Mike Colby (Jesse Vint) is an interstellar troubleshooter who is asleep in suspended animation when his android co-pilot awakens him with bad news: they are being attacked by alien ships. He shakes off the effects of his slumber and stumbles to the control room, then begins flicking switches to fire up the laser cannons and missiles, expertly targetting the assailants and blowing them out of space with keen aim. Once he is sure they are safe, he turns his attention to the message that has come through while he was out of it, and realises he has a new job to do...
On the Forbidden Planet! Oh, no it's not, it's the Forbidden World, which is completely different, obviously, as this is not a rip-off of a classic sci-fi movie from the fifties, it's a rip-off of a classic sci-fi movie from the seventies instead, that being Alien. This in spite of that opening which appears to hail this as one of those cheapo Star Wars copies thanks to its lifting special effects footage from Battle Beyond the Stars, although they were allowed to do that because it, like this, was a production from Roger Corman's New World studio. But put space battles to the back of your mind when watching the rest of this, as there is an icky monster to contend with.
Our hero has to investigate the escape of a mutant from a laboratory on the planet of the title, which by the time he has arrived there, has apparently been trapped as it has placed itself in an incubating chamber and is currently doing a bit more mutating in a cocoon of its own making. For some reason, although it has been proven to be extremely dangerous, the staff off the lab don't opt to destroy it - well, the main reason would be to ensure the story continued for another hour at least, but the reason in the narrative is that they wish to study it. Damn you science, always creating more problems than it solves! Or it does in films like this at any rate, where as in fifties sci-fi it is to be approached with suspicion.
That's the extent of the analogies from movies made thirty years before, for this anyway, unless you count the characters hurrying away from the beast resembling such runarounds as It! The Terror from Beyond Space. But it's really the Ridley Scott market Corman and company were heading for here, something for exploitation creators that was even more lucrative than taking their inspiration from George Lucas. Besides, there was no nudity in his saga, and if there's one thing that these auteurs liked to add in their works to spice things up, it was the presence of ladies not wearing any clothes. The ladies in question here are Dawn Dunlap and June Chadwick, who even by the standards of the day were given a raw deal by the script.
Not only do they have to disrobe for the flimsiest of excuses, but they have to act like morons in spite of a monster being on the loose, which should by all rights have sharpened their senses but here appears to make them stupider. Hey, let's go and communicate with the massive toothy creature, yeah, that's not going to end in tears, is it? Mind you, the nominal hero, Colby, isn't much help either, and aside from having his wicked way with both the female characters (can't be much to do while out on that there Forbidden World) doesn't really help until that last five minutes. This is a very short feature film - it was drastically trimmed by Corman before release - so maybe much of Colby's usefulness hit the cutting room floor, but he actually only comes into his own when the dying doctor (Fox Harris) finds a use for his cancer, allowing the film a minor footnote of notoriety. Music by Susan Justin.
