Monday, October 28, 2024

1996 - SPACE TRUCKERS, the return of the B-movie science fiction film

With his tongue and everything else firmly in cheek, the director Stuart Gordon films a B-movie space adventure film on a rather low but decent budget. However Gordon was a smart enough guy to add some humor to this funny and frequently dumb story.


Dennis Hopper is an independent space ship truck driver.  After dropping off a load of square pigs, (you read that right), he gets involved with a plot to take over the planet Earth with killer robots.  Along the way Hopper picks up some passengers, space station waitress Debbie Mazer and co-pilot Stephen Dorff.  A measure of the silliness of this film is that Hopper, Mazer and Dorff play a lot of scenes in their underwear for no real reason.  Hopper and his companions take on space pirates, killer robots and the evil C.E.O. of a company with plans to take over the world.

 

Well to put it mildly the critics did not get the jokes in this film or Gordon's clearly affectionate send up of old space movies like The Day The Sky Exploded,  Rocketship X-M, Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere, Lost Planet Airmen and Phantom from Space, to name a few.

 

Truth be told the film does kind of run out of gas towards the end but the good humor of the cast which is in on the joke does keep things amusing at the end.

The film was written by Ted Mann, the running time is 95 minutes.

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