Warp Speed [1981]

After the rather boring film last week, this movie kind of felt like a bit of relief. Was it amazing? No. In fact, the first 20 minutes or so were kind of boring and a bit hard to follow. But once we got into the rhythm of the film a bit more and some of the crazy really started to come out, we ultimately walked away from it with pretty favorable feelings.

The plot is a story within a story. In the outer frame, a psychic has been brought onto an abandoned ship that was supposed to go to Saturn to investigate the disappearance of the crew. The story of the crew is told through a series of flashbacks that are unchronological at first but eventually move back so we can see the plot unfold. The crew consists of Adam West as the captain, a lieutenant who's maybe dating the blonde bimbo but definitely an asshole, said bimbo, the reasonable black lady, the also reasonable but maybe a bit suicidal engineer, the psychiatrist, and the medical doctor who says everything antagonistically and has daddy issues. Everything starts out chill with a lot of card playing, failed flirting, and trips to a simulation machine called the pleasure center. The problem arises when there's an explosion outside and the math proves that they will need to lighten the load just to get home. After stripping the ship, they realize that people need to go too, which is kind of fine since everyone's going nuts. Asshole rapes doctor after she stupidly wagers sex during a poker game, the captain initially considers just going on with the mission even though everyone will surely die and mutiny almost happens, and everyone is mad or sad all the time. First the psychiatrist draws the short straw and when he resists his fate of death, asshole breaks his neck. Then the doctor tries to throw the black lady under the bus and they decide to go after her instead. The doctor slits her own throat in a delusion. The engineer sacrifices himself. The asshole shoots the captain and the black lady and promises the bimbo they will go out together but just kills her instead. At this point we have an absolutely wild turn where asshole acknowledges the psychic who he can apparently see even though they are in different timelines and goes to stab her before the movie cuts out. We literally screamed in frustration.

While completely poorly written from a logic perspective, this movie definitely had a plot to follow which was really appreciated after last week. The acting was often funny and the comedy was heightened by the fact that scenes were intercut with EKGs that Sarah kept assessing as either, "normal" or "dead" when the film was trying to tell us otherwise. Then, of course, there was the lazy first-semester-of-film-school choices like the ending. All in all, not too shabby.

Spoon Rating: 5