• Written and directed by Howard R. Cohen
• Starring
  • Vince Edwards
  • David Mendenhall
  • Drew Snyder
  • Patsy Pease
• Produced by Roger Corman

You’ve probably heard childless people say, “I like kids, as long as they’re not mine,” by which they mean that children are fun as long as you can send them back to mommy when they cry or soil themselves. On the other hand, I, as the father of two (soon to be three), loudly proclaim that I like kids only if they’re mine. I feel no protective obligation toward other people’s kids, nor even the slightest inclination toward putting up with them. There’s a biological bond between me and my own kids; there’s nothing between me and other kids except empty air, and the more the better.

Or, as I’m fond of telling people (and you should see the ghastly looks I get), “Kids? They’re like attention-deficit midgets with an impulse control disorder. I can’t relate to that.”

Which brings us to the current movie, which features one of the most annoying excuses for a “cute kid” in cinematic history.

We open on some planet or other, a dry place with a colony run by The Company, the mega-corporate entity that, at the rate the real world is going, will be the least fictional element of this movie in the future. Our supposedly-adorable ragamuffin is playing around in some kind of warehouse right beside the cargo spaceships, catching a stop motion Space Bug in plastic cups. We later find out that his name is Peter, but I consistently thought of him as That Damned Kid, a twelve-year-old with shaggy brown hair. The actor is David Mendenhall, who spent much of the eighties doing the same “cute kid” schtick in such movies as They Still Call Me Bruce and Going Bananas; his main acting talents appear to be the ability to stare straight ahead with his big doe eyes, and occasionally, at the off-screen cue of the assistant director, to break forth into a big chipmunk-cheeked grin. As you may imagine, his career petered out entirely toward the end of that decade, as whatever quality is was the people thought he had melted away.

Into the warehousey place run a five-man crew of charming space rogues — sort of an entire ship’s worth of Han Solos. You’ve got the grizzled leader Hawk (Vince Edwards), the obligatory woman (Patsy Pease), and the obligatory large-brained alien (I don’t know which one he was, because I don’t remember anyone ever calling him by name). And yeah, they’re supposed to be rakish space rogues, but that vanished really fast for me because they shoot about a bazillion Company guards in their attempt to steal one of the freighters. Given that we’re not exactly dealing with Stormtroopers here, just Corporate wage-slaves, I’m finding that a little hard to justify, any more than I could shrug off a gang of hoodlums walking into Wal-Mart and blowing away a score of blue-vests just so they could lift a Sony 27″ TV.

Anyway. As the loudspeaker blares on about a “security breach” (security? what security? you’ve got twelve-year-olds wandering around collecting bugs in this supposedly secure area!) and laserblasts fly, That Damned Kid ignores repeated warnings from both sides of the conflict to get the hell out of the way. Instead, when one of the thieves opens the hatch to the nearest freighter then ducks for cover, the kid meanders over and wanders in, just for the hell of it.

I think you can see where this is going. Once the thieves get aboard and away from the planet, and deal with the expendable member of their crew who caught a laserblast, they look up to see the blank-faced little cretin. “Can you take me home now?” he asks.

As you may have gathered by now, I wasn’t exactly sympathetic to That Damned Kid’s plight.

After another ten minutes of the kid doing nothing but getting in the way (aw, gee, ain’t it cute?), Hawk promises the kid they’ll get him home, and he becomes the grudging mascot of the crew. Boy, that Hawk’s some man of honor; he’ll massacre corporate employees by the busload to steal a freighter (which, it turns out, was empty after all — nice job, guys), but he’ll deliver that kid back to his home somehow, no matter how many of his crews’ lives it costs. (Hint: There’s not a very big Going Away Party when the kid gets home at the end.)

Peter’s father, meanwhile, is a middle managers with The Company, and his abduction is their excuse to try out their new computer-controlled big-ass warship, which will be able to track the ID card Peter has around his neck. (Cue long, Star Wars-ish panorama of the warship, culled — as was all of the space footage — from Battle Beyond the Stars. As was the James Horner soundtrack, by the way.)

The thieves go to the big Space Scum Space Station (no, they didn’t actually call it that), which houses a low-rent version of the Star Wars cantina. Further wackiness ensues as 1) That Damned Kid keeps deciding to wander around, leaving his room, entering restricted areas, etc., and 2) two other space scoundrels, recognizing that he’s a Company kid, try to snare him to ransom him.

Now, by this time, I thought the kid so innocently annoying that I thought the movie was evolving into a weirdly watered-down version of “The Ransom of Red Chief.” But apparently, I alone realize exactly what a clueless little troublemaker this kid is. Even as Hawk’s crewmembers get themselves killed in quick succession, they warm even more to the little cretin. Before they all die, they’ve managed to teach him how to drink beer, swear, and shoot asteroids. Isn’t that just precious?

Let’s fast-forward toward the end, shall we? I’m giving myself an ulcer. Not to give away any spoilers, but here’s a pop quiz: What space movie features a mop-headed kid who manages, in the finale, to learn instantly how to pilot and shoot better than seasoned adults, and miraculously shoots the big-ass bad guy ship right in its vulnerable place and blow it up?

That’s right, Space Raiders. Why, what movie were you thinking of?

Over the years, Roger Corman as amortized the cost of the space scenes from Battle Beyond the Stars over at least five other movies. I’ve got no problem with that; the scenes themselves are generic enough that you don’t immediately think of the movie from which they were borrowed (unlike Space Mutiny’s use of Battlestar Galactica footage), and they add more production value to projects made on the cheap. But by the same token, those space scenes don’t have enough verve and swagger to carry a movie, and this film’s script doesn’t do more than provide forgettable filler between unmemorable space battles. Neither feature provides enough sparkle to carry its own weight, much less the other half. And the kid…

Well, I think you know how much quality I think That Damned Kid adds to the proceedings.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 26
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 26
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • William Boyett (one of the two kidnappers) played a policeman on the TNG episode “The Big Goodbye,” and a policeman (what range!) on the TNG two-parter “Time’s Arrow”
  • Dick Miller (Crazy Mel, the briefly-seen used spaceship salesman) was also in “The Big Goodbye” as a vendor, as well as playing “Vin” in the DS9 two-parter “Past Tense”