Interplanetary

Crewless Productions

Shock-O-Rama Cinema

R1 DVD

I am not entirely sure what sort of film Director Chance Shirley intended with Interplanetary. It looks just serious enough to be a pretty fair budget B-grade SF film, with excellent cinematography, but has enough tongue-in-cheek humour to make a good but subtle spoof.

The plot is that old standard – Mars Base 2 is menaced by a flesh-eating monster, as usual, but the planet is supposed to be devoid of life. As well as the monster there is a group of homicidal spacemen to deal with, and a mysterious fossil that may or may not have something to do with the increasing body count. The corporation that owns the mission seems to have ulterior motives and doesn’t provide any support.

It’s the people who really make the film what it is – the fussy base administrator who is out of her depth if a problem isn’t listed in the book, the nerdy computer programmer who wears a tie (on Mars?) and has difficulty passing a mirror, the female crewman who is screwing her way through every male on the Base and seems to suffer from that terrible affliction, not enough clothes; and the monster who is the conventional man-in-the-rubber-suit.

Nitpickers will love the film. From the Earth-based administrator who can travel to Mars in a couple of hours to the large amount of corrugated iron used in the buildings the film is full of blatant errors, unlikely science and unbelievable sets. The entrance to the base appears to be a sheet of board leaning against the hill, with bits of rock glued to it. The Moon Buggy is a stripped-down Volkswagen chassis sporting a tank of Trichorofluoromethane, an ozone-depleting gas of absolutely no use at all on a moon buggy. If everything had to be transported across space, why bring individual lockers and computer desks? And, of course, badly painted corrugated iron?

I quickly came to regard the film as a spoof and on that basis it was a lot of fun. As budget SF it’s not bad either.

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