User Reviews

This is an 86 minute, low budget feature that's at least an hour too long. As a 20 minute film festival short with a plot to match that length, Interplanetary would have been pretty amusing. It's a visual homage to the fake looking sets and costumes of bargain basement sci-fi cinema combined with a satire on corporate culture. There's only one laugh out loud gag in the whole script but the ultra-cheesy look and irreverent sensibility are delightfully incongruous and that would have been enough to sustain a flick that came in well under half an hour. Extending it for another hour beyond that is as painful as stretching a midget on the rack. The humor dies on the vine and the attempts to fill out the story with drama are laughable, but not in a good way.

This is the tale of the wage slaves of Mars Base Two as they get caught between a Martian fossil, a secret lab of evil experimentation and an alien beast that apparently discovers it's a nudist as the movie goes along. There's a bit of bare female flesh at the beginning and a bit more of cheap-looking gore toward the end. The best members of the cast come off like they'd be good at community theater and the rest are clearly in this thing only because they know these filmmakers and will work for Spam. There are a couple of nice shots but most of Interplanetary is the work of people with more ambition than talent and will only impress others of the same stripe. As a movie, this is better than strictly amateur efforts but remains a clear step below professional standards. You'd have to call this semi-pro cinema.

The friends and family of the folks who made Interplanetary probably enjoyed watching it and I wouldn't begrudge them that. Foisting this quality of film on the general public, however, is flatly objectionable. No disinterested viewer could possibly like this unless they were stoned and/or retarded. There are just too many lame scenes that pound the life out of every good idea writer/director Chance Shirley poured into this motion picture. Again, at 20 minutes long and with a reworked story that emphasized the few promising elements here and dispensed with everything else, plenty of film festival crowds would have applauded it. At 86 minutes, most the crowd is going to walk out on it.

In the past, when mainstream movies were quite limited in the amount of sex and blood they would show, there was at least some reason for exploitative crap like Interplanetary to exist. What's the point of making something like this now? There's no market for it and no one in Hollywood is ever going to look at it and think the people responsible for it deserve their big show business break. It's like a modern day radio drama. If you want to produce one as a hobby, that's fine but you can't expect people to pay money for it like legitimate entertainment.

And by the way, I watched the trailers that came on the Interplanetary DVD and they were the single worst conglomeration of worthless, unwatchable garbage I've ever seen in one place at one time. The combined budgets of these wretched flicks had to have been less than the price of a back ally handjob and they couldn't have been more asinine if they were all written, directed and performed by donkeys. If flicks like those are your usual diet, you'll likely think Interplanetary is the greatest story ever told. You also shouldn't be allowed to vote. Unless you are a struggling, low budget filmmaker and want to see how bad it can be when you exceed your capabilities, stay away from this movie.

Despite the appearance of being a low-budget '70s film, 2008's "Interplanetary" is actually a comedy in the vein of "Dark Star". Deliberately low (one might even say "Cormanesque") production values, including low-quality audio, fuzzy cinematography and bad '70s hair & clothing styles, are the framework for slyly humorous performances ably-executed by a cast of unknowns.

This film had me laughing from start to finish, for all the right reasons. Though perhaps not everybody's cup of tea, more sophisticated fans of both comic and classic science fiction should not pass this one over.

Although this film is not rated, you should be aware that this film contains nudity and simulated sex acts (nothing terribly offensive however, unless you're offended by the concepts of nudity and sex in general), so you should treat it as R-rated.

A motley assortment of men and women live and work together on a base on Mars for the Interplanetary Corporation. Things are pretty dull and unexciting until one day the crew find themselves under attack by not only a lethal group of strangers, but also from a vicious reptilian humanoid alien beast. Writer/director Chance Shirley relates the enjoyable story at a brisk pace, pays affectionate tongue-in-cheek homage to endearingly tacky low-budget 60's era sci-fi schlock, maintains a winningly sharp sense of brash humor throughout (the opening black and white life on Mars documentary is a hysterically cornball hoot while an inspired running gag about censored profanity provides a wealth of gut-busting belly laughs), and delivers a generous sprinkling of cheesy gore as well as a smidgen of yummy gratuitous female nudity. The enthusiastic cast attack the campy material with real zest, with especially praiseworthy work by Mia Frost as spunky mechanic Beth, Kyle Holman as rugged take-charge cook Jackson, Michael Shelton as likable lunk Steve, Melissa Bush as uptight executive Lisa, Sylvestor Little Jr. as the easygoing Jones, Kevin Van Hyning as smarmy jerk Kevin, Lisa Mason as huffy company vice president Lori, and Amanda Myers as the lusty'n'luscious Michelle. The deliberately static cinematography by Steve Ashlee and Chris Hilleke makes nifty use of lovably flat and crummy master shots. Eric McGinty's spirited pulsating score hits the stirring spot. An absolute riot.