Forbidden World

Well, before getting to the sci-fi monster stuff, Roger Corman and company decided "let's rape Battle Beyond the Stars" in this "follow up" to Galaxy of Terror, Forbidden World. It only delays the film's hero, Jesse Vint, and his little robot sidekick, from answering a distress signal (albeit reluctantly, since this was during a much deserved break) from a research installation with scientists experimenting with genetic engineering [natch] in developing an "extremely productive, entirely new food source". Guess what happens? Science goes terribly wrong and the result is a monster on the loose, growing at a rate those in its vicinity need to stop.

The "something that got loose" is called by the staff Subject Twenty and their lab looks as if a tornado set through it, all the animals used as test subjects slaughtered, bloody little bodies of rats and such sticking out of their barbarically destroyed steel cages.

It's called a "metamorph" by the scientists, short-form for metamorphic mutation. It put itself in an incubator, growing, mutating, evolving, and what it will change into will be quite....dangerous. All of this deals with genetic splicing, the result "Proto B", hoping to create such an ever-growing "food stuff", as to solve the "galactic food crisis", in turn giving birth to the monster metamorph which falls out of a cocoon, looking like a blob of gelatinous material that attaches itself to the face of a janitorial clean-up officer on the station (the dumb ass opens the incubator, leaving to talk with the superior science researcher, and finds an unfriendly menace awaiting). This is where the film gives way to monster mayhem.

"So fair is fair...get naked."

There's a high titillation quotient here with the only females in the cast more than willing to show off their naked bodies to a jovial Jesse Vint. June Chadwick (V) and Dawn Dunlap have a naked scene together where June cleans up the slime from Dunlap's hair. This is where they have a discussion about talking to the mutant monstrosity... There's also a weirdly edited sex scene between Vint and Chadwick interspersed with Security officer, Earl (Scott Paulin, who has had a sizable television career since this movie) who is peeping on them through the monitors, not satisfied to the point that he will climb into the air ducts to get a closer look, finding himself in the sights of the monster through a POV shot...

"Let's go bag ourselves a dingwhopper..."

Movies like this are rife with stupid human behavior, particulary from scientists who are supposed to have a level of intelligence. Most of the time it derives from curiosity and the yearning to learn about the unknown, the newly developed, an organism of intellect that they want to communicate, risking life and limb in order to do so. I just shake my head because the result is obvious, the welfare of those that try to study, who get too close, usually, typically, wind up mulch. You know that the moment scientist, Dr. Barbara Glaser (June Chadwick), goes into the control room to try and reach the creature, its enlongated form coccooning a large area (it now controls life support and operations that will keep the remaining humans alive until they are wanted for its nutrional needs) that she's toast.

There's an ingenious use of cancer to tackle ending the threat of the creature (its face black and slimy with large white chompers we never see sinking their way into human flesh, which is a shame) because a malignancy on a vital organ exists within the sickly geneticist, Dr. Cal (Fox Harris). He's the one who instigates the unveiling of a secret involving how human DNA from one of the researchers was used to splice with "foreign DNA", producing the metamorph. His fate is most unkind as he gives up his life without morphine, having to be cut open by Vint with a box cutter (Yikes!) so that the approaching creature (and a frightened Dunlap, whose scream of fear is most unnerving) will have a treat that doesn't digest well.

You know what I really liked was the gooey metamorphosis of human victims resulting from "interacting" with the creature, their bodies reduced to ectoplasmic sludge (I dug how you can see remnants of teeth and skull, acidically settling into an unshapable form). They even splinter off into multiple organisms, pure protein, good food stuff for the monster to eat when hungry.
The research installation is located on a barren planet with rocky hills; we get a slight look at it outside the main setting, but a great deal of the action is indoors. The sets look familiar, probably used by Corman's low-budget filmmakers from other movies before Forbidden World. The copy I viewed was named Mutant; the film also had strange uses of events that would happen throughout the movie played in snippets at the beginning and end like flashbacks to remind us of what we would and had seen...I'm just puzzled as to why.

I didn't rent this on VHS back when I was young, and haven't seen it during its current dvd release, but remember watching it on cable late one night back in the late 90s. It isn't really to me a sequel or anything to Galaxy of Terror because that one didn't deal with a genetic creature that was a product of human genetic tampering (it dealt with encountering your worst fear, either falling to it or overcoming it, within a little science fiction-horror concoction). Alien doesn't deal with that, either, does it? Nor does Alien involve mutated creatures needing humans for a food source. It is just easy, isn't it, to categorize this or that movie as a rip-off and be done with it? When you sit through a film such as this, that is when the similarities fade and the differences emerge. It is sitting through a film like this that would be difficult for the many....