"The question is: Name two great movies and a dog."
A recent successful bid on the Heritage Auctions website added movie posters for Silent Running, Outland and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone to my modest collection. I received the package today, and I'm pleased with my purchases - well, mostly pleased, to be honest.
Silent Running? A favourite film for me, and a great transitional role for Bruce Dern. Outland - a well executed science fiction remake of High Noon, with a strong performance by Sean Connery. Spacehunter? Yes, well, Spacehunter...
As far as I can remember, Spacehunter wasn't in the original auction listing but seemed to make an appearance later, and there was never a photo of the poster, the image above is taken from another listing. It's entirely possible that this item was grouped with the others so as to get the damn thing out the door, for all I know it had been collecting dust in the back room at Heritage for some time.
Faint praise aside, I have to admit that I did in fact see Spacehunter in its 1983 commercial release, back when the original Cineplex multiplex was located at the north end of the Eaton Centre in Toronto. This places me in elite company: the film only grossed $16.5M on a $14.4M budget.* The film was produced using a two-camera technique called "Native 3D", and I do vaguely remember the 3-D effects, particularly the cyborg villain's metallic claws coming out of the screen.
On paper, all the pieces are there for a successful film. The film was made in 3D as part of the shortlived craze of the early 80s, and has a reasonably noteworthy cast. Peter Strauss, who takes the leading role of Wolff the bounty hunter, was a workmanlike actor with a solid television resume and some previous big screen experience, and Molly Ringwald, whose appearance as Niki the Zone Scav is only her second movie role after Paul Mazursky's Tempest, went on to fame in the John Hughes trilogy of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. Ernie Hudson and Michael Ironside have supporting roles, and Ivan Reitman was the film's executive producer.
Regardless, none of that was enough to save the film from mediocrity, and the result is one of those bad movies that isn't quite bad enough to have achieved cult status.
Part of me says that it must be streaming somewhere, and that I should re-watch the film as part of due geek diligence, but I somehow can't bring myself to invest another 90 minutes of my life on the outside chance that it's not a bad as I remember.
- Sid
* I was honestly a bit surprised to discover that it made back its costs.
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