Spacehunter

Cast: Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald, and Michael Ironside

Director: Lamont Johnson

89 minutes (15) 1983

101 Films

Blu-ray region B

Rating: 8/10

Review by Christopher Geary

An obvious product of the 3-D boom in 1980s movies, Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone easily avoids being just a part of that busy decade’s media fad, and it manages to revive pulp sci-fi, without reference to Star Wars copycats, just like Spielberg’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) did for narrative chaptering in adventure serials. You can also see the genre influence of this in everything from Stewart Raffill’s Ice Pirates (1984) to Stuart Gordon’s Space Truckers. 

Wolff (Peter Strauss) is a bounty hunter who accepts a contract for a rescue mission. He lands on a plague-stricken planet, where Mad Max appears to be the dominant aesthetic, with scavengers on motorbikes and gliders attacking a sail-boat on rails across a wild dustbowl western realm. Three Earth girls are kidnapped by the flyers working for evil cyborg slave-master Overdog (Michael Ironside), and so Wolff has to find them, all over again.

Along the rocky track ways, Wollf meets plucky but adorably scruffy tracker Niki (Molly Ringwald). Together, they vaguely re-enact a twitchily adoptive version of Pygmalion, before fighting off blubbery mutants, some predatory Amazons, and a dragon in an industrial swamp. Singer and TV actress Andrea Marcovicci plays the doomed Chalmers, our hero’s android companion. Sector Chief Washington (Ernie Hudson, later a co-star in Ghostbusters movies) portrays a space cop and Wolff’s main rival for the mega-credit reward.

A junkyard maze of varied sudden deaths provides a rousing climax of stunts for the amusingly hectic pace of this entertaining actioner's descent into sci-fi Hell. Wolff discovers that he cares about something other than himself, and money, and the vampiric villain gets his comeuppance with a satisfyingly violent shock. Spacehunter is not any kind of masterpiece but it has a good heart with a keen sense of humour about cross-genre plotting and sci-fi concerns, and the leads deliver plenty of charm. Of the actresses portraying those castaways in distress, Nova, Reena, and Meagan, only Deborah Pratt went on to a memorable career in TV, appearing in shows like Airwolf.