

Niki: Us loners got to stick together.



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Movie Review: The Substitute (1996)

A far-fetched crime action movie, The Substitute offers a mishmash of sometimes interesting ideas but defaults to lowest common denominator resolutions.

Professional mercenary Jonathan Shale (Tom Berenger) leads his team of independent soldiers on a botched mission in Cuba and finds himself unemployable. His girlfriend Janet Hetzko (Diane Venora) is a Miami-based inner city high school teacher. Although the principal Claude Rolle (Ernie Hudson) is a former police officer with political ambitions, the school is beset by gang problems. Top thug Juan Lacas (Marc Anthony), a student in Janet's class, is the head of the KoD (Kings of Destruction) gang.

Janet tangles with Lacas and gets knee-capped for her trouble. Shale replaces her by pretending to be substitute teacher "James Smith" and notices signs of big money and possible drug distribution activity centred at the school. His mercenary crew set up surveillance to uncover what Lacas is up to while Shale attempts to disrupt the gangsters and help the students who actually want to learn.

Even before the over-the-top action bursts through the school door, The Substitute demands plenty of leaps of faith. The logic challenges include a noble teacher who accepts a cold-blooded mercenary as her boyfriend, a professional soldier suddenly deciding to care about the quality of education, and a principal overseeing a violent jungle of a school believing he can be elected to city council (but maybe corruption really runs that deep).

Director Robert Mandel rumbles over all the inconsistencies with the admirably oblivious torque of a tank advancing over rough terrain, and seeks the charm of a scarred and stone-faced Tom Berenger donning a necktie and heading into the combat zone of an inner city classroom. His Vietnam War experiences and a few broken bones are all it takes to subdue the unruly kids, The Substitute taking every shortcut it can find on the way to the real business of killing on an industrial scale.

And once Mandel arrives at the final 30 minutes, new characters are introduced or reintroduced in a rush, all to create two well-armed groups of square-jawed men to partake in a grand firefight at the high school. The resultant battle would not have been out of place in Stalingrad circa 1942, but the Miami law authorities see no reason to inquire about all the noise.

In the interludes between incidents of violence Shale helps some of the wayward but salvageable school kids (all are Black or Hispanic) gain perspective on a better path in life, Mandel well-intentioned but not skirting the white saviour trope. The Substitute offers lessons in life while dishing out death, never convincing but certainly cacophonous.



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