Prison Ship

Although I enjoy watching drive-in style movies, I have to confess that there is a genre in this genre I have never particularly enjoyed, and that is the women-in-prison genre. I like the *sound* of what the genre promises to offer, but I have always found the actual execution to be dull and boring. And all of these movies seem the same after a while. When I heard about PRISON SHIP (better known as STAR SLAMMER), I was intrigued. A women-in-prison movie taking place in the future, and in space? I decided to give it a chance.

The fact that Fred Olen Ray directed this movie should have warned me. In fairness, not everything in the movie is bad. The sets and spaceship models, while definitely low budget, are not as bad to the eye as you may think. There is the occasional in-joke that made me smile (a planet is called "Arous", there's an alien that looks like one of the aliens from the movie THE DEADLY SPAWN). And there are a few unintentional laughs, like when the musical score sounds very much like the musical score for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

Aside from those bright moments, I found the movie tough to sit through. It's incredibly slow-moving - there is simply no plot advance for long stretches of time. The female heroine is poorly sketched, with a lot of the focus surprisingly not on her. And while you may expect the movie to be sleazy, it feels more like a PG-rated movie - there's almost no nudity, no real sex, and light violence.

Thank goodness they didn't make the sequel that's announced at the end of the movie.