Prisoners of the Lost Universe (1983)

Obviously, Dan, Carrie, Hartmann and Kleel are nothing more than weak carbons of Flash, Dale, Zarkov and Ming, while Dan's ill-assorted merry men seem to have been retained from Hawk the Slayer, Marcel and Robertson's last attempt at under-budgeted fantasy. One might expect straight-faced spoof from an opening set in a laboratory which looks like something from children's television, with a scientist who has lines like "Your programme is what I need to make those fools in the halls of science take my work seriously" and "Please, Miss Madison, the matter transmitter is a finely calibrated instrument", presently abetted by three characters blindly stepping by accident into another world. Sadly, Vonya turns out to be a particularly boring crossbreed of the Middle Ages (Kleel's swaggering warriors) and the Old West (the villain's Fort Apache hideout). The plot, meanwhile, staggers through the walk-on appearances of a few mild monsters, until winding up in blithely genocidal fashion with our heroes eliminating every man, woman and child in Kleel's tribe.

First Published In: Monthly Film Bulletin vol.51 no.605 (June 1984) pp.181-182

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