As last night's TV was so mind-numbingly safe and utterly dire I have resorted to You Tube and an old Roger Corman Sci-Fi production called MUTANT, which I've never seen.
Released in 1982, it has to be the biggest pile of derivative tripe I've ever had the dubious pleasure of watching. Mixing ALIEN, Star Wars, The Thing from Another World, some 2001 Space Odyssey score and clumsy sex with the finesse of a Kenwood Chef, it slides along dreadfully like something that has missed the bin and oozes down the wall towards the floor.
The acting is awful, the effects are laughable and the Mutant itself is as scary as a bowl of Reddy Brek. Its only redeeming feature is allowing you to shout at the screen when you spot the brazen rip-offs of costumes and effects from Hollywood's Sci-Fi successes from previous decades.
We see their brand of Stormtrooper and Tuskan Raiders [pictured], ALIEN computer text reflection and many many more laundered parts.
I understand that MUTANT was also known as Forbidden World and Subject 20. It doesn't matter what its called, it's still dross. So much so, I have turned it off three-quarters of the way through! Any more and I may have mutated myself.
Am I being unduly harsh?
have you seen MUTANT readers?
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Addendum:
Surprisingly, another interesting aspect of this flick particularly for video collectors like me are the various VHS covers for it. Here's a selection highlighting the different covers and names it tormented its hapless viewers with across the world back in the lawless Eighties. Do you recognise them?
and one for Arto, the Finnish cover!
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POSTSCRIPT:
I mentioned that I might have seen this image before. Well here it is, not quite the same at all! Its Gandalf and Balrog by the Brothers Hildebrandt from a book I had as a teenager.
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his post was first published in 2016
Wow, never seen that VHS cover before (nor known about the flick itself). The illustration is great!
ReplyDeleteIt says "Uskallatko katsoa?" or "Do you dare to watch?" above the title. What a tease!
I did dare Arto. the artwork is better than the flick! Fun for star wars fans tho like me.
DeleteOh, I love all the Roger Corman space films. To me they capture the excitement and danger of space better than the big-budget behemoths they copy. A short list of my favorites: Battle Beyond the Sun, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, Queen of Blood, Battle Beyond the Stars, Galaxy of Terror and... Forbidden World! I was lucky enough to see these last two in the theater. I guess you just don't care for imaginative low-budget clones? Me, I eat 'em up! SFZ
ReplyDeleteha ha! I love cheapo films SF, they fascinate me, the impulse to make a flick on a shoestring must be a compulsion, out of which great things have come or followed. I love your shortlist and I really must watch Queen of Blood. What a title. I know the beautiful poster art but never seen the film. One of my own fave cheapos is Equinox, the almost-student-like movie about a grim book and a monster world. Really superb and years before, say, The Evil Dead came along.
DeleteBig Hollywood epics and low-rent indies are two different animals, and its good to have a taste for each. Equinox is one of my all-time favorites, so we are on the same page there. Ever since I was a kid, for some reason I gravitated towards the lower-budget indies over the slick Hollywood stuff. Which just means I was weird from the get-go! And yes, the ingenuity needed to ape a bigger film with no budget is certainly the road to high imagination - and sometimes big failure! SFZ
DeleteI read that Forry Ackerman dabbled with low-budget films when he was a kid, student films even. Did he have a hand in Equinox?
DeleteAt first I thought that helmet in the first picture was a overbuild on the Lazer Tag helmet but given the shape of the crown, I suspect it may have used a Photon helmet as a base. Pure conjecture on my part though. Then again it seems they had a couple of variants of the helmet as here is one which has a different crown: https://wipfilms.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Forbidden-World-1982-Screen-1.jpg
ReplyDeletePerhaps their prop maker had access to pulls from the stormtrooper armor molds given the shape of the upper arm armor and the thinly disguised chest which is using the same style shoulder straps.
Fascinating Lance. Photon helmet, is that the LJN toy helmet from 1986?
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