Space Truckers (1996)

That was an excellent one.

hyped garbage

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

This is a good B-Grade film, and there are many reasons to watch it.First, and the reason I watched it: Debi Mazar is gorgeous and gets plenty of quality screen time.Second: the story line is interesting and imaginative.Third: the special effects are more than decent when one considers the mid-range success this film's creators would have been aiming for.Fourth: the acting from the main pair (Charles Dance & Dennis Hopper) was spot on - considering this film was meant to be a space adventure/comedy.Fifth: the design of ships and cargo carriers was very good.Sixth: almost all of the dialogue was well written.Seventh: the film should provide many laughs all the way through.So why the terrible 4.9 rating? Is the film badly edited and hard to follow? Absolutely not. On the contrary this side of things was very well handled, and the film is very easy to follow with no errors of continuance.Did the film suffer from bad casting? Definitely not, and both Charles and Dennis would be irreplaceable in my opinion. Remember Dennis Hopper's terrific one liners in Water World? Well, he repeats that performance here in Space Truckers. Besides, we get to see Dennis play a heroic character for a change!Does the film suffer from a lack of character development like some reviewers have said? Utter rubbish! I can't say much here that would not give elements of the outcome of the story away, but I will say that if you miss character development in this movie then you didn't watch it properly.And one last thing; this movie is close to the mark as far as the reality of our world is concerned. Technology has created power for some people that we should all be very concerned about, and while Space Truckers is a comedy, I felt it hit very close to home on a few fronts.

Space Truckers is too vulgar and raunchy for the art house crowd, too clever for the great unwashed, and too silly for anyone expecting to be convinced that they're watching "real" science. The lines are deliberately dorky, the special effects entirely unconvincing (who cares?), and the movie adds up to complete absurdity. I've seen it more than once, and it gets funnier every time. For people who complain that Dennis Hopper must have been really hard up to have agreed to do it, what about Charles Dance, a superb actor (Mr. Tulkinghorn in the new PBS "Bleak House")? They seemed to get the jokes, played it with zest, and managed to make it fly. I thought it was hysterically funny.

I am a great fan of films that don't take themselves too seriously and space truckers is definitely one of these. I could see Dennis Hopper actually revelling in his cheesyness mainly because he normally takes on very serious roles. The costumes were exaggerated (charles dance for instance) and the graphics, although quite gaudy were actually pretty good for its time. I liked the design of the killer robots with their face mounted death rays and karate chopping antics.A fun film with silly antics. Good stuff7 / 10

I love a good movie (or bad in this case) that knows it sucks, and revels in that fact by going to the extremes of B-cheesieness.Of course if you go in expecting a space opera and end up with a rodeo, you're going to be upset. Don't set any expectations and just have fun with this film.