Film Review: Space Mutiny (1988)

My favorite part of Space Mutiny is when one of the characters is murdered, then shows up again as an extra in the next scene. Yes, folks, this no-budget Star Wars rip-off is just that good. In all honesty, it’s hard to be mad at a movie like this. It’s not pretentious or preachy, and it knows exactly what it is – trash. Space Mutiny was featured on a 1997 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and became a fan favorite. That’s the version I watched, but even if you manage to track down the original (sans commentary), you may laugh just as hard.

Space Mutiny isn’t intended as a comedy, of course, but if you walk into the middle of it, you may think it is. It’s an utterly ridiculous movie in every sense of the word, and I’m not sure if I mean that in a bad way or not. The plot is easy enough to follow if you care to try. A spaceship called the Southern Sun has been looking for a new planet to colonize for several generations (I think). There’s a bad guy named Kalgan (John Phillip Law) who wants to wrest control of the ship for some reason from Commander Jansen (Cameron Mitchell). He blows a bunch of stuff up to disrupt the navigation (or something) but is thwarted by hunky beefcake Ryder (Reb Brown) and the Commander’s daughter, the plucky Dr. Lea Jansen (Cisse Cameron). Lots of bad guys get killed by falling over railings, and there’s a strange coven of scantily clad hippy women who dance nonstop around a glowing orb of some kind. Also, the Southern Sun has a 24-hour disco, so that’s nice.

It’s weird. So weird that I’m almost impressed with it. Legend has it that some of the space battles were cut for MST3K running time constraints. These scenes consisted of…wait for it…nothing more than old Battlestar Galactica footage. Yes, that’s right, they tried to pass off reused footage from a crappy T.V. show as their own. Simply stunning.

I can’t in good conscience recommend Space Mutiny as a standalone film, but I will wholeheartedly recommend the MST3K version. Mike, Crow, and Servo have an easy field day with this sorry space opera, and it ranks in the top three of every “best of” list I can find. It’s almost as if it were made with the sole purpose of being torn apart.