- Directed by Russ Mazzolla
- Written by Benjamin Carr
- Starring
- Michael David
- Anthony Furlong
- Robert Garcia
- Peter Barent Lewis
- Alison Lohman
- Produced by Kirk Edward Hansen
- Executive produced by Charles Band (uncredited)
In the late ’90s iteration of the Full Moon entertainment empire, funds were getting scarcer and scarcer, and keeping production values up to even the level of a cheap B-movie got tougher and tougher. Planet Patrol showcases a strategy for upping the bang-for-buck quotient that is at least as old as Roger Corman: amortize the cost of your footage! Take stuff you shot for an entirely different production, and edit it in with fresh (cheap) scenes! The results are very rarely anything approaching quality cinema (see Raptor), but hey, at least it’s something that can fill a video rental box. And that’s really the goal here. Isn’t it?
The Planet Patrol was introduced in the previous year’s Kraa! the Sea Monster (1998) as an interstellar police body, protecting the Earth and any number of other planets from space-faring menaces and such. Well, what was actually introduced to us was a single four-person team of said police body, four teen agents sitting on a backwater space station and watching a lot of stuff happen. Just to recap, the four patrolmen (patrolpersons?) are:
- Captain Ruric (Colton Scott), the tall, dark, and handsome commander who unfortunately couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag.
- Black’n’sassy Engineer Able (Candida Tolentino), who gets all of the Scotty lines about mechanical failures and other technobabble.
- Lt. Garth (Anthony Furlong), the blond surfer dude.
- Officer Curtis (Alison Lohman), the blonde, cute-as-a-button psychic. (Of the four actors, Lohman’s career has gone furthest since her excursion into Full Moon territory, with roles in such recent films as Matchstick Men (2003) and Big Fish (2003)).
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“Permission to stop holding my abdomen, sir?” |
The designated nemesis of these four space cadets is Lord Doom (Michael David), who is not only the ruler of the Dark Planet, he’s apparently 50% of the population. The only other citizen we see is Chamberlain (Jon Simanton), Doom’s pet dwarf and all-around lackey. Together, their main goal is to get off the chilly rock that is the Dark Planet and move somewhere more hospitable. (Insert the “swamp castle” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail here.) Why this inevitably means that they want to take over some unsuspecting planet, I don’t know; you’d think that these two guys could be content with a mid-sized condo somewhere in Florida. But that wouldn’t make much of a movie, would it? As opposed to what we actually have here, which… um… isn’t much of a movie.
Instead, what we have are three discrete episodes, almost as if the original concept were for a Power Rangers-style TV show, rather than a single direct-to-video feature.
Our first adventure comes when Lord Doom turns his attention to the Museum Planet. Yup, an entire planet that’s covered in marble hallways with “Do Not Touch” signs. At present, three workers are unpacking and cataloging a bunch of new acquisitions, and when the curator (Colin Campbell) comes along, the marginally smarter two manage to pawn their workload off on the nebbish worker Drass (John Williams). But Drass soon discovers, among the crates, a canister containing what looks like red strawberry syrup. He pours it out…
And we get footage from the first Subspecies (1991) of the little demonic-cow critters congealing! (Warning: For the sake of your sanity, DO NOT pay attention to how the floor in all of the Subspecies footage bears no resemblance to the floor in any scene of the current footage.)
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“That Reed Richards thinks he’s soooo clever…” |
Next thing we know, the Planet Patrol is being called in to investigate the murder of Dross! (Yup — an entire Museum Planet with nothing but a couple of robot security guards; they still need to call in outside muscle when something bigger happens.) Seems that the other two workers returned to find a Drass-shaped pile of disintegrated ash on the floor. The Planet Patrol teleports in (saves a lot of money on spaceships, you know) and starts investigating, which means that they stand around until clues present themselves.
In this case, the clue is a massive psychic assault on Curtis’ head, caused by the Subspecies critters — excuse me, they’re called “shape machines” here, which implies that the little bastiches chose to look like miniature demon cows — opening a secret panel in a wall somewhere in the museum wing and exposing… the Pickery Stone!
Yes, what we’re seeing is footage from Subspecies of the creatures opening the vault of the Bloodstone. Yes, the Bloodstone still looks like a cross between a half-melted cherry sundae and a Ringpop. Somehow, a name like “Pickery Stone” seems to do it justice.
The curator is aghast, because the Pickery Stone, despite its laughable name, is an artifact of great power that was hidden in the museum for safekeeping and never catalogued. But now someone is trying to abscond with it! The Planet Patrol’s great idea is to then personally search the entire museum by themselves. Well, the entire wing, anyway, but if it’s a museum the size of a planet, a wing has to be at least the size of Australia. Fortunately, they find some clues in the first place they look: the curator’s private office. It’s the Thermos canister that the shape machines came in! Could the curator be behind it all?
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In space, no one can hear you scream in pain from bad ergonomics. |
No, it turns out that he’s being set up, a fact that the brilliant Captain Ruric figures out when he realizes that the ashy remains of Drass are half a kilogram heavier than what should have been left behind by a disintegrator. The ash was planted — and Drass is still alive!
Yes, nebbish Drass is trying to get the Pickery Stone to Lord Doom, but to do so, he’ll have to go through — the Planet Patrol! Our climactic battle comes in the rotunda of the museum, where Drass uses the Stone to animate a T-Rex skeleton; Officer Curtis responds by animating the mammoth skeleton. All of which is footage cribbed from Doctor Mordrid (1992). It also explains why the security guards on the Museum Planet look so darned terrestrial, so they’ll match the footage of the guards being chomped.
The second story is, well, Kraa! the Sea Monster in its entirety (not hard, since Kraa! plays like an extended Planet Patrol episode anyway). Technically, the whole movie isn’t here, but the editing philosophy for trimming that feature down to a half-hour segment is bizarre: Instead of dropping out any of the plotlines — like the waitress and the Renaissance Man biker saving the earth, or the talking space mollusc assisting them, they merely shortened the movie as a whole by dropping out lines and transitional footage and the rare scene here or there, leaving a Cliff Notes version of the original movie instead of a segment that stands on its own well. (Thus, the fact that Mogyar the space clam speaks with a goofy Italian accent is never acknowledged or explained.) What results is even less compelling and comprehensible than the original movie — and given that Kraa! was an amalgam of three different productions itself, that’s saying something.
They even manage to leave in the embarrassing editing mistake from the original, in which the wrong spaceship footage is used at a climactic moment. Way to preserve the movie’s “authenticity,” guys.
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“Next time, I get to dip you!“ |
In our third adventure, Doom and Chamberlain decide to take over the planet Raspin, the last colony established by a mighty space empire before that empire petered out a hundred years ago. As such the colony has one of the last remaining “hyper-robots” — huge battle-robots used for defense. It’s a simple thing for Chamberlain to send a full-sized shape machine (was it really supposed to look that much like a “putty” from Power Rangers?) to gain control of the hyper-robot — and soon, the scorpion battlebot from Robot Wars (1993) is attacking a desert settlement!
In response, Ruric and Garth teleport in with a laser cannon mounted on a tank to stop the hyper-robot. Why? Mostly so they can use the footage of a futuristic tank getting blasted by the scorpion robot. And the next thing you know, Ruric and Garth have been taken prisoner aboard the scorpion itself, as insurance against attacks.
When the girls finally show up to rescue the boys, there’s much verbiage with the colony leader about how the scorpion shouldn’t have the shielding it does, and whether there’s anyone alive who remembers anything about the last wars in which the scorpion fought, and maybe how to defeat it. As luck would have it, one of the leader’s technicians has an antique battle computer from those days at home, which he pulls out of the attic and brings in for show and tell. (Time for the movie’s most embarrassing prop, as the “battle computer” is very obviously constructed from a length of furnace pipe.) Said battle computer happens to know where another battle robot is buried that might be able to defeat the scorpion, so we immediately go to footage of the antique, vaguely anthropomorphic robot bursting out of the ground, also as originally seen in Robot Wars. Interspersed with shots of the Planet Patrol girls in the cockpit, the two robots duke it out until the good guys win.
Our final wrap-up has the Planet Patrol teleporting into Lord Doom’s lair, and Ruric using his Captain Kirk combat moves on Lord Doom. Bad guys are captured, everyone’s happy, the credits roll.
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Sometimes, even ol’-fashioned cuteness can’t save a movie. |
This movie managed to instill in me a newfound respect for Doctor Mordrid and Robot Wars. I originally found both movies to be less than good, but seeing their FX shots edited into this new crud makes me nostalgic for movies I had previously derided.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 1
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 28
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- dwarfs: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
- Jeff Rector (”team leader” in the Kraa! footage) played “Alien 2″ in the TNG episode “Allegiance”
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