Hyper Space (1989) — Triskaidekafiles

HYPER SPACE

WRITERS: Story by David Huey

Screenplay by Richard Dominguez

DIRECTOR: David Huey

STARRING: Richard Norton as Thomas Stanton

Don Stroud as Ryan Drezak

Lynn-Holly Johnson as Arias Christensen

James Van Patten as Raymond Scully

Ron O'Neal as Samuel Tubbs Tubarian

Rebecca Cruz as Roberta Villalobos

QUICK CUT: A group of space garbage men take the scenic route back home.

THE MORGUE

Stanton - Our hero, a former ‘ranger’ which is basically a police detective of his time. He’s an honest man, just trying to get home. He’s a loner in his love life, but has his close circle of friend.

Tubbs - An older space trucker that has been from one end of space to the other, and has decide it’s time to retire.

Arias - A young woman who is the ship’s techie. She’s sweet, innocent, and would never hurt a fly, to a fault.

Drezak - A tough guy on the ship, who only cares about himself.

Captain Scully - Well, he’s the captain.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! This week, it's time to get a bit more scifi, with an odd bit of film called Hyper Space. And spoiler alert, for a movie with that title, there is a shocking lack of hypersace in this.

The movie takes place slightly in the future, next Sunday AD, and we open on our hero detective Thomas Stanton and his partner, a discount Crockett and Tubbs, staking out a place. Finally they decide to get some action going and rush in to fight Big John Studd.

We get a big fight in a warehouse OF THE FUTURE and John has a head for some reason, which he huffs at Stanton, and then he tosses everyone around like they're rag dolls, lifting them up with a dreaded front wedgie.

Stanton finds a blowtorch, and Studd retaliates with a giant timber he sets on fire by lunging at the cop with it. Actually fighting fire with fire!

Triskelions, this fight is *wild* for this level of movie. I rarely go into beat by beat stuff with fights these days, but this thing is, wow. Stanton's torch gets knocked away, but he grabs some rope and tries to Indiana Jones that shit out of Studd’s hands, but the rope catches on fire, which he starts spinning around liking a flaming bolo.

Stanton uses the fire to activate the sprinklers, which at least puts out Studd's giant flaming stick.

However, he is still left with a giant normal stick with which to beat you.

At least, until he tosses it away. I guess he doesn't need it, considering.

Stanton tries to arrest him, saying headhunting is illegal in the city. Is...is it legal OUT of the city? In the country? Is this a law?

In a shocking turn of events, Stanton just jumps forward, punches Studd in the face, and he goes down like he has a glass jaw.

Stanton finishes him off by chucking some fire at him, and we jump through the credits and into Hyper Space!

If you like fire so much, why don’t you marry it?

The credits drop a bit of text setting up that nuclear waste is such a problem now, that we have decided to launch it into space with some space truckers who go and dump it into a vast empty space known as Title of Movie. Oh, and in some versions that area of space is called the “Black Forest” which is also a ridiculously inexplicable title this movie has.

We move on from there to the poor man's Nostromo, presumably carrying some of that deadly waste, and our crew and WHAT DID THAT OPENING HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING??

*ahem* Well, at least Stanton is still here, as everyone is being awoken from the lamest suspended animation sleep ever.

The crew does their wake up meet and greet, most notably Stanton's best friend, Tubbs..wait, seriously?? Okay, fine, moving on. Tubbs has been doing these runs for awhile, and decided to retire after this mission.

Meanwhile, most of the crew fills their bellies after waking up, until Arias runs in from checking the computers, saying they are WAY off course.

So, the computers are spewing gibberish, they can't contact Earth, and their fuel supplies are way below where they should be. Why any of this happens will never be answered.

You know it's the future, because he has one of those pointless desk gadgets.

It turns out they have even less fuel than projected, for no particular reason, under 25% and they would have to go 1% their normal speed to reach Earth again...in 22 years.

Uhh, someone doesn't know how space works. Blast your engines, use your fuel, coast the whole way home. Once you're near Earth, someone can show up to repair or refuel.

To pad the movie out more, Stanton has another flashback to fighting another wrestler, and this is in a toy warehouse, and that's good because their police weapons look like toys. It's laughable production values.

After the nightmare where his partner is murdered by Tanaka, the crew is despondent with their fate, and Arias runs in with a brilliant plan.

They DO have enough fuel for the shuttlecraft to get back home, in only 31 months. The bad news however, is that it can only take one person, or the chances of survival drop precipitously.

I gotta say, those are some Cold Equations. And boy, is that an obscure reference.

You can imagine how the news of only one person can go home goes over with the crew. Drezak takes it pretty hard, and comes close to mutiny. Give it time!

In short, they decide to draw straws, and Stanton makes sure the retiring Tubbs gets the long straw, so he can go home to his family.

Stanton visits Tubbs as he gets packed, and everyone gets the shuttle ready for launch. And it's a sweet little scene between old friends. You can feel the emotion hanging in the air. It's effective.

Once he leaves, Roberta visits with Tubbs, and tries to seduce her way onto the shuttlecraft. But even though he's a dirty older man, and has been flirting with her all movie long, he sees through her plot and is having none of it.

We get a long drifty look through the ship while everyone settles down for the night, and eventually land on Captain Van Patten finding Drezak at the shuttle trying to get in, but the access code has been changed. Probably wisely, so only Tubbs knows what it is.

The pair get into a fight, as was inevitable, and in the process the airlock gets opened up. Everyone kinda takes it in stride though, since this movie doesn't have a budget to do a proper explosive decompression, and eventually Stanton closes it back up.

After everyone disperses, Roberta tries to make another offer, but finds Tubbs dead, being eaten by his own spacecrab pet.

Then Stanton shows up, and slowly everyone else arrives, and it COULD just be the nasty creature escaped, but we all know better, don't we?

With Tubbs dead, no one can access the shuttle, some believe Stanton has a backdoor code, and Roberta starts to build a pressure overload that will destroy the shuttle, as a means to force him to give it up.

Before she can do it though, Drezak shoots her with Chekov's assault rifle, and now he demands the code.

Stanton hands over a card, and it doesn't work when Drezak tries to use it. Instead, it's just a savings card, but the distraction is enough to attack Drezak.

He ends up chasing Stanton through the three sets of the ship, and the fight eventually ends when Stanton shoves a giant live wire just kinda dangling there, into Drezak's face.

Meanwhile, Arias finds the captain in the mess, and he tries to scheme with her behind everyone else's back. And then tries to murder her.

She runs into Stanton, and they make their way to the bridge, and the captain has gone missing from the mess hall though.

While they try and get the ship's computers to work long enough to frammit the thingistat to get into the shuttle, we get some backstory on Stanton from his days as a ranger, and he talks about..well, suddenly there's androids in the plot, because why not?

He talks about how much he can't stand androids, and Arias looks visibly bothered and oh no, the lack of clues on androids we didn't even know existed until now will be revealed that she's one too, isn't it?

You can’t accuse this movie of being subtle.

Of course, if she was an android, then it would be better for her to go on the shuttle, or go with someone, since she doesn't use as much resources? Oh, nevermind.

The captain returns with a knife to Arias' throat, making the usual threats, and Stanton reveals he's figured out the weasely captain is the one who murdered Tubbs. And that it couldn't be Arias, because she's far too human. Ah ha ha ha.

Cap comes too close, gets shoved into the console, and for some reason he gets electrocuted. I guess.

They get to the shuttle bay, and find Drezak still alive. He lightly bonks Arias with a stick, and this somehow manages to kill her. Geeze, androids sure are fragile.

During the fight, Stanton realises Drezak is a filthy robot, and then uses Chekov's airlock to launch him into space, taking care of the last threat.

Stanton checks on Arias, she's dead too, and so he gets into the shuttle and launches for Earth. He plays a message Arias left for Tubbs thinking he would be the pilot. In it, she reveals he knew what she was, and that she loved Stanton.

And so we end with zero answers as to how, or why, and just kinda sputter into the end credits.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: Pretty average

Audio: Sounds just fine

Sound Bite: “What time is it?” “April.” I know that feeling.

Body Count: Everyone but Stanton is a pretty good percentage, at least.

1 - Five minutes in, and I think our hero just torched a baddie??

2 - Stanton’s partner Chang dies in a flashback

3 - Tubbs found dead with a giant spacecrab in his belly

4 - Roberta gets shot by Drezak

5 - The captain gets electrocuted by Stanton.

6 - Arias gets lightly bonked and dies.

7 - Drezak goes out the airlock

Best Corpse: There’s really only Tubbs’ death to speak of, with a giant spacecrab in his gut.

Sex Appeal: We see Roberta nude going to the showers, and some shirtless Stanton and Tubbs.

Drink Up! Whenever someone dies from a lovetap.

Movie Review: This is a solid plot. It’s basic, it’s been done before, but this does it fairly well. But being a more character driven piece, THIS IS NOT A BIG ACTION MOVIE. That bores a lot of people, but I do appreciate the more thoughtul sort of SF that asks the hard questions. With a little polish, and a bigger budget, this coulda been something. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have its fare share of padding, with those flashbacks, and long strings of shots of the ship interior. The other big problem is the music. The movie is almost wall to wall music, to the point that instead of setting any sort of mood or tension, it’s so ever present it becomes distracting by its mere existence. Still, it’s all right, if a bit slow, three out of five spacecrabs.

Entertainment Value: Being a very straightforward movie, there’s not a whole lot to comment on here. It’s almost an inexplicable movie at being so no budget, yet there’s two well known wrestlers of the time in it for a grand total of five minutes out of nowhere, mixed into a scifi movie. Two out of five airlocks.