A satire of 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course, but also a response against Kubrick's inhuman technology -- the machines here, particularly the titular spaceship, are scrapped together, literally handmade guerilla contraptions. A triangular model sails across the bottom of the screen, the camera lies on its side to summon the vertical perspective of an elevator shaft, and the rattle of bottles and cans provides chimes for an ad-libbed piano-xylophone. The fond cheesiness, closer to It! The Terror from Beyond Space than Arthur C. Clarke, has a low-tech grace, to say nothing of dorm-room, stoner vibes anticipating the Mystery Science Theater 3000 wise-asses. Appropriately, it's a USC Master Thesis expanded to semi-feature length by two budding genre artisans, John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon. Much of it comes from O'Bannon, whose treatment is a deadpan sketch for his Alien darlings (the genesis of the chest-busting slime-drippers of that slicker space opera lies, disarmingly, in a red beach ball equipped with flippers); he also plays the least atrophied of the crew members, long vanished underneath manes, beards and ennui in their mission of vaporizing unstable intergalactic orbs. Yet the invaded Hawksian aesthetic, a camera slithering elegantly across cramped spaces, and gloved intimidations of parallel worlds (the body of the ship's commander, cryogenically frozen in the basement, wheezes info from the beyond) are all Carpenter's, no less ingenious a genre comment than his later, more polished evocations. The tone is meditative slapstick, "How do you know you exist" asked to the bomb ready to detonate the ship, then "Let there be light" and a moment of sublimity -- a piece of debris becomes a surfing board and the comic turns cosmic, the vastness of the universe contemplated to country mooning ("Benson Arizona, the same stars in the sky/But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I"). With Brian Narelle, Carl Kuniholm, and Dre Pahich.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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