Dark Space |
USA • 2013 • 91m •
   • Directed by: Emmett Callinan. • Starring: Keith Reay, Steve West, Alana Dietze, Tonya Kay, Joseph Darden, Avital Ash, Sharlene Brown, Freddie Johnson, Tim Martin, Blake Edgerton, Preston James Hillier, Francisco Espalliat, Jose Rosete. • Music by: Greg Nicolett.     Six friends get more than they bargained for when their shuttle craft crashes on an uncharted planet. Now, the only thing worse than not knowing where you are is if you'll survive.
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Review:
In the future, six college kids take a vacation trip to a vacation planet. They talk and act like 13-year-olds. They rent a shuttle to take them to their destination. The shuttle speed is slow, so the whiz kid among them tinkers with the speed limiting device, and lo and behold the shuttle turns into an interstellar hot rod, able to jump to warp speed and go where (almost) no one has gone before. Like renting a Fiat and turning it into a Maserati by removing a regulator on the throttle. They end up at an uncharted planet. They run through an asteroid belt on the way in, but the asteroids mostly bounce off causing only minor damage. They crash on the planet. The shuttle has no seat belts, only living room couches bolted to the floor, so our heroes and heroines (three each) are thrown around when the shuttle skids to a landing amidst trees.
Remarkably, the landing is about 50 feet long. Despite the implied incredible deceleration and no seat belts, only one person is seriously injured. She has a compound fracture of her lower leg. One of her friends grabs her leg, pulls it straight, and snaps the bone pieces back together, where they conveniently stay with only a rag wrapped around the cut. Four of the six intrepid heroes then venture out to look for help, leaving behind the injured colleague and the whiz kid. Whenever they hear a strange noise, they shout, "Hello? Who's there? I know you are watching us," and so on. One of the four is self-described lady-killer with all the sex appeal of an amoeba - no brains, no personality, no looks, no physique. He continues to make passes at his two female companions and to talk like a 13-year old even though his group is lost on an unknown alien planet, their friend has a broken leg, and their ship is ruined. He takes a break to go skinny-dipping in a lake. The water's fine, but there are aliens watching. Gripping. We know it's gripping because the tedious background music says so.
Soon the four intrepids meet the aliens who have been hunting them, but just in time our heroes are miraculously saved (sort of) by the miraculous appearance of a horde of soldiers who blast away at the aliens. This horde is trying to colonize the planet but must exterminate the natives because it is illegal to colonize any world that already has intelligent life on it. They blast everything and then burn large swaths of territory to "hide" the evidence. Nobody later is going to notice the huge burned-out areas over an entire planet or find any traces of the intelligent former-lives that were there. The baddies don't want any witnesses, so they decide to fry our friends. They succeed in killing one, but like all baddies they cannot hit the broad side of a barn from the inside, so the others get away. In the race back to the ship, the remaining three intrepids are reduced to one, who reaches the ship.
Ship? Oh, yes. Its computer was broken, its hull badly damaged, and its oxygen tanks ripped open. The two heroes who stayed behind fix the computer. They have some encounters with the aliens. The one with the broken leg gamely hops around to evade one alien. The whiz kid says her leg is infected. The infection will kill her if it reaches her brain! She must take some tranquilizers to slow the spread of the infection! Apparently both bacteria and tranquilizers of the future have evolved from our day and can do amazing things. Once fixed, the computer makes innumerable announcements that function as a narrator. "Warning. Electrical failure." "Hull integrity at 5%." "Object blocking door. Opening door. Object removed." Too bad the object blocking the door was the whiz kid who was being dragged out of the ship by an alien. The partly-closed door was holding the whiz kid. When the computer opens the door, the alien drags away the object, i.e., the whiz kid. The computer declares in a self-satisfied tone that the object has been cleared. The broken-leg heroine, now alone, fights off and kill a baddie who shows up. She also fixes the ship enough to make it fly despite its 5% hull integrity (5% of what, by the way?). Apparently all you do in the future is tell the computer to fix things, and it does it. How it can wield a blow-torch to repair torn metal and so on is left unexplained.
The broken-leg heroine somehow makes the ship fly and then somehow finds her single remaining friend wandering around outside. They set off a distress beacon. That attracts a baddie ship. Conveniently, this baddie ship has only one crew member. He enters the intrepids' ship and gets blasted by one of the intrepids, using the ray gun dropped by the baddie whom the broken-legged heroine killed previously. All this is just what our heroines had planned. Our two remaining heroines then take the baddie's ship and leave for home.
Review by john_seater from the Internet Movie Database.
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