THE FINAL FRONTIER - Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone
Poor Columbia Pictures, when the science fiction boom kicked off in the late 70's and early 80's, they were never able to generate a blockbuster adventure film franchise of their own. Sure, with Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind they helped kick off the public's fascination with outer space (along with Star Wars), but they never managed to produce a sweeping fantasy adventure or hardcore sci-fi in the 7 to 8 years thar genre remained popular. They finally got round to trying with Krull in 1983, but by that time space opera was getting over-familiar.
They had another go the same year with Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone. To help it seem fresher Columbia employed a few gimmicks. Firstly, they mixed the trapping of space opera with laser guns, spaceships and a Han Solo styled bounty hunter called Wolff (played by the gruff Peter Strauss) and they set it in a Mad Max, post-apocalypse world. So far so good. They then shot it in 3D (a real gimmick at the time), added teen favorite Molly 'Sixteen Candles' Ringwald as a sidekick for youth appeal and had it produced by Ivan 'Meatballs' Reitman so there was a lightness of touch to balance out the ragged, downbeat visuals.
In terms of capturing an audience, it didn't really work as Spacehunter just about clawed it's meagre budget back, but the film itself is still an disposable piece of fun. It's basically a western at heart with the bounty hunter travelling through Native American territory with a tracker and a Marshall to rescue three kidnapped rich girls....although in reality, it's a series of encounters with weird inhabitants until they get to the bad guy's township. The argumentative banter between the three leads, Strauss, Ringwald and a pre-Ghostbusters Ernie Hudson keep things lively, Michael Ironside makes a fantastic villain as the sleazy cyborg Overdog and the production design has some genuinely cool sets and vehicles.
Despite the lackluster direction by Lamont Johnson, this is still an enjoyable diversion when you don't want to concentrate on a story all that hard.
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