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NAKED SPACE
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What can I say about this movie? I've seen a lot of good and bad press for this film, but the common thread seems to be that people who expected crap were delighted to get it, and people who expected an awesome and witty film were generally just pissed off with Naked Space. Naked Space, aka The Creature Wasn't Nice, was arguably the best film of 1981, if by best you mean worst and by 1981 you mean all time. Okay, okay, perhaps it doesn't have the cult following of Plan 9 from Outer Space or the sick pointlessness of Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, but this movie is definitely out there. And coming right off the heels of making the all-time classic Airplane, you just have to ask yourself: what was Leslie Nielson thinking? The happy fact of the matter was that he wasn't. Some folks are luckier than most, and Leslie was occassionally one lucky idiot catching decent scipts, but this is anything but a decent film. Despite Nielson's best efforts to make a serious movie, thankfully he failed miserably and I bring before you today an unwittingly hilarious masterpiece of crap. Nielson is the captain of a spaceship, which incidentally looks like a deformed kitchen utinsel of some sort hurtling past a child's crayon rendition of space. They come up with some half-assed excuse to land on a remote planet, the surface of which is a fun combination of an old dusty Star-Trek set and an abandoned fairy rave site. They discover a jelly blob, and have to leave again. Back onboard the ship folks argue a lot, sit down and share dinner a lot, and even have a talent contest in which nobody is talented and everybody is bored to tears but desperately trying not to look it. The dinner scene is almost reminiscent of the classic first chest-bursting scene from Alien, but without all the cool stuff. In fact, without much of anything except for the eating and random statements from various crew members. Nielson tries to raise morale, or shouts a lot. Both happen constantly and often several times in the same scene. While he may have been trying to win an Oscar for demonstrating a wide range of emotion, he looks more like a desperate actor trying and failing to portray a schiztophrenic. In short, he's just being Leslie Nielson. Particularly lovely is the cockpit of the ship, which is just an empty room with an old chair in the middle and sombody holding up a handle attached to a long stick. Apparently in the future ships will fly themselves, but for the peace of mind of the crew someone will pretend to be in charge anyway. God help me, I loved this set. The film really picks up if we can skip all the crappy middle sections with the blob growing and the doctor (played by an obviously down-on-his-luck Patrick Macnee) expressing his awe with an obviously superior and misunderstood life form. When the entire crew confronts the monster face to face for the first time and the monster does the song and dance number, "I Want To Eat Your Face," the film gets, well, just plain funny. Thankfully the doctor dies by the end of the dance number, morbidly WAY too happy to let the monster eat him. Personally, I think he was realizing how stupid the whole thing was and couldn't wait to get off the set. We spend the next four hours or so (probably only a half hour but it felt interminably long) watching the crew get chased around the ship and eaten one by one. I'm not sure who survived the longest, but I do remember with a horrifying eeling that the one person who looked like he SHOULD have been funny but wasn't, John, a Chevy Chase look-alike, was none other than Bruce Kimmel, who also wrote AND directed this cinematic catastrophy. There's no more obvious way to win than to sing and dance, so that's exactly what the two remaining crew members do. We get to watch them sing and dance and lure an intrigued and beebopping monster into the target zone for the airlock, and then unoriginally blow him out the hole. The film ends without much fanfare, but I think there may have been yet another talent contest and I'm pretty sure we had to watch them eat breakfast one more time. One final thought. If this took place in the future and everything, who the hell decided that future space captains should be armed with six-shooters? ON A SPACESHIP?! It makes no sense, but then neither did budgeting this film, which is why it's here today. © 2005 actionplant.com. all rights reserved.
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