Saw this years ago and decided to pick up the DVD. It's the sort of movie that occupies the 2 AM time-slot on the Sci-Fi Channel. We begin with 6 girls manning an interstellar cargo ship. Unfortunately, their navigator is a bit too lazy/impatient to wait four extra minutes for the computer to finish checking their course, so they fly right into an asteroid field. For some inexplicable reason, one of the asteroids is surrounded by a cheesy looking energy field. I'm no spaceship captain, but I would think that if you wanted to avoid asteroids, you might want to navigate between them. However, the captain (Shannon Sturges) heads straight towards the one with the energy field and skims over the surface at high speed. For some reason they have to jettison all their fuel, but they do survive their encounter. Considering that the navigator's negligence almost got them all killed, the captain warns her that if she ever does that again, she may be fired.
So, the only place they can stop to refuel is a penal colony. They receive scary radio transmissions in which they find out there was a riot, started by Convict 762, and there are only two people still left alive. While still apparently thousands of miles away, they bring up a video image of these two guys fighting on the surface. The image is rock steady and looks to have been filmed from twenty feet away. Now that is one heck of a telephoto lens! The guys are also dressed in comical looking barbarian space fighting suits. Oh yeah, this just keeps getting better and better. The captain wants to stop the fight, so she nearly runs the spaceship into the guys as she lands. As soon as the ship touches down, one of the guys is instantly aboard it. Maybe he beamed aboard? Maybe they never got around to filming a scene?
The central question of the movie is which of these two guys is Convict 762, and which is the presumably good guy. The guy who appeared aboard ship seems to be really nice, and agrees to help them refuel the ship. They fly to the refueling depot (fuel tanks inexplicably begin exploding under them as they pass over). They arrive safely and Mr. Nice Guy goes out and begins the refueling process. Okay, so now we've got 6 babes on a relatively safe spaceship, the prison outside is really scary and everybody there is dead. So what do the girls do? Why, leave the ship and go looking around the prison of course! They find some recently killed people, and one of the girls inexplicably wanders off. I seem to be using the word "inexplicably" a whole lot, don't I? They leave the dumbest girl onboard the ship, and she lets somebody onboard. Yup, just one act of brilliance after another. The rest of the girls return to find her slaughtered, and the other guy, we'll call him "creepy guy" (Billy Drago), lurking about the ship. So maybe he's Convict 762? They put him in their brig, leaving some girl to guard him. But then the navigator shows up and convinces the guard babe to open the door so they can go in and kill the guy. Of course they can't pull the trigger, creepy guy easily overpowers them and escapes.
So they try to lift off and leave the planet, but now there's some energy shield which prevents them from getting away. Time to go back into the prison and turn that thing off. I can't remember how many of them get killed in that little excursion, but their numbers are dwindling rapidly. Of course both of the guys get aboard the spaceship for the big showdown, and one of them is
apparently killed. Still not certain of which of them is the good guy and which is Convict 762, the captain decides to have sex with the remaining dude. Yup, a very trusting person. Turns out he's Convict 762, but then the other guy turns out to still be alive, so there's another big showdown. But wait, he's convict 762 as well! Then the origins of Convict 762 are explained, leaving me confused and unsatisfied.
Oh, by the way: If you haven't seen this movie yet, don't read that last paragraph.
I suppose you could make a drinking game out of spotting every act of wanton idiocy displayed in this movie, but you'd be unconscious well before the end. Somebody over at IMDb said they expected all the women to be wearing spandex outfits, like Wilma Deering in Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century, and I agree that would have improved the movie by a gigantic margin. The atmosphere wasn't bad, sort of claustrophobic and scary. Acting, well, I was so overwhelmed by all the stupidity taking place I could barely notice the acting. Billy Drago does a nice job as the creepy guy. CGI was fairly comical. Soundtrack was 2.0, but converts to a fairly good 5.1 track.
I guess you could find some amusement in this, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it
