See Ya Out There, Good Buddy

Stuart Gordon had an interesting career. He was a creature effects-loving director that never really seemed to shy away from the weird, gross, disgusting, or fantastic. Most of his films in some way play to those factors, from the H.P Lovecraft horror of From Beyond, to the crazy sci-fi, low-budget thrills of Robot Jox, and even the family-friendly body horror of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (on which he served as the writer). Of course, one of his most famous movies was also his first, The Re-Animator, which only cemented the kind of demented, devilish fun the director could have making films. He was a master of the B-movie, turning what could have been unwatchable dreck into something far more interesting.

His magic didn’t always stick, though, and sometimes he’d come up with an idea that just wasn’t going to work no matter how much demented glee he put into it. Space Truckers was one such film, a notable misfire that, frankly, should have been obvious from the second you hear the title. Truckers in space is the kind of goofy concept you expect from a mid-range, late-1980s or mid-1990s comic book series, something made as a parody of the self-serious comics that were so popular then, like a TMNT or a Tank Girl. It’s not something you’d make where you’d actually expect it to make money; you just do it as a lark.

Well, Space Truckers is a lark, but it’s nowhere near as interesting as everyone involved expected it to be. It’s got that wacky 1990s vibe, for sure (which it comes to all on its own as it’s not actually based on a comic book), but what it lacks is anything that actually could make it fun, funny, or interesting. It’s a dull slog of a film that’s so bright and colorful you expect it to actually be enjoyable, but it’s not. It takes too long, does very little, and trudges on thinking you’re having fun along with it. It died at the Box Office, only making $1.6 Mil against its $25 Mil budget and, frankly, even then it feels like it made too much.

John Canyon (Dennis Hopper) is a space trucker, riding his aging truck across the cosmos, free of union contracts or corporate control. On a trip taking square pigs to Titan, he runs afoul of the union boss, Keller (George Wendt), who says that Canyon was two days late with his load so he’s only going to get paid a quarter of his expected check. This leads to blows thrown and much shouting, but Canyon seemingly wins the argument. He heads off to the Truck Stop to grab some food from waitress Cindy (Debi Mazar), who John really wants to marry (even though she keeps saying “no”). While John is off grabbing food, Keller’s goons head onto John’s truck and steal his load, leaving him with no cargo and no money.

The pig job is then passed, by Keller, over to Mike Pucci (Stephen Dorff), a newly graduated space trucker ready for his first real haul. However, an altercation at the restaurant between John and Keller leads Mike to step in, joining John in the fight. Keller (due to the incompetence of his own goons) ends up getting sucked out into the vacuum of space, and Mike, John, and Cindy all have to make a break for it. They end up getting an audience with the underground criminal ring on the starbase, and they grab a contract to haul sex dolls out to Earth. Only they aren’t sex dolls but killer robots set to conquer Earth, and if John, Mike, and Cindy can’t figure that out they might just condemn Earth to death.

I do have to say that I like the idea of Space Truckers. Gordon, along with screenwriter Ted Mann, had this idea that no matter how far into the future you go you’ll always have to deal with the same human failings of greed, and corporate incompetence, and everything else that seems to plague human society. Most people, then, are stuck just going on about their days, living their blue collar lives while the fat cats get rich and the corporate boot heel keeps coming down on everyone else. It’s a good thought, it’s just that most of that isn’t conveyed well in Space Truckers and, instead, the film is just a B-movie cheese fest that even MST3K would struggle to get through.

Surprisingly MST3K hasn’t yet touched Space Truckers, and that might simply be because it would cost way too much to license it. The film, despite looking like a cheap as hell Roger Corman production, was actually fairly expensive to make. Bearing in mind that the original TMNT film (which we’re using a barometer here for complex special effects on a budget) only cost $13.5 Mil to make, and that had Jim Henson puppetry involved, it’s just mind boggling that a film this cheap looking could have cost so much. You’d assume looking at it that the film was made for $5 Mil or less (and likely much less) considering just how bad it is.

I have to assume most of its budget went into the cast. Dennis Hopper was still a name at that point, having been in a ton of films through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Whatever he was paid to be on this film, it couldn’t have been a small number. Stephen Dorff was a few years from truly breaking out in Blade, but even then he was a known name who had been in a lot of mid-budget films (Blood Wine, I Shot Andy Warhol, S.F.W.) and likely didn’t come in at scale. Hell, the film even has Charles Dance for a few short scenes as a villain, and Dance is frankly the only one in this film having a great time. In short, this film spent on its cast and really didn’t get anything watchable for the outlay.

The biggest factor in this is Hopper who, despite seeming engaged in the material, doesn’t have the right performance or tone for the role. Canyon should be a dick swinging cowboy with a drawl, not some weasley dude you want to punch. The dynamic between him and the material, let alone him and all the rest of the cast, is just wrong. You can’t look at him and think, “yeah, this is the greatest space trucker I’ve ever seen.” He looks like the guy that would be panhandling for smack outside the space truck stop. He’s the guy that should be playing the slime, underground contract dealer, and having him in the lead role throws everything off. I absolutely hated him in this film.

The plot, meanwhile, is just garbage. It’s a very basic, there and back story with all the expected beats that come with it. “Oh, we have to haul this cargo. I sure hope it’s not a trap,” when it’s totally, obviously a trap. “We’ll just go off the main shipping lanes, I’m sure that won’t be an issue,” when it clearly is going to immediately be an issue. At every turn this film does the stupid, expected thing and it very rarely is able to muster anything close to real energy. The story in Space Truckers utterly bored me and I had trouble caring about anything going on.

The thing is, if they had been a film made on a tiny budget but, say, Roger Corman, I’d probably be kinder to it. You’d say, “hey, this film tried,” as it rose above its shitty finances to be halfway watchable for a film of its kind. But Space Truckers was an actual movie with a real budget that should have been able to do better than this. It looks bad, it’s poorly acted, and the story is awful. About the only thing I really can say about it is I kind of like the concept. In execution, though, this film is a total dud.