Nightflyers (1987)

      Nightflyers is a film based on a story by George R. R. Martin, who reminds us all what it would look like if Ernest Hemmingway quit writing to be a competitive Hot Pockets eater.

Or if Santa just stopped giving a fuck.

Rest assured, this film lacks any fantasy elements, unless being bored is your fantasy.  It stars Catherine Mary Stewart, who you may remember from Weekend at Bernie’s and Night of the Comet, and James “Uncle Phil” Avery, who was also the voice of Shredder. They are members of a space expedition who are looking for some intelligent entity in space.  Or something. It’s never really clear and they don’t ever find it, probably because they aren’t really looking.  Their spaceship is controlled by a shitty version of Hal from 2001 because it's really easy to put a little red light into a wall and nobody worked very hard on this shit.  However, this Hal is actually the consciousness of its creator, whose artificially grown son lives in a tube and is projecting himself as a hologram. The hologram totally falls in love with Catherine after watching her do the least erotic gymnastics routine in history.  Yeah.  The rest of the plot is also pretty idiotic. Here’s a highlight reel:

Uncle Phil gets his fingers chopped off in a mysterious oven explosion.

All four of them. Ouch.

David Copperfield gets his mouth split open by the laser machine from Logan’s Run.

Love that Joker.

And the last boss turns out to be Gozer's grandma, who has a face-lightning battle with her dipshit hologram son and loses.


I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.

The director of this movie abandoned it before production finished and refused to let them put his name on it.  It would be interesting to see how many of the actors actually put this celluloid abortion on their resume instead of, say, just wiping their ass with a piece of paper that had their name on it.

If you are like me, then you might be suckered into watching this by that bitchin' poster which promises an unholy celestial space demon who eats spaceships. I can't stress enough that nothing even remotely that cool happens in the film. It's like putting a Taco Bell sign on a church just to get people to go in. And really, I'm not sure if I'm more mad at the guy who made the Taco Bell sign or the church. I'm just left feeling confused and betrayed and I want tacos.

Go make me tacos, Uncle Phil.