Life, Writing, Weirdness

Goofy fun.

Post-apocalyptic settings were common in the 70s and 80s, but this one isn’t on Earth. Instead, we see a failed colony called Terra 11 that’s descended into chaos and barbarism, technology slowly being stripped away to leave the remaining colonists with a harsh, subsistence existence with not enough resources to go around. Tech and effects that are a cross between what will eventually be the mechanical aspects of steampunk and the sparks produced by weapons you’d normally associate with things like Flash Gordon.

A pre-Breakfast Club Molly Ringwald essentially steals the film, and the other big names of the time (Peter Strauss, a barely recognizable except for the voice Michael Ironside, and Ernie Hudson) who appeared in it aren’t given a lot of direction from the feel of things. The writing isn’t exactly great, but the plot is more or less coherent if you don’t look too closely at it, even if it does feel sometimes like the creative team was just trying to see how many weird things they could stuff into one film. Linear, but coherent. We have to go to this place and rescue the girls from the bad guy. There’s a lot of crazy alien planetary landscape and things that want to eat us along the way.

This wasn’t really a B movie at the time, or at least it wasn’t marketed as one by Columbia Pictures, with a budget larger than Wrath of Khan had the year before for a runtime almost half an hour shorter. I might suggest the writing team was overpaid. Then again, maybe if they’d been paid more they would have taken more time with the script and turned in something more interesting than Thunderdome but with weird drugs and aliens (coherent, but linear and not particularly interesting). A lot of the additional budget probably went for the extra equipment to shoot in native 3D, which apparently most theatres at the time couldn’t handle, which might also partly explain why it didn’t do that well.

Still, it was entertaining to watch, once, and stands above a lot of other things in the same post-apocalypse vein. Plus, I’m always up for a nice found family message. It’s worth the time spent for the ending to work out nicely, especially if you don’t take it too seriously along the way.

Be well, everyone.