Shit I Haven’t Seen #1: FORBIDDEN WORLD

Director: Allan Holzman
Screenplay: Tim Curnen, R.J. Robertson, Jim Wynorski
Starring: Jesse Vint, Dawn Dunlap, June Chadwick, Michael Bowen
Release Date: 1982


ALIEN rip-offs were a dime a dozen back in the early 80’s, and no one was more proficient at churning them out than B-movie mega-producer Roger Corman. Through his independent outfit New World Pictures, he released a variety of spins on the same story, all with lurid titles like GALAXY OF TERROR, THE TERROR WITHIN,  DEAD SPACE, and the subject of this review, 1982’s FORBIDDEN WORLD aka MUTANT. FORBIDDEN WORLD is a cheap, sleazy, fucked-up little movie, filled with poorly defined characters, a veritable checklist of monster movie clichés, bountiful full-frontal female nudity, and buckets of gooey, gory, sloppy slime and slippery entrails. Basically, everything I love about 80’s sci-fi horror, wrapped up in a nasty, undignified bow.

Our hero, Mike Colby, Intergalactic....guy who gets laid... a lot. Or something...

In the distant future interstellar bounty hunter Mike Colby (Vint) is awoken from hyper sleep to answer a distress signal from the planet Xarbia, home to a genetic research station that has developed a synthetic strain of DNA called “Proto B” as a means of staving off a food crisis. The end result of their research is a life form deemed “Subject 20”, a metamorphic being that escapes from it’s enclosure and kills all of the lab animals before cocooning itself inside an examination booth. Once it hatches it goes on a killing spree, picking off the personnel one by one in grisly fashion, by injecting them with the “Proto B” strain, causing them to slowly break down on a molecular level until they are reduced to gelatinous piles of pure protein, a human slurpee which “Subject 20” sucks up for sustenance.

Just another day at the office at the "Inhuman Abomination" factory.

Mike immediately decides to kill the creature, but is met with resistance from the scientific team, because damn it, they’re doctors! Really, I don’t know why they don’t want him to kill it. I guess they just needed some reason to add an additional layer of conflict to the plot, or something, but all it really adds is a scene in which Dr. Glaser (Chadwick) convinces Mike to think it over one more night using nothing more than her rockin’ tits. Cue unnecessary (but sexy) montage set to the strains of some delectably sleazy synthesizer music.

So, the plot is pretty much horseshit. Do you think a dumb assistant is going to poke his head into the examination booth with the creature? Are there two scientists with diametrically opposed viewpoints, one who wants to destroy the creature, and another who wants to preserve it for the sake of science? But most importantly, do the two female scientists show their boobs? In case you were wondering, the answers are yes, bingo, and hell yeah, and bush too!

A terrified geneticist attempts to ease the tension in this absolutely necessary scene from FORBIDDEN
WORLD.

 I’ve gotta give the filmmakers credit for coming up with such a horrific and original way for “Subject 20” to dispense of the cardboard cutout characters. The goo flies fast and furious, and once it starts oozing, it never stops until the end credits, which are actually superimposed over a shot of flaming goo, so I guess it doesn’t really stop at all. No one dies quickly in this flick, and they usually leave a volcanic trail of viscera in their wake. I’d have to say at least eighty percent of this flick’s budget went towards the purchase of several metric fuck-tons of KY jelly. It  certainly didn’t go anywhere else. Many of the sets are re-used from GALAXY OF TERROR, and the walls of the lab’s corridors are made of Styrofoam take-out boxes from McDonald‘s breakfast menu, no bullshit, just freeze-frame that shit on bluray if you don’t believe me. The model shots of the spacecraft in the opening space battle are re-purposed footage from BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, another Corman production. And the monster! My God! It starts out as a leechlike creature that burrows straight into one poor chap’s skull, and by film’s end resembles H.R. Giger’s ALIEN design as recreated by Mrs. Gertman’s kindergarten class, by which I mean papier mache, a trash bag or two, and the previously mentioned metric fuck-ton of KY jelly. Legend has it that producer Corman, ever the penny-pincher, had a whole bunch of sets left over from production on GALAXY OF TERROR and asked Allan Holzman to pitch him some ideas that they could film as quickly and cheaply as possible. The movie was literally thrown together in the span of about a month, and it shows.

"Subject 20" poses for a picture with his number one fan.

I was incredibly refreshed by how un-PC the whole movie was. Mike, the film’s hero, is an uncaring douche bag who has no trouble bedding both women on the base. At another point in the movie, the two female scientists decide their male counterparts have got it all wrong, and they should attempt to communicate with the creature rather than destroy it. Of course, they discuss this while one gives the other a very sensual massage. While naked. While taking a golden shower. Okay, it’s actually some kind of weird golden laser-water, but if that isn’t a metaphor for getting peed on, I don’t know what is! Point being, the scene has no point other than to titillate. That’s this movie in a nutshell. Cheap thrills with absolutely no moral value whatsoever. It’s also the only movie of this type I can think of that is crazy enough to have it’s protagonists kill the creature by force-feeding it a cancerous liver that they mere moments ago violently extracted from a screaming mad scientist who was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.

For some reason the film's original tagline "Smearing a snail trail of terror across the screen!!!" never caught on.

So if ya dig that kind of unabashed misogyny coupled with an overabundance of plasma spewing from orifices both human and alien, give this flick a shot. It’s cheap, disgusting, poorly acted, and ridiculously fun. The filmmakers certainly weren’t taking this seriously when they made it, and neither should you.

My Rating:
7/10 (though it should be noted there is definitely a curve involved here)