Rating: D-
Dir: Phillipe Mora
Star: Harold Pruett, Rutger Hauer, Brion James, Joan Chen
Hauer and Chen have teamed up before to good effect in low-budget SF – chuck in James, and you can’t knock the cast. The material, on the other hand…”asteroids” which possess Earth atmosphere, normal gravity, and look a lot like Arizona? For it’s SF merely in name; swap Stetsons for the space-suits and this could easily be the Californian gold-rush, since what you have here is an unofficial remake of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Chen (wearing very well, I must say) tries to cash in on Hauer & James’s mine, only to find there are worse claim-jumpers than her around.
It’s almost as if Mora bought a job-lot of special effects and worked out what to do with them later. He isn’t helped by a hero entirely lacking in personality, especially next to the three previously mentioned actors, and he’d have been better concentrating on the paranoia between the various factions, an idea briefly raised. Instead, it’s uninteresting to-ing and fro-ing – oh yeah, and Rutger becomes a samurai at the end, for reasons that escaped me, and might have been connected to him stumbling into a cactus during filming and having to have his scenes completed digitally. My attention probably wasn’t all it could have been by that stage.