Demented (Arthur Jeffreys, 1980)

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Deep Space (Fred Olen Ray, 1988)

It's been too long since I reviewed a Fred Olen Ray movie on this site. Ray, one of the most prolific b-movie directors ever, has a career stretching from 1978's The Brain Leeches to next year's 100 Dates in Dallas, which is in post-production now. Ray has also managed to stay afloat despite the declining b-movie ecosystem (this sad world of disappearing drive-ins and grindhouses and video stores and hollowed-out cable channels) by cranking out Christmas TV movies. If you search the archives of this site, you'll find posts about Ray's movies The Alien Dead, Biohazard, Armed Response, and Alienator, each one more entertaining than it had any right to be.

Deep Space, despite its title, takes place right here on earth and stars two of the great big-headed, square-jawed character actors, Charles Napier (The Blues Brothers, Miami Blues, Maniac Cop 2, The Grifters, Original Gangstas, and numerous films for Jonathan Demme and Russ Meyer) and Bo Svenson (the Walking Tall sequels, North Dallas Forty, Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker, Heartbreak Ridge, Curse II: The Bite, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, and both Castellari's The Inglorious Bastards and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds). It's a little more subdued and mildly less insane than most Ray films of the period, but I enjoyed its relaxed pace and smorgasbord of character actors.

In the (as mentioned above) misleadingly titled Deep Space, Ray combines the buddy-cop action movie with the monster-running-amok movie. The monster here is an alien creature (with a design heavily indebted to the Alien movies) that has been captured by the U.S. government (along with a few of its offspring) and sequestered in a capsule floating in space. The top-secret program is studying the application of using the creature as a weapon of war, but a major control-room snafu has sent its capsule hurtling toward earth. My favorite line of dialogue in this control room snafu scene? "Awww crap."

Meanwhile, a pair of L.A. detectives who play by their own rules but get results, Ian McLemore (Napier) and Jerry Merris (Barney Miller's Ron Glass), get in a shootout with some punks who are trying to steal some Halloween masks from a warehouse (including a green two-faced mask I owned as a kid). In classic '80s style, the shootout ends with dead punks, an exploding car, Merris saying "trick or fuckin' treat," and an exasperated captain, Robertson (Svenson), who takes their guns (of course) but lets them keep their badges (say what?). (I love a later scene where Merris asks if they should treat the captain better. When McLemore asks why, Merris says, "We're always mouthing off to him and doing whatever the hell we want.")

While our detectives are knee-deep in this hoopla, the alien capsule crash lands in the countryside near the city, witnessed only by an alcoholic hobo and two teens whose make-out plans are ruined by a flat tire. Soon, all their plans are ruined by the alien emerging from its giant roach egg cocoon, wrapping them in its projectile tentacles, and pulling them into its teeth-filled maw, crunching them to death. Robertson sends his wisecracking but results-getting detectives to the scene to check it out. The place is already swarming with emergency professionals, so, after checking things out and not getting any answers that make sense, our detectives who play by their own rules steal the egg cocoon things containing the younger offspring and take them to their respective houses. Why? That's just the kind of dudes they are.

The rest of the movie consists of the alien kicking asses all over the city, the detectives trying to stop it, and government agents trying to stop the alien and the detectives while keeping the whole thing secret. Instead of the wall-to-wall action you'd expect, Ray takes his time and gives you plenty of character moments and atmosphere. As people my age attempting young-people speak would say, it's more of a vibes-based movie, though Ray also includes multiple scenes of action and alien mayhem, including a scene involving a chainsaw. The point I'm awkwardly trying to make is that Ray emphasizes the quiet moments and the interactions between and personalities of his characters just as much as he emphasizes the b-movie craziness.

Some of these other characters include policewoman Carla Sandbourn (Humanoids from the Deep's Ann Turkel), whom McLemore seduces by playing bagpipes (McLemore: "that's the first time that ever worked"); scientist Forsythe (James Booth, whose extensive credits include five episodes of Twin Peaks as Norma's criminal dad), the head of the scientific part of the top-secret government program; General Randolph (Norman Burton, whose credits include Fade to Black, Mausoleum, Crimes of Passion, and Bloodsport), the military head of that program; The Howling's Elisabeth Brooks as the mother of one of the crunched teens; and several Roger Corman vets.

I also want to make special note of two other characters. Catwoman herself, Julie Newmar, plays Lady Elaine, a psychic who keeps trying to warn McLemore about the space monster. Ray must've had Newmar for only a day because she's never in the same room as any of the other characters, all her scenes take place in her home, and these scenes mostly consist of her calling the police station or the detectives at their homes.

We also get the late, great Fox Harris in one of his memorable weirdo roles as Professor Whately, an entomologist friend of McLemore's. Harris gets only one scene, but he tears it up. (I love this exchange between McLemore and Whately after the detective shows the professor the roach egg thing — McLemore: "This thing is not from our planet." Whately: "Something extraterrestrial?" McLemore: "No, it's from space.") Harris was a favorite of both Ray and Alex Cox. Cox featured him in Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Straight to Hell, and Walker, and Fox's other Fred Olen Ray movies were Armed Response, Evil Spawn, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Warlords, Terminal Force, and Alienator. Harris also appeared in Forbidden World, Wim Wenders' Hammett, the Neil Young/Dean Stockwell/Devo collaboration Human Highway, My Favorite Year with Peter O'Toole, Hal Ashby's Lookin' to Get Out, Dr. Caligari, and a Teri Garr TV special on Cinemax called Flapjack Floozie.

Now that I've bored you with credits, I'm going to keep talking about them. If you've seen any footage of Deep Space on a washed-out, panned-and-scanned VHS, the movie looks like dogshit, but in the properly restored version I watched last night, you can see the care put into it by cinematographer Gary Graver, a man who led a triple life. Graver was a friend, artistic collaborator, and tireless champion of Orson Welles in the last third of the man's life and career, and the cinematographer on many unfinished Welles projects and some real gems that saw the light of the day (in one case belatedly) like F for Fake, Filming "Othello", and The Other Side of the Wind. A passionate believer in Welles' projects, Graver poured a lot of his own money into Welles' work, using the proceeds from his other two parallel movie careers as cinematographer and director in the worlds of the drive-in/grindhouse/b-movie circuit for filmmaker/producers like Ray and Roger Corman and in the porn film industry. It's partially why so many of the movies he worked on look so great, especially compared to other cinematographers in those lesser-respected industries. I'm someone who loves art films and drive-in movies, and I don't think the latter get enough respect, so I'm a big fan of Graver's career in its totality. (He also worked on the camera crews of A Woman under the Influence and Enter the Dragon.) (A further digression: the old cliché about Welles never living up to his potential after Citizen Kane is such bullshit. If you're talking about power, success, and Hollywood clout, sure, but if you're talking artistic worth, Welles never lost it. Every movie of his is worth seeing, and many of them are every bit as good as Citizen Kane. His unfinished projects were the result of misfortune, economics, an industry that had partially turned its back on him, and his own outsized ambitions, not because of any artistic failure or erratic behavior.)

Back to Deep Space. It's not that deep and 99 percent of it does not take place in space, but it's a lot of fun if you like character actors, b-movie approaches to sci-fi/horror/action, and the fine art of bagpipe seduction. My letterboxd mutuals are not as enamored of Deep Space as I am, but maybe I'm just too sophisticated. Does your preferred Alien ripoff teach you the fine art of bagpipe seduction? I think not.