OBLIVION (1994)

OBLIVION (1994)

Tagline: On this planet, it's Cowboys and Aliens.

(Adventure, Sci-Fi, Nonsense) [PG]

I don't want to hurt anyone. But unfortunately, you happen to be standing right where my gun's about to go off.

This movie came out before Tom Cruise’s OBLIVION, but I didn’t get to this review till now. This film is a cult-classic at this point in sci-fi circles but it’s one of the few that I hadn’t heard of at all till this year. 

In this western with aliens, a man named Zack Stone is reluctantly taking up his father’s mantle after his father was killed by this alien named Red Eye. Zack tries to stay out of everything, but when his friend Bueto gets captured by Red Eye, his electric whip-wielding girlfriend Lash, and their gang, it’s time for him to step in and save the day. It also doesn’t hurt that Zack has an android named Stell Barr helping him, because he’s basically losing his mind whenever the shooting starts. 

I will say this movie is loaded with a bunch of great b-movie and TV show personalities of the ’80s and ’90s. On the side of good in the movie Zack (played by Richard Joseph Paul) is a less interesting character than Stell Barr (played by Meg Foster, best known for THEY LIVE). Julie Newmar best known for playing Catwoman in the Batman TV series plays a character named Mrs. Kitty that works at the salon. The town also has a very tall creepy dude (that is actually good) that most people seem afraid of and is played by Carel Struycken. You might not recognize the name, but he was Lurch in the newer ADDAM’S FAMILY movies. George Takei for some reason decided to be in this flick playing a drunken doctor named Doc Valentine. One of the craziest parts about this was that Takei apparently just decided to ad-lib some of his lines which harkened back to his days on STAR TREK. For this movie, it was fantastic for humor, but his role in this movie overall was pretty damn rough. We also get the legendary Isaac Hayes (perhaps best known as being the voice of Chef on SOUTH PARK) in this movie. He doesn’t have a big role, but he definitely worth mentioning. “Lash”, one of the main characters is played by Musetta Vander who has been in a ton of stuff, but actually shot an episode of “Murder She Wrote” in the same year she played Lash. That’s versatility. 

On the downside, in spite of this crazy epic cast, we don’t get a single moment of good acting in this entire movie. Clearly, that may have been completely on purpose because a lot of this film was comedic. Script wise this thing is really rough again unless it was intentional. There is a character named Bork who supposedly human, but gets shot at least 3 times and burned to a crisp and inexplicably lives. We have characters that get a full proper introduction but aren’t mentioned again, or are, but don’t have more than a few lines of dialog. It’s all kind of nuts.
 

The effects in this movie are wonderfully b-movie and stop motion and puppetry is used to pull that off. I do think this movie could have used more actual aliens, but the ones we got had pretty cool design work, just poor execution. In one scene we get a space frog essentially presiding over an arm-wrestling match. The loser gets their neck eaten, by the space frog. The cinematography is horrible and the camera work is often boredom inducing. 

OBLIVION is pretty freakin nuts as is this entire viewing experience. This is definitely not something you watch expecting anything but a totally bonkers movie with the most simplistic plot you can think of. I knew exactly what I was getting before I hit “play” and for the most part was not disappointed. This is a classic “so bad it’s good” movie but will walk the fine line of “so bad it’s bad” for a lot of people.

For those reasons, I have to give this one a 4 out of 7. In the b-movie world where the worry about offending people is thrown out the window, this one holds up.

 
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