Forbidden World (1982)

Ever had a feeling of déjà vu while watching a movie that you are sure you've never watched before?  Well, I had that experience while watching Forbidden World (1982) the other day.  Now, I have no conscious recollection of ever having seen this typically cheap and cheerful B-movie from Roger Corman's New World Pictures, before.  Yet, at several points in the film, I had a feeling of familiarity as scenes played out, as if I could vaguely remember them from a previous viewing.  Not the entire film - just a few scenes and snatches of dialogue.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the scenes that seemed most familiar were a sequence based around the remote space lab's solarium, which featured a lot of entirely gratuitous female nudity and a sex scene.  I just felt sure that I'd seen these exact scenes before, despite the rest of the film being unfamiliar.  Obviously, this could be down to the fact that Forbidden World is entirely derivative, clearly a knock off of Alien, but with a much, much lower budget - nothing about it is original.  But that still doesn't explain the familiarity of those particular scenes, which, to be fair, have no direct equivalent in Alien.  It could simply be that I'd, at some point, seen Dead Space 1991, which is pretty much a remake of Forbidden World, (this time for another Corman production company, Concorde), probably on one of those dodgy Roku streaming channels I frequent.  In fact, it uses more or less the same script, with a few minor tweaks and different character names, (not to mention a bit less nudity).  It also has a slightly higher profile cast, including Marc Singer and Bryan Cranston in an early role.  Not that it had a bigger budget - like Forbidden World, an opening space battle is actually re-edited footage from the Corman produced Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), (Forbidden World was actually directed by Battle Beyond the Star's editor).

To get back to the film itself, I have to say that Forbidden World is actually a pretty entertaining seventy seven minutes of low budget mayhem.  There's absolutely nothing original about it, but films don't have to be original to be enjoyable - it's what they do with their obvious source material that matters.  Forbidden World concerns an intergalactic trouble shooter sent to a research facility on a remote planet to assist them with some unspecified problems they've been having.  It turns out that in the course of their research to solve the galactic food shortage problem, the scientists at the base have inadvertently created a constantly mutating new lifeform, which has killed all of the lab's animals.  The chief scientist insists that the situation is now under control, as the creature has entered a cocoon state.  Of course, it rapidly hatches and starts eating its way through the cast as it mutates into a larger and even more vicious form.  The debt to Alien is obvious: a xenomorphic menace, a confined space and a limited cast of characters, with the plot's main mechanism simply being 'who's next on the menu?'  But the execution of these familiar elements is pretty decently done, despite the film's clear lack of resources, with the cramped looking sets (some borrowed from another Corman production, Galaxy of Terror (1981) and designed by James Cameron) and low key lighting combining to create a suitably oppressive and claustrophobic atmosphere.  It also moves along at a decent pace.  Moreover, at risk of being an unreconstructed sexist pig, the sex and nudity certainly help things along.  The cast is perfectly adequate for what is required of them and the script is actually pretty decent, the dialogue not too clunky, the plot unfolds reasonably logically with plenty of well-timed revelations to keep things moving and provides a reasonably original resolution to the central menace.  Forbidden World might not tread any new ground, but it is an enjoyable B-movie and a good example of the Corman formula for low budget productions in action: cheap and cheerful, utterly unpretentious and all the better for that.