Despite bursting onto the horror scene with a gaggle of winningly extreme gorefests in the mid 80s, Stuart Gordon had a rather strange affinity for populist sci-fi which gave us the mecha-inspired Robot Jox and the hyper-violent, future prison flick, Fortress. While these broader films tried to ensnare Gordon a wider audience, they tended to butt up awkwardly next to his more notorious works – he followed up the kid friendly Robot Jox with the depraved torture of a reworking of Poe’s The Pit And The Pendulum and gave us the even more brutal Castle Freak after releasing Fortress – maybe his most weirdest trip to space ended up being Space Truckers; an absolute head scratcher that suffered re-entry burnout midway through the 90s.
Possibly one of the most random movies ever assembled, the director of Re-Animator found himself helming a sci-fi comedy much in the vein forgotten screwball space farers such as Ice Pirates and Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone – however, it left most people who saw it wondering what the truck was going on…
In the distant future, mankind has finally realised its dream of taking to the stars and conquering space travel once and for all. However, what with our species having a disturbing habit of ruining everything with corporate bullshit, the future is as cutthroat and corrupt as things are now. In this world we find cantankerous space trucker John Canyon, a man so devoted to the life, he wears his cap inside his space suit and one of the last independent pilots around as he struggles to make a living in a universe where the best jobs are farmed out to company guys. The last straw comes when the greedy Keller refuses to pay the agreed price for a delivery of genetically altered pigs that Canyon has delivered late to a truck stop space station and after punching out a thug’s teeth in zero gravity, the grizzled old space trucker goes to drown his sorrows in the company of his favorite waitress, Cindy.
Cindy has something of a hard luck story too as she’s desperate to get back to earth to visit her sick mother and has vowed to marry the besotted John in order for a ride back home. While this raises a couple of iffy, moral dilemmas (seems like kind of a crappy demand for the lead of our movie to make), matters are made all the more complicated by the arrival of the idealistic Mike Pucci who, despite being given John’s pig delivery, stands up for the ornery elder statesman and causes a riot that results in John, Cindy and Mike excepting a job involving illegal cargo and taking an unsafe space route to avoid the police.
However, to do so will attract the attention of any marauding space pirates and before you know it, they’re prisoners of the sexually frustrated, cyborg, pirate captain, Macanudo, who sees Cindy as a rare chance of being able to get his robotic end away. Unfortunately, lusty robo-pirates with ripcord activated sexual organs will be the least of the crew’s worries when it’s revealed that their suspicious cargo is that of the indestructible killer robot kind…
When I first heard that Gordon was making a movie about space truckers, I got super excited. After all, one of my favorite comics growing up as a child was the 2000 AD series Ace Garp Trucking Co., which saw a pointy headed, blue collar space hauler get into bizarre situation alongside his long suffering crew. Now, while I wasn’t expecting Gordon’s unrelated movie to get anything close to replicating this (the comic was insanely ambitious, with the only human character actually being an antagonist in this world of surreal, nutzoid, alien creatures), I was hoping that the spirit of an oily, rough and ready, working class occupation in the depths of space might manage to echo the spirit of my beloved Ace Garp.
Well, scratch that idea; because not only did Space Truckers fail to invoke the crazy escapades of Ace and co., but it failed to invoke the feeling of an actual movie as the finished film turned out to be distractingly obnoxious and the wrong kind of stupid.
For a start, I don’t think I’ve seen many movies where the main cast has such a noticable lack of chemistry for the entire film. While plenty of sci-fi comedies start with their characters usually hating each other’s guts or at least, barely tolerating each other in the vein of Guardians Of The Galaxy or Cowboy Bebop, but these kinds of movies usually sink or swim on these disparate characters actually forging a believable connection. In comparison, the trio of Dennis Hopper, Debi Mazar and Stephen Dorff still seem to legitimately dislike each other even when the film insists they’re all friends now. Hopper, coming off a string of 90s villain roles, attacks the script as if he hasn’t read it, waving his arms about and blustering while not even trying to soften the fact that his entire character arc is that John is actively trying to leverage a far younger woman to marry him. Elsewhere, Mazar deploys her usual New York schtick while spending the majority of the film in a shiny, space bra due to a plot contrivance involving a busted cooling unit. Finally, looking like he has even less idea what’s going on than Hopper, is Stephen Dorff whose character only seems present to stop the relationship between John and Candy from getting too creepy.
However, while there seems to a major disconnect between the actors and the dopey, abrasive script, Charles Dance embraces the chaos magnificently, stomping around with a half-melted face and robotic clamp for an arm. Continuing Stuart Gordon’s string of sexually twisted bad guys, Macanudo just longs to get laid and has issues kick-starting his glowing, bionic member when Cindy reluctantly offers to bed him.
However, as irritating as the movie is, it’s got a cargo hold full of kooky ideas that combines with Dance’s what-the-hell performance to make the journey a bit more tolerable. The set design is as id Ridley Scott’s Alien if it had been put together by Pee Wee Herman and the little details – like pigs genetically altered to be a square shape in order to maximize stacking space is inspired. However, the jewel in Space Trucker’s rather tarnished crown is the army of sleek robot warriors that not only seem to be a neat upgrade from the freaky cyborgs Gordon gave us in Fortress, but are a genuinely awesome sight to see. Pulping their victims with head-mounted plasma cannons or slicing people up with lithe spin kicks, they inject some much needed life into the movie as it drifts in the void.
Gordon seems to have been working overtime in order to transport the goofy and weirdly horny tone of retro, comic book pulp onto the screen, but he does so at the expense of likable characters or a gripping plot. I guess even kickass killer robots and the sight of Cheers’ George Wendt getting sucked out of a porthole can only do so much.
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