'Classic' Film Review: Space Truckers

Read the full version of this review on Film Fubb.

CHARLES DANCE’S MOTORISED PENIS.

Now that I have your attention, I’ll talk about all the other brilliant aspects of Space Truckers.

Space Truckers is a gaudily coloured attempt at sci-fi, with an Alien meets Yellow Submarine meets Big Mutha Truckers visual style. Dennis Hopper is one such trucker, ferrying square pigs and floating beer around the solar system. After pissing off his employers InterPork, Dennis has no choice but to ferry a mysterious cargo to Earth, alongside fellow space trucker Stephen Dorff and young space waitress Debi Mazar, who’s agreed to be his fiancée in exchange for a lift. Of course, shit goes down. They get hit by asteroids, then captured by space pirates, then the cargo turns out to be an army of 5,000 deadly deadly robots. Bugger.

Admittedly, it’s a cracking concept, and one that could, with the right script and direction, be an entertainingly camp sci-fi comedy. And there are bits of it which live up to that premise. The killer robots are surprisingly not shabby – creepy, relentless killers reminiscent of the Terminator films.

Despite this, Space Truckers is guilty of some of the worst scenes in all of science fiction. Which brings me back to Charles Dance, who’s the real star of the show as a cyborg space pirate who very nearly could have been a well-designed villain. This potential is entirely squandered in what must be the weirdest sex scene ever, in which Tywin Lannister himself reveals that his penis needs to be cranked up with a lawnmower-style cord. No, really. There’s an awkward delay as he tries to get his lesser-used reproductive systems ‘operational’. With classic lines like ‘I emit a low amp electrical wang pulse designed to drive women wild with pleasure’ and, later in the film, ‘If I had an anus, I’d probably soil myself’, it’s a role Nicolas Cage would have been ashamed to take.

To be honest, I bloody love Space Truckers.