Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

Fire up your knock-off light sabers for NOT QUITE STAR WARS Month at Mondo Mondays, featuring the intergalactic rip-offs Darth Vader didn’t want you to see!

Not-at-all-unintentionally released to theaters a mere one week before the massively anticipated Return of the Jedi in order to cash in on Star Wars mania, and originally presented in eye-crossing 3D (and presented here in glorious 2D), Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone is an intergalactic mash-up of Star Wars, Road Warrior and Flash Gordon, all covered in spacey B-movie cheese!   In the year 2136, dashing space jockey Han Solo …wait, make that “Wolff” (Peter Strauss), answers a distress call from a trashed planet called Terra Eleven.  Agreeing to pick up three women who’ve been spaceship-wrecked, he lands on the planet only to discover they’ve been kidnapped.   Following their trail, Wolff soon encounters Niki (Molly Ringwald, a year before she became America’s favorite teenager in Sixteen Candles), a spunky orphan who agrees to guide him across the Forbidden Zone, a vast wasteland populated by plague-scarred cannibals, aquatic barracuda women, and bloated maggot pod people.     After a series of death-defying adventurers, Wolff, Niki and their new pal Washington (Ernie Hudson) finally reach the lair of Overdog (a wildly overacting Michael Ironside), the planet’s hideous, insane half-man/half machine ruler, who is holding the missing women captive in his booby-trapped lair of doom, and now the games begin!   A fast and fun rip-off extravaganza produced by Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), with impressive production values and PG-rated sleaze, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone is an underrated slice of ‘80s sci-fi trash.  (Dir. by Lamont Johnson, 1983, USA, 90 mins., Rated PG)