Film Review — Space Truckers
★★★☆☆ Stuart Gordon’s cheesy working-class Star Wars is trash in the best kind of way
A rag-tag group of blue-collar workers unwittingly get caught up in a galactic conspiracy involving invincible killer robots.
Growing up a sci-fi fan in the ’90s was the best. Within the space of a couple of years we were treated to genre gems like Independence Day, Star Trek: First Contact, Starship Troopers, The Matrix, and the criminally underrated Event Horizon.
Space Truckers doesn’t deserve a place amongst such veritable efforts, but it also doesn’t deserve its current reputation as a complete failure. Released straight to minimal fanfare on home video, the film is barely known today, hamstrung by its appalling 15% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Straight from the warped mind of Re-Animator’s Stuart Gordan, the film is crass, cheap, lewd, poorly plotted and tonally all over the place. And do you know what? I kinda love it for all those same reasons. A film with all the hallmarks of a cult classic, one of those craptastic delights, a film so bad it’s good, perfect for a watch party with a gallon of beer.
Dennis Hopper, Stephen Dorff and Debi Mazar head up a bizarrely stacked cast, their love-triangle dynamic similar to the iconic Star Wars trio of Hans, Luke and Leia, replacing the incest with a hearty dollop of toxic masculinity.
But the real show stealer is Charles Dance, whose Captain Macanudo gets the best moment by far, attempting to seduce Mazar with his low-amp electrical Wang pulse, and ripcord-powered robotic penis. It’s awesome, I assure you.
If silly sci-fi is your thing, you’ll love Space Truckers. Ignore the stuffy online critics and their stupid aggregated scores and give in to this delightful nonsense; it’ll be the best ninety minutes of your day.
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