Astro Loco (2021)

Popcorn From Outer Space has a slightly rigid monthly structure to it. The main goal of the blog and it's overriding purpose is to serve as kind of digital journal for my project to work my way through every single movie considered the worst ever made. Wanting to expand things a little bit I started covering slightly obscure or unpopular Disney movies and low budget, flimsy licenced movies available to watch for free on video streaming portals; "Free to Watch" week. Each month I pick one film from these 3 broad-ish categories to cover and I watch it. That leaves me, intentionally, with a spare week where I can just watch and cover whatever the hell I please and to be honest it breaks things up a bit and makes Wednesday movie night a bit less of a chore. I've used this time to fit in Howard the Duck, a movie I really wanted to watch for ages and finally got chance to schedule in. And I loved it. Thanks, me. But I've also used it to cover a wide variety of different kind of movies; 80's Sci-fi cult classic: Short Circuit, 2015 micro budget B-Movie: Killer Piñata (as part of a yearly Halloween themed side event: Spooky Season), and 1983's Turkish ET knock off: Badi, which was... awful really... But this week, I'm pivoting slightly to a movie that I hadn't really planned on covering at all but just so happens to have found it's way onto my watchlist purely because of how bollocks it looks: Astro Loco. A 2021 low budget sci-fi / space exploration movie about "a ship computer that has to develop a sense of humanity in order to manage a break out of cabin fever amongst the crew." The trailer is truly something special to behold and I have genuine high hopes that this is going to be craptacular. I get the most fun out of this blog when I either watch something I thought was going to be bollocks and it winds up being really great or when I watch something that is genuinely so terrible and unfathomly bad that it's hilarious. The latter doesn't happen very often if I'm honest, I usually just get wound up... but there is a chance, a chance, that this could be the latter. There is only ever really one way to find out...

After an absolute bonkers music intro, we are introduced to a... International group of Astronauts and their onboard ship AI: Hetfield (Jon Repp) and it's extremely southern drawl accent... who are all onboard the spaceship Araya on the way to Jupiter, or one of it's moons; Callisto to be more precise. It's clear despite being only 2 years into their journey that there already exists some tension between the crew and their Captain, Odd (no really, that's his name... Frank Handrum) and after some kind of 'external disturbance' impacts the ship Odd goes to investigate, and after repairing the damage is captivated by a strange asteroid floating nearby. On returning to the ship it's clear he isn't himself again which raises a few suspicions amongst the crew and with Hetfield... When a distress signal is received by the Araya, they adjust course to investigate but that is put on pause for the moment because as increasingly desperate and negative messages are received from CEO: Dudbrook (Darren Casey) back at HQ, during a game on the main deck, Odd and one of the other shipmates, Sebastian (Nick Sun) end up in a fight when Odd tries to lecture them about 'positive thinking' which results in the rest of the crew joining in. They later learn that 2 of them are being made "involuntarily redundant" owing to the companies poor financial performance which only serves to increase the paranoia between each other that they are already experiencing. And after Rex (Hayley Dallimore) and Lucien (David Argue) dance with each other in the following scene, whatever parasite that potentially infected Odd has now infected them both. They then receive what might be made up videos from their family members despite Hetfield insisting the messages are real and... I'll be honest I have no fucking idea what's going on in this movie. It just seems to lurch from scene to scene... Anyway, after Odd goes bananas again, this time threatening to kill everyone, Rex decides she's had enough and locks him in storage taking over as commanding officer. Deciding that everybody needs a party in order to let off some steam, Hetfield arranges all crew members sans Odd to gather in the mess hall for drinks, which they do, which only seems to further spread the contaminent... I... think... it's quite difficult to tell really at this stage... but the party is interrupted when the Araya detects... itself... directly ahead of it's current position. As the crew speculate if the version of the Araya they see is one of themselves from the future it transpires to be the Petrozza, an identical vessel which they were supposed to rendezvous with at Callisto, Hetfield reveals to the crew that it was the Petrozza that sent the distress signal and that they have veered off course by thousands of miles to respond. Rex and Dasha (Dasha Naumova) make the decision to split off from the others and board the Petrozza... for some reason Rex starts to suffer from nosebleeds constantly at this stage... and once inside they discover the ships computer is scrambled, the whole crew are dead and there is some weird large insect thing - also dead - crammed in one of the ships compartments. On the way back to their own ship, Rex begins to go crazy herself, trying to kill Dasha, resulting in Dasha pushing her off course and away drifting into endless space. Once back on board, with Sebastian now in control they decide to move a conveniently placed cabinet to see if the same compartment they have contains a crazy huge insect only to discover hiding inside is Dudbrook...? Dudbrook reveals he accepted a role onboard the Araya in exchange for serving time in prison and that the company knew in advance the Petrozza hadn't made it to Callisto but that the Araya had to be fooled into thinking it had in order to complete it's mission so the company could still receive capital funding. Although there is no chance of them returning because the return journey can't be funded. Hetfield corroborates Dudbrook's story, that the mission was only ever to ensure the crew made it Callisto and not necessarily make it back. In retaliation, Sebastian shuts down the Hetfield's 'higher functions'. By questioning a now very basic and unintelligent Hetfield, Sebastain learns that the Petrozza suffered a contamination which the company blames for the crews death and that Dudbrook was placed on board to avoid a repeat of the same contamination. Deciding that they need to lock Dudbrook away, the crew open the same storage locker to find Odd is now a crazy big insect himself, but they throw Dudbrook in there and lock him in anyway. Suspicious of Sebastian, Dasha and Lucien make the decision to reboot Hetfield who confirms the company knew nothing about humans being turned into giant insects... back in the mess hall, the pair are proven right to be suspicious when Sebastian starts to turn weird (even by this movies standards...) and suffers the same nosebleeds as Rex. They hatch a plan to lock him inside the recreation room but when Lucian bursts in there to disable the lock, Dasha locks him in with Sebastian before she starts to foam at the mouth like Odd did. Locked inside, Lucian and Sebastian decide to play a game of squash whilst Sebastian - now possessed - explains that they are an alien species protecting Callisto from human inhabitation and after proclaiming that they also have to make sure no-one lives to tell the tail, he transforms into a giant insect and lunges at Lucian but is presumably killed by Hetfield before he can kill him. Lucian wakes up and Hetfield informs him that he's slipped into an artificial black hole that was accidentally created when it killed Sebastian. He explains that Dasha is now full insect and providing Lucian with roller skates and a helmet instructs Lucian to lead the insect to the trash compacter. Returning Lucian to the Araya, the insect gives chase and we have a roller skate chase scene... that ends when Lucian tricks Dasha-insect into flying head first into the trash chute. In the closing scenes, Lucian learns that he's likely infected too, there is no hope of rescue and that they lack the means, and fuel, to make it back to Earth. Hetfield asks Lucian a favour before he dies, and agreeing, Lucian heads to Petrozza and reinitializes the computer so that Hetfield and the Petrozza can communicate for the rest of eternity and - as he makes his way back - Lucian decides to take his fate into his own hands and instead of returning allows himself to drift off into space as Hetfield demands he return to the Araya...

Yeah... this was a weird one. Even by my obscure tastes... surprisingly bleak ending as well. Maybe I just didn't get it? Or maybe the humour was completely lost on me? But this was just strange man. Like really strange. And I feel like the acting left alot to be desired... I wouldn't go so far as to say it was terrible because, well I wouldn't say it was but I just... didn't get it? I'm not really sure what I just watched? Was it supposed to be funny? Was it just a sci-fi movie? I don't know.

I think let's address the biggest issue first of all. I spent the first half of the film just trying to figure out what the fuck was going on? It seemed to just jump from scene to scene without any really coherent storyline and was just stuff happening for about the first 40 minutes until the movie started to draw together for the remaining hour and the contaminant storyline developed. But initially it was just a weird sequence of confusing and illogical events. It all sort-of built to what was happening in the conclusion but it was a struggle initially to try and make sense of what was actually developing.

Some of the acting in this thing was pretty bad. I think maybe David Argue could just about walk away with some credibility left in tact but pretty much the rest of this cast gave the impression that they had no idea what they were doing. I thought initially some of the accents were maybe put on! But I take it back actually as it transpires everybody in this film was talking with their native accent... more or less... so uh sorry, but yeah there was a lot of slightly cringey moments and some cheesy overacting going down. Combine that with what felt like a complete lack of effort from some of the other cast members and yeah the painfully obvious low budget-ness was on full display. Trying not to be un-necessarily cruel here, but it was a bit painful to watch in moments, although not necessarily bad, just average.

Storyline-wise, accounting for the aforementioned point, eventually developed into something semi-decent. Even if there was just a bunch of things going on in the beginning that were difficult to make sense of. It was kept incredibly short and incredibly basic, but with the help of some mega exposition fleshing things out halfway through I'm willing to give the movie a bit of credit and say that there was at least an effort to build a coherent plot. I feel like it was mostly a skeleton upon which all the other weird / goofy shit was kind of sewn into but there was a plot. There was a story that was told from start to finish.

And I think therein is where I have my biggest problem. I just didn't get it. Maybe the humour is completely lost on me, but it was just conversations and some mildly goody situations sounded out via dialogue. I err... didn't get it. I've never watched Red Dwarf (yeah, sue me) cos it's never really appealed to me but I kinda feel they were trying to go for the same vibe here with a kind of sitcom level comedy but it just wasn't funny. Not even like, a little bit. And then there was the really bleak feeling ending where Lucian just drifts off into space. Tonaly it just felt really off and weird like a bad taste joke told at a funeral, and the deceased died horrifically.

In terms of production though, things were pretty decent! There was a couple of moments where I got the feeling the Araya was a cool little model being dangled on a string, and everything else was pasted in post prod, but in a way I kinda liked that. And it was a pretty detailed model. You never really got a full on clear shot of the insects but what you did see looked genuine enough and not totally fucking stupid. And for the most part, I think it might have been a lot of green screening, but it felt like it was set onboard a ship in space. Despite being obviously low budget, the effects looked pretty decent I thought. Feels like enough attention was put in to make it as professional as possible with the tools they had to work with.

Yeah, bit of a weird one this. Not quite sure what I should, or do... make of it. Like on the one part maybe it was just completely over my head and I didn't get it? Or maybe, just maybe it was a really fucking shit movie? And I'm trying to give it some credit? I can't in good faith say any of the acting was particularly good. I mean, it was average, passable, but that's about as generous as I'm going to be. But I just didn't get it. And I sort of just tried to make sense of it with a confused interpretation of what it was I watching. And then that ending sort of left me like: "oh..." Really odd little movie that I feel a bit uncomfortable about to be honest. Like leaving an awkward exchange with somebody who's language you don't speak. That kind of uncomfortable. I dunno? 1 out of 5?