Forbidden World (1982)

Fantastic!

best movie i've ever seen.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

There's just something special about some of these early 80's Corman "cult classics." This is maybe the least impressive of the ones I've seen ("Galaxy of Terror" and "Humanoids From the Deep" being tops) but it still has it's moments and is entertaining enough.It's clearly self-aware, but not in a tongue-in-cheek campy way. The music is ridiculous and awesome in equal measure. There's a scene where everyone on screen in contributing in their own way to the score. A couple's moans while having sex, a crewman watching on security cam while playing with a fancy light up yo-yo thing that makes a zing sound and a guy sitting on his bed playing a translucent space sax.It could have used some more scares and more effective kill scenes. There's some pretty good special effects work here but it's all after the fact with the tension all but deflated.

I don't have to tell you what this movie is a ripoff of because it's so blatantly obvious you could see it a light year away. As much as I dearly love this movie, it's just very, very bad. Not least because the space shots are all recycled from Battle Beyond the Stars and the rubber monster looks about as convincing as the Shat's new rug. The plot? A Marshall in the Alliance Mike Colby (Jesse Vint) is pulled out of stasis by his long-suffering Cylon partner SAM-104 (voiced by Don Olivera) to have a space battle before whizzing off through a effects shot to the planet Xarbia, where genetic researchers are creating a new kind of life form that gets loose and starts eating everyone. The one thing I think saves this movie from being a complete flop are the characters, particularly Fox Harris' character Doctor Cal. I don't know why but his slightly nihilistic pessimism and constant smoking have a strange charm about them. He should've had his own movie, that's how good he is. Linden Chiles' Hauser is also quite fun to watch, if a little predictable. I kind of feel sorry for SAM, he's always getting switched off. The deaths are a bit over the top, the sex and nudity are a little on the large side, and the sky outside is quite obviously blue, no matter how much tint you stick on the lens. Corman's didn't learn his lesson there either; when he remade it as Dead Space in the 1990's, the only improvement was this time the monster looked better. That aside, it was worse. He even used THE SAME F*CKING STOCK FOOTAGE for the space shots. What a cheapskate.

The "Forbidden World" of the title is really just a remote research outpost, where scientists are conducting experiments in creating a new life form from re-engineered DNA(or some such thing!) Of course, things go disastrously wrong, and a space marshal is called in to clean up the mess, and destroy the "mutant" monster.Incredibly mundane and unappealing film has practically nothing to recommend it, other than two beautiful leading ladies(Dawn Dunlap & June Chadwick.) Pity they are stuck in the middle of this gross, ugly and derivative film. Method used to kill the monster may be unique, but not in a good way! Total junk.

Forbidden World (1982)** (out of 4) Made on the re-modeled sets from GALAXY OF TERROR, this sci-fi/horror flick isn't nearly as good but it does offer up plenty of gore and nudity. A professional problem-solver (Jesse Vint) is awaken out of a cyber sleep so that he can assist a group of people isolated on a space station. It seems the nutty scientist has created some sort of creature that has come to life and is now picking off the crew one by one. As you can tell, this is yet another ALIEN clone and while it's certainly far from a good movie it's still pretty hard to resist with its short 77-minute running time and the amount of sleaze on hand. I was pretty shocked to see how much gore and nudity was packed into this thing considering how short it is. The movie has a pretty good looking monster that starts off as a blob like thing and slowly turns into a pretty good sized killer. I really loved the black skin and those giant teeth were another plus. The attack scenes are all pretty effective due in large part to the special effects by John Carl Buechler. We get a wide range of deaths from people being ripped apart to their entire bodies melting right in front of your eyes. All of them look fairly realistic and the amount of gore and oozing material ranks very high and especially when you consider how much of this stuff was being cut out of movies by the MPAA at the time. The nudity level is also pretty high as actresses June Chadwick and Dawn Dunlap have no problems disrobing and we even get a bizarre scene of the two together in the shower. Performance wise the actors aren't too bad and certainly no worse than what you'd expect to see in a film like this. FORBIDDEN WORLD, as you'd expect, is far from a classic though and the biggest problem is that the screenplay has a paper thin story and the characters are even weaker. As much as I liked seeing the two woman nude, I really didn't care about them or anyone else. Without much interest it was just way too hard to care what happened to any of these people. The story itself is one we've seen countless times and it's clear the producer (Roger Corman) wasn't overly interested in anything but the gore and nudity.