James Cameron demonstrated his ability to think on his feet early in his career when he textured the walls of a spaceships walls with grids of Styrofoam Big Mac containers which were then spray-painted. That was for Galaxy of Terror, which was produced by Roger Corman. As a man who always knew how to stretch a penny until it turned into copper wire, Corman reused that corridor for at least one other movie. That set had obviously taken a beating before being used in 1982’s Forbidden World, with enough damage to it to make its fast food packaging source material evident.
I have seen a great many of the films Corman produced, and I would rank this among his worst. This tired clone of Alien is shoddy in every regard: technical, acting, effects, music. Even the dialog is bad enough that I wondered if Cameron had worked on the script. A sample line: “Let’s go bag ourselves a dingwhopper.”
The movie has at least one innovation, though not a welcome one. Near-subliminal images are dropped into some of the scenes. Some of these are a long procession of lightning-fast edits that made me wonder if they could induce a seizure in the wrong person. This had to be a massive time-consuming effort before the age of digital editing, so I’m surprised they went to that much trouble.
Of course, they were able to get some extra mileage out of the ample female nudity from other scenes by recycling them for these subliminal moments. The result is you have moments with somebody fleeing the monster and the odd frame of boobs will pop up. It is simply baffling but isn’t thought-provoking. It didn’t make me wonder why they did that. It was wasted effort.
I can’t overstate just how copious the nudity is in this. There’s enough full-frontal female exposure that I was genuinely surprised this received an R. I know much of 80’s horror is about horny people getting killed, but the characters are apparently so overwrought that the possibility of getting their freak on makes them completely forget there is a deadly creature on the loose. I found myself wondering if this had been made with the intention of easily making an X version from the material, as some scenes seem made solely for hardcore inserts to be dropped in.
We will first see some of the subliminal nudity when our hero (Jesse Vint) is awaked from cryogenic sleep in a precredit sequence. I thought we were seeing random thoughts from his waking mind. But it will turn out everything we’re shown are clips from later in the movie. This seem to imply Vint has some sort of precognitive abilities, something which is never touched on again.
Others in the movie include June Chadwick, who played Jannine in This Is Spinal Tap. She will have little more to do than get naked here.
Still, she has somewhat more to do than Dawn Dunlap, who also spends a surprising amount of time in the altogether. That is, when she’s not shrieking at a pitch that could break glass. Probably her sole moment actually in service to the plot is when she’s in a control room, watching others hunt the monster in a desert that has an impossible number of security cameras filming the action so that she can watch it from afar.
The only other actor worth mentioning is Fox Harris, as the lead scientist, and that is only because he has an uncanny resemblance to Tim Burton. His unfortunate character will have a tumor removed from his body without benefit of anesthesia. He walks Vint through the process of doing this, with the plan being to try feeding the tumor to the monster. Harris dies in the process and I’m still wondering why they didn’t just kill the poor man outright and then carve him up. That seems far more humane.
But this is a film that consistently takes the most gruesome and gory path available. This is a very gross movie and I think I was only able to finish watching it because of how cheaply and ineptly the effects are done. I wonder how much of the budget was allocated for gelatin, Karo syrup and red dye. Heads up to the friends of animals out there: one scene is liberally decorated with the real corpses of various species that are normally kept as pets.
The one element of this that should have been novel is the murderous creature is a “metamorph” that continually changes its structure. Alas, that just means it changes from one sub-par design to another. Given how freely this lifts from Alien, there is the token face-hugger version early on, but what they have here looks like a guy with a square cut out of a black rain slicker stuck to the side of his face.
The movie’s nadir arrives when Chadwick decides to just talk to the monster. I would wonder why nobody in the various Alien sequels and spin-offs ever tried this approach, and it’s probably because it would turn out as badly there as it does for her here. Before her demise, however, we get the creature answering her by somehow playing some cheap synth music through the ship’s computer. I thought the music was only on the soundtrack, but a cutaway reveals it is digenic. An earlier scene that is almost as weird has a guy playing some sort of glass saxophone along to music we already were hearing on the soundtrack, which means a character in a movie can hear, and play along with, the soundtrack.
Forbidden World is bad—so bad that I don’t think it can even be recommended for fans of thick slices of movie cheese. It’s a horror movie without any scares, science fiction that doesn’t take us anywhere interesting and near-porn that never delivers the goods it hints at. This is such a sorry mess that it isn’t even any fun to laugh at.
Dir: Allan Holzman
Starring Jesse Vint, June Chadwick, Dawn Dunlap
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray