Crew
Director – Fred Olen Ray, Screenplay – T.L. Lankford & Fred Olen Ray, Producer – Alan Amiel, Photography – Gary Graver, Music – Alan Oldfield & Robert O. Ragland, Special Effects – Kevin McCarthy, Makeup Effects – Steve Niell [Neill], Creature Effects – Sho-Glass Effects (Supervisor – Steve Patino). Production Company – Trans World Entertainment.
Cast
Charles Napier (Detective Ian McLemore), Ann Turkel (Officer Carla Sanbourn), Bo Svenson (Captain Robertson), Ron Glass (Detective Jerry Merris), Julie Newmar (Elaine Wentworth), James Booth (Dr Forsythe), Norman Burton (General Randolph), Michael Forest (Hawkins), Fox Harris (Professor Whately), Anthony Eisley (Dr Rogers), Peter Palmer (Detective Pike), William Fair (Michaelson), Jesse Dabson (Jason Ridley), Sandy Brooke (Woman in House), Susan Stokey (Susan), Elisabeth Brooks (Mrs Ridley)
Plot
A NASA probe comes down in Los Angeles and an experimental creature escapes. LAPD detective Ian McLemore is sent to the crash scene and puzzles over findings. McLemore takes two pods they find at the scene. One of these hatches into an alien creature that proceeds to kill all it comes across. Teaming up with rookie officer Carla Sanbourn, McLemore sets out to track down and eliminate the creatures.
Fred Olen Ray is one of the most prolific directors of all time with some 140 plus films to his credit between 1978 and the present. Olen Ray has almost always worked in exploitation – he started making films for the drive-in circuit, moved on into the video revolution and later cable and streaming markets. All of his films are either B-budget science-fiction, horror, action or works of softcore erotica, sometimes all of the above, although in the 2010s he has branched out into making Lifetime thrillers and family-friendly Christmas tv movies. Olen Ray was the most well-known proponent of the Scream Queens fad of the 1980s featuring minimally talented girls who would whip their tops off at the drop of a hat. One of the virtues of Olen Ray’s films are his employing a cast of former name actors, lots of genre in-jokes and sometimes an appealingly cynical sense of humour. (A full list of Fred Olen Ray’s genre films is at the bottom of the page).
Alien (1979) was a huge success and immediately produced a horde of copycats films throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. These included the likes of Alien Contamination (1980), Without Warning (1980), Galaxy of Terror (1981), Inseminoid/Horror Planet (1981), The Deadly Spawn (1982), Parasite (1982), Forbidden World/Mutant (1982), Xtro (1982) and Titan Find (1984), among others. Fred Olen Ray was one of the first to jump aboard the fad with his second film The Alien Dead/It Fell from the Sky (1980) and has made at least four other Alien copies with Biohazard (1984), Deep Space, Alienator (1990) and Hybrid (1997).
Deep Space offers the not unamusing idea of the basics of Alien brought down to Earth and relocated to Los Angeles and environs and with the cast of interstellar blue collar workers replaced by cops on the LAPD trying to deal with a series of bizarre deaths. As the lead detective, Charles Napier, a regular A and B movie actor of the day in similar roles, is perfectly cast. Napier effortlessly nails the tough, grizzled, individualistic cop role and plays the part to perfection. He’s so tough and cranky he throws darts at a dartboard on his apartment wall that has a picture from Charles and Diana’s wedding pinned to the centre of it!!!
Deep Space works fairly solidly as the monster movie it is intended to be. Fred Olen Ray has an okay budget – reportedly the biggest he ever worked with – meaning that Steve Neill (albeit ignominiously credited as Steve Niell) is able to deliver some decent creature effects.
The only quibble with the monster is the changing nature of what it is – it is initially referred to as something experimental placed on a probe in orbit that comes crashing down, while later scenes keep referring to it as an alien. Part of this would appear to be that the producers insisted on the shooting of additional scenes to add a military cover-up angle whereas Olen Ray had originally conceived the monster as just an alien nasty
