Not to shatter the illusion of the film reviewer as a romantic cinema goer, stubbonly catching everything on the splendor of the big screen in order to expressly maintain the director’s artistic vision – but sometimes (actually, more times than I’d like to admit) I’ll watch any old random shit I happen to come across while aimlessly scrolling through a streaming site. Sometimes, inspiration offers up something remarkable as I trip over a title I wouldn’t have thought to look for in a million years – other times, however, it’s Prisoners Of The Lost Universe…
While watching this fantasy/sci-fi “epic” that sees an electrician and a TV personality zapped into a prehistoric dimension to fight warlords, river beasts and whatever the fuck a Varn is supposed to be, I found myself wondering if that maybe I’d been too rough on Hawk The Slayer for all these years. Imagine my utter non-surprise when I discovered that they had both been directed by Terry Marcel, which may give you some idea of the cheap-as-chips production values we’re about to encounter…
Carrie Madison is the host of science based TV show “The Weird and the Wacky” and is on her way to interview the stern, humourless scientist Dr. Hartmann about a new, possibly groundbreaking breakthrough. We know Hartmann’s a bit of a dick because he says things like “I dare say you’re wondering why I, a serious dimensional physicist, should waste my valuable time on a television program which sensationalises science?”, but Carrie is made late for her appointment after she accidently has a fender bender with electrian Dan Roebuck and wipes out his pickup. Still, Carrie forges on with her interview even though her camera crew are running late and it seems that Hartmann has created a teleporter to another dimension – but maybe the scientist should have invented some safety protocols to go with it as he’s accidently blipped somewhere else when an earthquake turns the portal on while he’s examining it. It’s at this point Dan arrives looking for assistance and he’s certainly not happy to run into Carrie again, but despite already witnessing how ludicrously volatile that portal is, they also stick their heads into it as the earthquake switches it on again (I guess you don’t need actual smarts when you’re only presenting a science show).
Dan and Carrie arrive in a distant, primitive universe that looks very much like Arizona (but actually is South Africa) and have to survive in a world where seemingly everything wants to kill them or ravish them. Thankfully, the local language of Vonyan is exactly the same as English (?) so that’s something I suppose – but once the earthlings catch the eye of violent and perpetually horny warlord Kleel, they have to fight to survive. Banding together a ragtag group of vagabonds such as the nature loving Greenman, the cowardly thief Malachi and the ferocious Manbeast, Dan and Carrie have to overthrow the villain and try to find their way back home.
You have to wonder how many young, impressionable kids we’re suckered in by the expressive video box art while renting movies back in the early 80s, only to bring home this hilariously amateurish drivel that single handedly makes most other fantasy flicks of the decade instantly look like Lord Of The Rings. Red Sonja, Krull, Masters Of The Universe, Beastmaster, yes, even Deathstalker all seem remarkably more assured and professional when compared to Prisoners Of The Lost Universe. Never explaining once how you manage to “lose” a universe, you have to wonder what the story of electricians and TV hosts fighting evil in a faraway land actually looked like in Terry Marcel’s head, because I’m fairly certain it didn’t look anything like how it turned out…
On first glance the cast is fairly solid. I mean we have Apollo from the original Battlestar Galactica in the form of Richard Hatch who tries to bring a Han Solo swagger to his kendo practicing handyman and as the sassy (read: noisy) Carrie, Kay Lenz is fairly recognisable if you’d watched any popular TV show at the time. Better yet, the coldly arrogant features of cult legend John Saxon was filling the role of frequently shirtless despot, Kleel and even fantasy regular Peter (Hawk The Slayer, Legend) O’Farrell is at hand to mug shamelessly as the comic relief. However, in practice, the world (and thus the movie) immediately collapses in on itself as we find that the film seemingly has the budget of Conan The Barbarians catering truck. No effort is made to make the land of Vonya look even remotely otherworldly (would putting a coloured filter over sky or a single matte painting have killed them or something?) and the sets and costumes and not-so special effects all seem left over or scavenged from older productions.
Additionally, the stranger members of the thrown together band of heroes seem like some half-assed attempt to copy the homework of both Lucas and Tolkien. Ray Charleson’s nature attuned Greenman seems to be a thrift store knockoff of an elf as he summits horses by making flute sounds with his hands and water divines by jabbing a stick in the ground. Even better (and by better I naturally mean worse) is the hulking Manbeast, a fur-clad troglodyte with a latex John C. Reilly brow who provides the grunting muscle like some sort of less hairy Chewbacca. Also scattered around are random sea creatures and a tribe of glowing-eyed mutants that roar like a panther, but it just becomes too unintentionally funny to bear.
However, not helping the threadbare production values much is the fact that Marcel seems utterly clueless to the tone he’s trying to achieve. For a film that chooses to insert comedy sound effects into it’s action sequences, there’s an awful lot of threatened sexual assault in the air for what apparently is a family movie. In fact there’s an entire subplot involving an underling of Kleel’s repeatedly trying to violently have his way with Carrie at various points in the film and while such R-rated savagery fits into the world of, say, Conan The Barbarian, it’s way too much for a movie that also sees character clumsily find their way in and out of alternate dimensions by having all the presence of their surroundings as a toddler. Simply put, it’s bad. Funny bad, maybe, but still bad nonetheless and while Hatch, Lenz and Saxon all try to grin and bear it for the paycheck, for best results maybe watch the Rifftrax version and lessen your pain.
A genuinely poor showing from all involved with the exception of Saxon’s chest hair, Prisoners Of The Lost Universe some manages to crash and burn without ever actually managing to take flight in the first place. Lovers of ropey, fantasy trash will be overjoyed so find a movie that so capably fails on every conceivable level, but when your film ends either it’s heroes accidently finding their way home as clumsily as they arrived in this universe in the first place, you know you’re in a special kind of bad-movie Hell.
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