By 
There are movies you discover as an adult that you admire with all of your big adult brain. There are movies you discover as a child that shape and form your entire movie outlook for life.
Then there are movies that you discover on VHS at the age of eleven, with a belly full of microwave pizza and zero critical faculties. You don’t choose these movies. These movies just happen to you.
Spacehunter, or to give it the correct title – Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone – is one of these movies.
Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone
There is no other way to describe this movie other than as a “fixture”. A fixture in the VHS rental ecosystem of the 1980s. One that consisted of gas stations and convenience stores as much as it did dedicated VHS rental stores.
Here is where Spacehunter could be found in its natural environment.
The box was always a little sun-faded, the tape always a little warped, the tracking always slightly off. Yet, in the event of all the new, good, movies being out on rental already, somehow I always came back to this.
I must have rented it enough times to hit double figures.
And look, it’s another one of those 1980s movies that, objectively and as a movie is not good… yet it is also somehow kinda great.
Like many of its 80s peers that we have already talked about here, like Iron Eagle or Space Camp, this is one of those movies that exists in a specific cultural crack in our lives.
It also exists in a specific Hollywood bracket that came about after Star Wars changing everything and Hollywood then desperately tried to catch up by throwing money, rubber costumes, and cocaine at anything that could be called a “space adventure”.
Spacehunter is a film that can only have come from one thought process:
“What if Mad Max… but space?”
So welcome to the Forbidden Zone. Please wipe your feet. Or don’t, as we are not sure anyone in it really cares.
Enter The Wolff
Peter Strauss stars as Wolff.
Yes, just Wolff, because surnames are for pussies. Wolff is a space bounty hunter and smuggler with worse luck and fewer shirts than Han Solo.
When there is an accident on a space cruise ship, three women escape and crash on a planet where they are taken by space slavers and taken to the Forbidden Zone, which kids today would describe as less zone and more vibe.
It is a post-apocalyptic junkyard, with spikes, bones, and an aggressive anti-moisturiser policy.
Through a series of unfortunate events he will be forced to team up with Niki (Molly Ringwald).
She is a scrappy teenage scavenger and space tomboy who exists to prove that even in the bleakest dystopian hellscape, someone will still be extremely Molly Ringwald.
Also on his team is Washington (Ernie Hudson), a black space cowboy from before black space cowboys were cool. He treats every situation like it might end in a bar fight or a sermon.
They are up against Overdog, who is played by Michael Ironside with the energy of a man who has read the script, hated everyone involved, and decided to make that entirely your problem.
And that is about it. That’s the movie. They drive through hell. Things explode, and every so often someone throws something at the camera because Spacehunter was made in 3D! In the 1980s!
This means it was filmed around the same time as Last Movie Outpost classic punching bag Jaws 3D. This was a strange time. A cursed time. A time when Hollywood inexplicably thought red-and-blue glasses were the future of cinema.
Everyone else soon realised it was a migraine delivery system.
The cinematic experience back then involved spears, rocks, and miscellaneous debris being hurled directly at your face every five minutes, because the technology demanded constant reassurance.
Unfortuntely this was also the time of VHS, and at home none of this 3D worked, so movies ended up with this weird vibe where characters aggressively threw things at the camera every so often.
Strauss is fine as Wolff. He has the square-jawed seriousness of a man who absolutely thought this might be his Star Wars.
His Wolff is all stoic grit, and because of those the movie forces him to be around, this comes off as perpetually annoyed. He commits, and in this movie, commitment counts for a lot.
Ernie Hudson is, as always, a reliable delight. He has warmth, humor, and a sense that he realised what was really going on and decided to get through it with sheer charisma.
Like in Ghostbusters and The Crow, he gives the film something of a heartbeat that, at times, keeps the movie alive when it starts to creak.
Molly Ringwald here is pre-Brat Pack, pre-John Hughes royalty, pre-everything, really.
She’s young, scrappy, and radiating the kind of natural screen presence that makes you go:
“Oh. Right. That’s why she became Molly Ringwald.”
Even covered in dirt, dodging mutants, and working with what this movie has given her, she still feels like a star waiting to happen so her downstream success is no surprise.
But let’s be honest. We’re all just here for Michael Ironside.
Ironside delivers a performance that can only be described as weaponised discomfort.
As a mutant overlord slaver with a lair full of enslaved women and a deeply unsettling aura, this is not a fun villain. This is not a cackling villain. No moustaches will be twirled.
This is a villain who makes you shift on the couch and consider checking the locks.
He plays Overdog as a mix of cult leader, sadist, and HR nightmare. Every line reading feels like it might end with a restraining order.
He really is too good for the movie. His intensity belongs in a different, better film.
This all somehow makes Spacehunter better. He elevates the trash by dragging it into something genuinely disturbing. You don’t laugh at Overdog. You endure him. Which is exactly the point.
Every single 80s sci-fi movie requires a robot. Spacehunter does something weird to the teenage boy who stumbled across this on VHS by making that robot inexplicably sexy. I mean really, really sexy.
What the hell were they trying to do when they came up with the character of Chalmers?
With the 80s hair and the look of Kelly Le Brock wandering around naked underneath a man’s shirt. It simply wasn’t fair on our hormones.
Junkyard Chic
Visually, Spacehunter is a glorious mess. The Forbidden Zone looks like someone dumped a post-apocalyptic illegal organ and weapons market onto a soundstage and then set it on fire.
Everything is rusted, spiked, or dripping. Costumes are aggressively impractical. Armor is designed to injure the wearer first.
And yet… it works in that very 1980s way where texture matters more than logic.
You can actually smell this movie. This is pre-CGI, pre-cleanliness, pre-anyone caring about health and safety.
Real things explode, real people sweat, and real stuntmen regret their life choices, all in real time.
Spacehunter was comparatively expensive, very ambitious, and positioned as a big deal at the time.
Critics were unimpressed. Reviews ranged from lukewarm to outright hostile.
The film was tagged as derivative, messy, and more interested in spectacle than substance. It was average at the box office. Not a total disaster, but not a triumph. It just quietly killed any dreams of a franchise without anyone needing to say it out loud.
In a normal world, that would have been the end of it. But the 1980s were not normal. Thanks to VHS, Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone achieved immortality.
Home video changed everything, for both us as kids and for this movie,
On VHS, Spacehunter found its people.
It became the movie we rented again but we couldn’t quite figure out why. The movie you remembered loving without much of it really sticking in your head.
Freed from theatrical expectations, its flaws became features and its rough edges became charm, its ambition endearing,
So Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone is not a hidden masterpiece. It is not an underrated classic. It is just a scrappy, overreaching, deeply 1980s space oddity that survives on VHS nostalgia, and Michael Ironside making everyone uncomfortable.
Sometimes cinema isn’t about perfection. Sometimes it’s about rust, sweat, sexy robots, and the memory of rewinding a tape you rented for $2.50 and watching it again anyway, just because.
The post Retro Review: SPACEHUNTER (1983) appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
