Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983)
DIRECTOR: Lamont Johnson CAST: Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald, Ernie Hudson
So as we prepare to be buzzed for Ron Howard’s upcoming STAR WARS prequel SOLO, we here at Awfully Good Movies are piloting our Millennium FAILcon right into the galaxy of SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES OF THE FORBIDDEN ZONE, starring Peter Strauss and Molly Ringwald! Out of the many cheap knockoffs of STAR WARS that were plugging up movie theaters in the early 80s, only SPACEHUNTER would be so bold as to open in theaters one week before the original theatrical release of RETURN OF THE JEDI. And what did SPACEHUNTER offer that the last original STAR WARS film was unable to? Well, for one thing, it’s only sort of a STAR WARS ripoff, even though the film does center around a wiseass dashing space adventurer who has a handy laser blaster at his side, and he’s looking to rescue three female survivors of a spaceship crash from the surface of a post-apocalyptic planet wiped out by plague and ruled by a pig-nosed Michael Ironside. But once he lands on the planet only to have his sexy robot companion killed and replaced by a young and shrieky Molly Ringwald, he must navigate the barren wasteland to face off against this gang of demented scavengers, and now we’re suddenly in MAD MAX territory out of nowhere. Don’t worry, though, because you’ll helped out of this film’s drier moments with some lively supporting work from the great Ernie Hudson and a colorful variety of mutated villains who try to foil our two heroes. It just goes to prove that even without having to wear those cheap 3D glasses, this movie will hurt your eyes just as much in two dimensions as it does in three.
And since we don’t serve droids in this cantina, they’ll have to wait outside and watch past episodes of Awfully Good Movies on their phones instead…