This was a nice surprise for today. Rich and Jay made for a chill deep dive into this.
I had never heard of it though, and found it funny most of them went on to do their best work after it. I figured this was “my career is middling” material lol.
Wow. Not much discussion about this episode here, but I suppose it's fitting, for a movie that, according to Rich, "was basically made to be forgotten as soon as possible." I guarantee that every Gen-Xer who watched this movie for this review came to the part with the Death Maze or the villain with the giant claws and said "Hey! I remember watching this when I was a kid!" Virtually no one remembers watching the full movie in its entirety, but everyone can remember some small part of it that stuck with them. I think that's because this movie was mostly made as a series of setpieces, designed by committee to appeal to young kids, tied together with the barest string of a plot. Also, the main hero was a black hole. All I could think of while I was watching him was that he was trying so hard to be Han Solo, while not even remotely pulling off being Han Solo. The Han Solo parody in
Spaceballs was also trying hard to be Han Solo, but the character had a distinctive story arc, plus Bill Pullman had the endearing charisma to pull him off. I can't even remember the name of the guy who was trying to play Not-Han-Solo in Spacehunter, - that's how little of an impression he made. (He was a better Han Solo than Alden Ehrenreich in
A Solo Story, so I'll give him that.)
I agree with Rich that this movie should have made more of an impression, with its art direction and its list of notable actors. It was extremely derivative of better movies, but so were all of the Italian schlock films that were knocking off Star Wars and Mad Max back in the early 80s, and many of
those have developed cult audiences. Maybe if the movie had been allowed to go in the weird, pervy direction its first director wanted it to go, it would have been strange enough to garner a cult following.