Forbidden World / Mutant (1982) ***½

     When I jokingly refer to New World Pictures (or, to a lesser extent, Filmgroup, Concorde-New Horizons, and New Concorde) as the Roger Corman Academy of Film, I’m not just acknowledging the extraordinary number of significant directors, writers, producers, and so forth that got their start there. All of Corman’s companies were deliberately set up to foster the emergence of new talent— although the later firms obviously did so less successfully or reliably than their predecessors. Let me give you a concrete example of how it worked in practice…

     One Tuesday during the production of Galaxy of Terror, Corman paid a visit to the main set representing the interiors of the Mission Ship Quest. That set was nearing the end of its allotted span, slated for partial demolition and redressing over the coming weekend. But after looking the place over for a bit, Corman instructed the crew to leave everything as it was until Sunday. He had a plan, you see. Allan Holzman, one of the New World film editors, had recently let it be known that he wanted to try his hand at directing, and the boss had decided to give him a shot. Holzman would get four days to write a seven- or eight-page script suitable for about two actors, structured so that it could function as either a self-contained short, or as the opening scene of a modestly budgeted feature film. He could have the Galaxy of Terror set on Saturday for principal photography, plus a free hand to raid Battle Beyond the Stars for completed special effects footage. Then, if the results were up to snuff, Holzman would have the next three months to prep the rest of the picture, by which point there’d be room in the New World release schedule for a new sci-fi movie. That was the origin of Forbidden World, an Alien cash-in which test audiences saw (in a slightly variant cut) under the title Mutant.

     A similar training-camp approach applied to practically all of Forbidden World’s behind-the-scenes aspects, too. Line producer Aaron Lipstadt pulled double duty as second unit director, not least because Holzman wanted to recruit an ally against Corman’s stinginess by getting him invested in the creative side of the project, instead of just the bean-counting side. Dennis and Robert Shotak, who usually built and filmed miniature models for New World’s visual effects unit, got the job of creating and operating Forbidden World’s full-scale creature puppets as well, although they received reinforcement later on from low-budget monster-master John Carl Buechler, who was originally hired to handle the gore makeup. The screen treatment was co-written by Jim Wynorski, who in those days was mainly employed cutting trailers, and special effects technician Don Olivera ended up on camera, wearing the robot suit that he built for the test reel. And of course Forbidden World was by no means exceptional among New World productions in any of that. Indeed, I believe that Corman’s general willingness to let just about anyone in his employ try on just about any hat, so long as they could make a reasonable case that it might fit them, goes a long way toward explaining why his companies’ output so often feels like a labor of love, even though the vast majority of the films in question are tawdry exploitation programmers. Rarely do you find one (at least prior to about the turn of the 90’s) that wasn’t somebody’s chance to prove themselves, and people trying to do that are apt to give even the most cynically designed project their all.

     Anyway, once you understand that Forbidden World was made in two phases, separated by a matter of months, it looks a little less unreasonable that its pre-credits sequence has so little to do with the rest of the film. Aboard a flying saucer that we’re not supposed to recognize as Nestor’s ship from Battle Beyond the Stars, robot pilot SAM-104 (Olivera) responds to an emergency warning signal from the vessel’s computer by cuing up some relaxing classical music onto the PA system, and leaving the bridge to awaken its master, space ranger Mike Colby (Jesse Vint, of Deathsport and Silent Running), from hypersleep. The emergency in question is an oncoming squadron of Fu space pirates, whose fighters we’re not supposed to recognize as Sador’s, and whose command ship we’re not supposed to recognize as Cayman’s. Mike and SAM may be outnumbered, but their ship is greatly superior to the Fus’ in terms of protection and firepower. The pirates don’t last long, but no sooner are they vanquished than SAM informs Colby of more bad news. While he was sleeping, orders came through from Federation headquarters cancelling the vacation on which Mike was just about to embark. Evidently there’s trouble at a biological research station on Xarbia, of exactly the sort that Colby specializes in.

     Federation headquarters ain’t kidding. As lead scientist Gordon Hauser (Linden Chiles, from Eye of the Cat and Mr. Twistedface) explains upon Mike’s arrival, his team was doing research aimed at solving the galactic agricultural crisis; apparently humanity has found it challenging to feed itself ever since the species spread out beyond the homeworld. Xarbia’s sole indigenous lifeform is a fantastically prolific bacterial strain known as Proto B, and the hope was that the genes responsible for its phenomenal fertility could be spliced into the DNA of food crops fit for human consumption. Somehow or other, though— Hauser won’t specify, and his associates, Doctors Cal Finbergen (Fox Harris, of Warlords and Repo Man) and Barbara Glaser (June Chadwick, from The Comeback and Headhunter), are unwilling to oppose him by blabbing themselves— work at the station got diverted into another channel. The team’s latest Proto B hybrid is an animal of some kind, and this morning it escaped from its cage and massacred all of Hauser’s other lab critters. Currently, the thing is sleeping off its rampage inside a cocoon in the main genetics lab; the fact that it crawled into a specimen incubator in order to do so suggests that it has both acute senses and mammal-like intelligence. But as for what the creature actually is, Gordon and his staff can’t help Colby there, even if they weren’t trying to keep secrets. You see, Hauser’s creation is a metamorphic mutant, meaning that it reshuffles its genome wholesale at each new stage of its growth and development. Whatever it may have been when it chewed up all those rats and rabbits, it’ll be something else altogether when it emerges from its cocoon.

     We’re the only ones around to witness it, but the metamorph wastes little time in demonstrating that anything it can do to bunnies, it can do to humans as well. Now that Colby has seen the carnage in the subject room, a lab tech by the name of Jimmy Swift (Michael Bowen, from Night of the Comet and Mortal Passions) is given the thankless task of cleaning it up. The creature hatches while Swift is at work, attaches itself to his face, and eats his cerebrum right out of his skull. Incredibly, however, Jimmy isn’t technically dead when his girlfriend and fellow technician, Tracy Baxter (Dawn Dunlap, of Laura and Barbarian Queen), notices his plight on one of the monitors that security chief Earl Michaels (Scott Paulin, from Vampire and Grim Prairie Tales) should have been watching, but wasn’t. Finbergen can’t figure out how Jimmy could have survived such an injury even as a human vegetable, so he hauls Swift off to the medical lab at once to investigate. Meanwhile, Mike, Earl, and engineer Brian Beale (Child’s Play’s Ray Oliver) seal off the genetics lab, and go over every cubic inch of it looking for the creature. It isn’t there, nor is there any indication of where it might have gone or how. Maybe Finbergen should have looked deeper inside Jimmy’s hollowed-out skull before whisking him away.

     That night and the following morning, Colby sees action of a different sort when first Dr. Glaser and then the ostensibly bereaved Tracy throw themselves at him. Mike’s tryst with Barbara ensures that he misses all the excitement when Earl is ambushed by the mutant while he thinks he’s hunting it, but the thing comes for Colby and Baxter next, right when they’re starting to get serious about making their steam bath even steamier. Nobody, the audience included, gets a clear look at the metamorph on this occasion, but it’s definitely grown a lot since making off with Jimmy’s frontal lobes. At the very least, it’s big enough and strong enough now to batter its way out of the sauna, and into the open air of Xarbia. The preparations which humans require for extended activities in the thin Xarbian atmosphere give the creature time to undergo another metamorphosis, and by the time Colby, Hauser, Beale, and SAM catch up to it, it’s turned into something like a cross between a giant spider, H.R. Giger’s adult alien, and the droppings of a grizzly bear with dysentery. This time it’s Hauser’s turn for a fate grosser than death, as the mutant drags him along with it while breaking back into the station via one of the exhaust vents for the life-support plant. Even worse, the creature is able to follow that vent straight to the main control room, effectively depriving the crew of its use for the foreseeable future.

     With their boss out of the picture and their asses more obviously on the line than ever, the surviving researchers at last come clean to Mike about how this whole mess started. The non-Proto-B component of the metamorph’s genome? It’s human. Specifically, it’s Hauser and a fourth scientist named Annie Best (represented in photographs by Susan Justin, who composed and performed Forbidden World’s memorably strange score). The team merged Proto B with one of Hauser’s sperm, and implanted the resulting hybrid into one of Best’s ova. Then, astonishingly, Annie volunteered to carry the embryo to term in her own womb. Let’s just say it went badly, which is why Colby never got a chance to meet Best. The important point for now is that the human contribution to the creature’s DNA could mean that it’s even more intelligent than it’s already shown itself to be. Glaser thinks that may be an opportunity as well as a threat, though, insofar as it introduces some possibility of communicating with the mutant and negotiating a settlement. Colby and Beale think that’s ridiculous. Especially now that Finbergen has discovered that the creature alters its victims’ genes so that instead of ever dying from their wounds, they degenerate into fast-growing, ever-multiplying blobs of undifferentiated protoplasm— apparently the metamorph’s favorite food— they’re more determined than ever to shoot it, burn it, blow it up, electrocute it, or whatever else it might take to kill the fucking thing. Cal has an idea about that, too, as it happens, only it’s not something he wants to talk about, for fear that the others will revolt at the plan, and try to stop him.

     John Carl Buechler said it best, I think. In an interview appended as one of the special features on the scandalously swank Shout! Factory Blu-Ray disc of Forbidden World, he assesses the film thusly: “This is a sleazy ripoff of Alien. Yes— but it’s the best sleazy ripoff of Alien ever made!” It is a film completely without ambition to be anything more than what it is, which makes it a bit unusual among New World Pictures’ output. There’s nothing here to match the sharp wit of Piranha, the madcap absurdity of Death Race 2000, or even the stoner mysticism of Galaxy of Terror, let alone the surprising, subversive substantiality of The Student Nurses or the intoxicating visual artistry of The Velvet Vampire. The film it most resembles is probably Humanoids from the Deep— but you may recall that I’m among the few unapologetic fans of that much maligned exercise in hideously poor taste. Nasty, brutish, and short, Forbidden World really is the movie that Galaxy of Terror is often mistaken for by people who know it only for the infamous Rapeworm scene, but for me this is one of those situations where vice is virtue. Meanwhile, as was generally the case at New World, Forbidden World exhibits a journeyman craftsmanship and efficiency that renders its scuzziness more genuinely shocking than it would have been in something half-assed and inept. Its grossout sequences and gratuitous sex scenes have the technical acumen behind them to be legitimately repulsive and legitimately erotic respectively, and Cal Finbergen’s desperate final gambit to destroy the monster is a minor masterpiece of grindhouse provocation.

     All that said, there are a few high points to Forbidden World that you don’t have to be a reprobate to appreciate. Although this is truer of the pre-release cut than of the final version, there’s some good, understated humor in the dialogue. (Indeed, that understatement was apparently what led to so much of the humor getting snipped. Corman, who attended the test screenings as was his wont, thought the audiences were mocking the movie whenever they laughed at a joke that he didn’t get.) Fox Harris is an oddball delight as Finbergen, his performance having a bit of the same flavor that I look for from Jeffrey Combs. There’s an interesting tension between the scientists at the station and their support staff, making Forbidden World one of the few Alien copies to retain the original’s subtext of class conflict. For that matter, since Mike Colby is an atypically proletarian space hero, the sex scene between him and Barbara Glaser takes on an unexpected hint of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And I’ve already mentioned Susan Justin’s nifty music, which deserved to get cannibalized for future projects almost as much as James Horner’s New World scores, but seemingly proved too intimately specific to this one ever to be used that way in practice. My favorite small highlight, however, is the revised characterization of SAM-104. In Mutant, SAM’s dialogue was rendered by some sort of electronic voice synthesizer. It was a neat idea, but the technology was in its infancy in 1982, and almost everything the robot said came out as a nigh-unintelligible burble. So for Forbidden World, SAM was looped by someone with the androgynous voice of a twelve-year-old boy; I wish I could tell you who, because they had a tremendous impact with only a few lines. It completely changes the interpersonal dynamic between Colby and his mechanical sidekick, in a way that’s difficult to explain. The only point of comparison I can think of is Peppermint Pattie and Marcy in the “Peanuts” cartoons of the 1960’s, with SAM playing Marcy’s role. It’s such a peculiar departure from all the cheap 70’s and 80’s sci-fi flicks that tried (and mostly failed) to ape R2-D2 and/or C-3PO! So while it’s pointless to deny that Forbidden World is calibrated very precisely to the tastes of filth pigs like me, I do think it has something to offer viewers of slightly more genteel sensibilities.

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