Dead Space (1991)

Don’t we all love Alien-rip offs? And don’t we all, even more, love a remake of a movie inspired by Alien which makes this a remake of rip-off of a classic? The rip-off is the amazing, wonderful and mega-cool Forbidden World, a Roger Corman-produced monster-o-thon from 1982. That movie is so damn entertaining, so goofy and so wild. I can’t say exactly the same thing about Dead Space, but I kinda like it and it delivers some gore and monsters – which can save most movies.

In the lead this time we see Marc Singer, who with his faithful robot-friend Tinpan, arrives to a distant planet where they picked-up a distress signal. Like the original movie, this planet is the place of a secret research facility, where they accidentally have created a monster – who now is roaming the base, killing and eating everyone in its way. That’s about it, nothing new or fantastic. Just Marc Singer showing his fit body, some beautiful women, some cheap gore and a quite stiff monster. But it is still a lot more entertaining than some of the other Alien-clones that came out in the nineties.

Where Forbidden World just is chaos, a Ken Russell-movie, Dead Space is clean, neat, and more Roy Andersson, but with a touch of David Bowie á 1990. A parable as good as… something else. Shot in seventeen days, this is a movie that looks better than feels more coherent than it should be. But maybe it’s hard to fuck it up with such a generic script? But director Fred Gallo makes a good job and it’s never really boring, just very ordinary.

The first hour is the slowest, even if it has some nudity and gore (some nasty make-up effects too), but when the mayhem starts is low budget effectiveness with cramped sets being torn to pieces, the monster running around like it’s ass is on fire and some good thrills. But it never comes up in insane trash-quality of Forbidden World.

Dead Space is a decent and well-made little b-movie which is safe viewing for us monster-lovers and Marc Singer-fans. It delivers no surprises, just a sanitized version of Forbidden World. Not bad, I liked it and will watch it again – believe it or not.