Forbidden World

There are three Roger Cormans. The first Corman is the director Corman. Working primarily at American International Pictures, young Corman was famous for being able to crank out competent, successful films on time and under budget with a surprising consistency. Although Corman’s name is often associated with drive-in schlock, in my opinion, most of what he made was, at the worst, adequate for the intended purpose of entertaining the teenagers. And on occasion, Corman directed some genuine classics of genre cinema. His Poe films with Vincent Price, for example, are some of the best Gothic horror films you’ll find.

The second Corman is the producer Corman. It was inevitable that Roger would eventually move into the role of producer. In that role, he trained and guided an impressive legion of young filmmakers, including directors like James Cameron, Ron Howard, and Francis Ford Coppola. Corman handled it old school, making them learn the ropes before they ever got to direct their own movie. Editing, screenwriting, second unit director — you had to do it all before Corman let you take the helm, and you had to show that you understood the value of a dollar. Corman would give you the money if you could justify needing it, but he wasn’t one to throw dollars around just for the hell of it. Roger Corman the producer signed his name to more bad films than Roger Corman the director, but once again, if Corman was producing and actually interested in the project, chances were that it would be an entertaining movie, at the very least.

Then there’s the third, and current, incarnation of Roger Corman — the executive producer. This Corman has been responsible for more bad than good, and his involvement as nothing more than a money man is evident in the laziness of many of these productions. Still, some of them are worth a watch or two, so even Corman the executive producer is giving us something with some sort of entertainment value.

Forbidden World sees us graced with the presence of the second Roger Corman, the hands-on producer, and Corman’s personal interest in this, his Alien rip-off means that, while Forbidden World is cheap and derivative, it still delivers exactly what undiscerning viewers like myself hope for from such a film: some goofy sci-fi trappings, a silly monster, gore, and the sort of gratuitous nudity that was so common in the 1980s. On top of all that, the story of the making of the movie is classic Corman. He was producing another sci-fi movie, Galaxy of Terror, which filmed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of the week (Corman has some convoluted but ultimate logical system to the days on which he would shoot a film, that precluded filming on Monday and Tuesday). The spaceship bridge set of that film was scheduled to be struck over the weekend, but when Corman showed up to poke around and see how things were going, he decided that there was no reason to strike the set over the weekend when he could use it to film another movie.

Anyone familiar with the production history of Corman’s nonsensical but oddly hypnotic The Terror knows this is familiar territory. Legend has it that Roger Corman finished directing The Raven and found that he still has a couple days left on the lease for the location and on Boris Karloff’s contract. So Corman had everyone stick around, dashed off a bizarre script in a matter of hours, and in something like three days, shot an entire second film with his leftover time. Similarly, with Forbidden World, Corman thought the spaceship set for Galaxy of Terror was too nice not to squeeze a little more use out of. He approached one of the cogs in his production machine, a young man named Allan Holzman. Holzman had been working with Corman for a little while, and Corman knew the guy was eager to direct a film. So the deal went like this: Allan had a couple days to write an eight-minute or so opening scene to an as yet unplotted, unnamed movie, with the scene to be filmed over the weekend before the Galaxy of Terror set was broken down. Holzman jumped at the chance, dashed off eight minutes worth of movie, and thus was born the opening that would become Forbidden World.

With the crisis of a perfectly good set going to waste averted, Holzmann was given time to come up with a script proper, working with Tim Curnen and a few other new faces at the production house, including future one-man exploitation film factory Jim Wynorski (who was also working on Sorceress for Corman around the same time). Corman’s primary input in the screenwriting process was, “I want to rip off Alien.” Pretty much everyone was trying to rip off Alien in one way or another back then. While Star Wars is the film everyone knows changed science fiction and became a cultural touchstone, so on and so forth, Alien probably produced more direct copies, single-handedly ushering in the era of science fiction horror that would give us movies like Forbidden World, Lifeforce, Split Second, and Event Horizon—to say nothing of the countless dozens, maybe even hundreds, of films that just stole Alien‘s plot wholesale.

Not everyone was happy with the blend of bloody horror and science fiction that came in Alien‘s wake, but as a kid who loves both genres and thought of the transformation as little more than a gorier revival of the sort of scifi-horror films that were popular int he 1950s, I rolled with it well. It’s especially easy with Forbidden World, a movie where gore is sillier than it is disturbing and the screenwriters were so obviously delighted with every gag, melted face, and gratuitous nude shot they could cram into the film. It really is the perfect B-movie—silly but oddly competent, cheap but determined to look fancy, dumb but also clever, and of course, full of nudity, monsters, and gore. Also, as was required by law in the early 1980s, there are special effects scenes stolen from Battle Beyond the Stars.

Battle Beyond the Stars is probably the best investment writer/director/producer/cult movie legend Roger Corman every made. Sure, he had to spend a lot, at least by Corman standards, to pull off all those special effects shots and cool spaceship models, but once that initial expenditure was done, he was able to take those special effects shots and use them over and over, in just about every movie he produced in the 1980s. Hell, somewhere right now, someone is probably splicing a random shot of a Battle Beyond the Stars spaceship into a romantic comedy, just because they can. The opening space battle sequence in Forbidden World, which incidentally has pretty much nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie, features both special effects sequences lifted from Battle Beyond the Stars and the set borrowed from Galaxy Terror, the existence of which is the sole reason Forbidden World was even made. There’s something positively sustainable about it.

Jesse Vint (Macon County Line, Deathsport) stars as Mike Colby, a space marshal with a vaguely defined job description that mostly seems to consist of flying around while chatting up an adult size robot with a little kid’s voice, making Mike Colby the first wisecracking space ranger type to design his robot sidekick after the Omnibot 2000 instead of a Playboy bunny. It’d be way less disturbing for a grown man to have a robot that looks like a porno model, like that awesome robot lady from Spacehunter. But a plastic robot with a kid’s voice — ick. And it’s not even like they’re pulling some Ghost in the Shell tachikoma shtick where the robot is an artificial intelligence that has to grow and learn, and thus starts off with the voice of a child. It says and does perfectly normal adult things, but then speaks in the voice of a kindergartner. Why would a robot designer do that?

After dispatching with some of Roger Corman’s stock footage, Colby is assigned an actual mission. A remote research lab is sending a distress call, and only one man can get to the bottom of whatever those pesky eggheads are up to: Mike Colby. Answering a distress call from a mysterious research colony in a movie called Forbidden World should conjure up memories not just of the crew from Alien answering a mysterious distress call, but also of the granddaddy of all “space guys answer a mysterious distress call” movies — Forbidden Planet.

Colby shows up at the research lab, which is staffed by a couple old guys, a couple buff guys, and a couple sexy ladies in spandex who like to scrub one another down in the shower, as will be the style once we get to the future. Also, a Black guy who, as is often the case, seems the most reasonable of the bunch, thus dooming him immediately. Although everyone seems happy to have Colby on hand, no one seems particularly keen on letting him do his job. It seems the ruckus has been caused by one of the lab’s bio-organisms, which escaped its incubator and went on a killing spree amongst the other lab animals. That seems like precious little cause to send in the galaxy’s “number one troubleshooter,” but then, when you see how ineffective Colby is at everything related to his job, perhaps this is one of those cases where his superiors telling him how awesome he is and how important his mission is, when in fact everyone knows he’s a total screw-up, so they send him out on the worst and dumbest missions.

Colby is supposed to decide what to do with the now seemingly docile beastie, and what he decides to do is put off his decision in favor of dinner. While everyone is busy eating sponge cake with jam, the creature does its best to get some attention by killing some surfer dude (Michael Bowen). It turns out the guy is only mostly dead. It melts his face and skull and starts transforming his DNA into something hideous and covered in blood and mucous. Resident mad scientist Dr. Gordon Hauser (Linden Chiles) doesn’t think this justifies killing what he keeps vaguely referring to as this remarkable life form. Another resident mad scientist, Dr. Cal Timbergen (Fox Harris), is overjoyed to have this gooey new specimen to poke at while he chain smokes and jabs syringes into his own belly.

Colby, however, is determined to react with swift action to the murder. I mean, now that the beast ate a guy’s face — come on! But everyone seems pretty mellow about the whole “monster eating a guy’s face” thing, so Colby puts off any sort of substantial action once again, this time in favor of bedding sexy Abba-looking scientist Barbara Glaser (June Chadwick). While they’re busy getting it on, the facility’s head of security is busy watching them and playing with his yo-yo of sexual frustration. I can only assume that he’s as anxious to get a little of that sweet Colby action as both of the women seem to be. The mostly dead guy’s girlfriend, Tracy (Dawn Dunlap, Barbarian Queen) expresses her grief by wandering around in her space nightie, taking a steam bath while wearing sunglasses for no reason, and eventually also fooling around with Colby.

It turns out that the research center was working on inventing some sort of self-replicating food to solve the galaxy’s hunger problem or something like that, and I guess they created a giant man-eating Venus flytrap instead. Even with this thing scurrying around and ripping off faces, the scientists are still loathe to let Colby kill the damn thing. You know how Poindexters are. Luckily, Colby eventually decides that maybe it’s time to stop taking their advice on things.

As originally shot, and under the title Mutant, the movie ran a bit longer than the cut we know as Forbidden World. As the story goes, Corman and crew held an advanced screening of the movie, and it got a lot of laughs — which is not what Corman wanted. The screenwriters, however, had seen fit to pop some jokes and satire into the mix (I mean, one of them was Jim Wynorski, after all), but Corman wanted what he defined as a straight sci-fi horror movie. Furious, Corman stormed off to the editing suite and chopped all the jokes out of the movie, leaving it at a lean, mean 77 minutes. The crew was sort of bummed, but in the end, I think I prefer the “unfunny” version, which is still pretty funny in its own way.

Forbidden World comes to us from a time when low-budget films still aspired to look big-budget, and while no one will mistake Corman’s movie for any of the other sci-fi films that came out in 1982 (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, ET: The Extra Terrestrial, and Blade Runner being just a few of theexamples in a year that also saw the release of TRON, Creepshow, The Thing, and, umm, Megaforce). That said, it doesn’t look nearly as cheap as it was. I guess the Galaxy of Terror set that serves as Jesse Vint’s spaceship is a fair enough set to justify wringing a little extra work out of it (that set must have felt like Boris Karloff on the set of The Terror), and the entire research lab works in a claustrophobic sort of way. Sure, there was only the one hallway everyone had to walk down, and the walls were covered with painted containers pilfered from the McDonald’s down the street, but parts of it really are convincing as a cramped space research lab. Now, exactly why a remote research lab would have its own sexy sauna room is…well, that’s no mystery, is it?

The gore and make-up are quality, and the monster, for the most part, is a pretty good special effect as well. It can’t really move around, but when it’s just smashing its head through glass and bearing its fangs, it’s pretty good stuff. Again, in a year that saw the release of a Steven Spielberg film, Blade Runner, and TRON, the lo-fi practical effects of Forbidden World might not stand up to the test. No, you know what? Scratch that. Forbidden World‘s special effects are not as good as TRON or Blade Runner, but I’d pit them against ET any day of the week. Come on. ET looks like more of a puppet than the mutant in this movie, and that flying bicycle scene? Sure it was magical and inspired all us kids to ride our Huffys off a cliff, but that’s some shoddy special effects work right there. I’d take Forbidden World‘s foam-spewing mutant any day of the week, and Corman and his crew built that thing for less than Spielberg probably spent on those bicycles.

The acting is on par with the budget—it gets the job done. I like Jesse Vint. I always feel like he’s about to either kill me or offer me a bong. It’s fun to see him dress up and play space cowboy, even if it’s just a paycheck to him. He’s old school professional enough to give it his all. The rest of the cast is mostly forgettable, with the exception of Fox Harris as the twitchy, nicotine-gobbling doctor with the crazy hair. He seems to really be relishing his role. I might add him to my movie starring Kyle MacLachlan, Jeffrey Combs, and Crispen Glover. It’s a romantic comedy, a sequel to my romantic comedy starring Danny Trejo, Al Leong, and Billy Drago.

The ladies are there mostly to scream and get naked, and both do so with gusto. Neither of them are accomplished actors, but neither are they stiff and artificial. They’re wooden in a way that is sort of natural-seeming and ultimately winning. It’s a shame Dawn Dunlap didn’t do more. By all accounts, she was a bit of accidental casting, someone’s girlfriend who showed up after a long day of the casting director not being able to find any suitable actresses who were also OK with doing nudity and yelling at a giant monster puppet. Jesse Vint certainly seems to remember her fortuitous casting with fondness.

At 77 minutes, this movie rarely takes time out from cheap exploitation, and while the “creepin’ around looking for a monster” scenes are more tedious than tense, Forbidden World makes up for it in grand fashion by delivering bucketloads of exploding faces, vomiting aliens, and the most ludicrous/offensive way to kill a monster that I think has ever been dreamed up. Forbidden World delivers pretty much everything I could hope for from a Roger Corman film. He knew what we kids wanted, and in the 1980s, what we kids wanted was stuff we kids probably shouldn’t be seeing. And bless its heart, Forbidden World gives us that in spades.