Film Year: 2017
Genre: Science Fiction
Director: Mark Steven Grove
Starring: Casper Van Dien, Cynthia Rothrock, James Lew, Brit Laree, Sara N. Salazar, Mark Steven Grove
Riff Year: 2019
Riffers: Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett
Featured Short: "Values: Telling the Truth"
The Short
First thing I'd ask is whether or not running away is the same as lying? Technically screaming "Oh SHIT" and running is not being untruthful.
This meandering short takes a while to get to its point. Maybe you're telling a story about kids who were going about a normal day only to find themselves in an unexpected situation, but you really shouldn't focus on dawdling to tell your story. The key to a story is relevance, especially when a moral is concerned. If your audience's attention has drifted off before you reach your event, then what is the point?
The short isn't particularly well done either, as a female teacher relates the story in the classroom but it switches needlessly to a male narrator for the story segment. Then it reaches that awaited climax and the moral of the story seems to be accepting responsibility for one's actions and not telling the truth itself. Granted, there is some overlap, as accepting responsibility requires a degree of truthfulness, but it's not really the moral that we signed up for based on the title.
The Movie
*Disclaimer: This reviewer is fully aware that one movie's badness does not negate the badness of another, as movie quality is mutually exclusive in each entity. Starship Troopers is still a great movie though, and you're wrong. So... 😛
Star Raiders: The Adventures of Saber Raine features Van Dien as Saber Raine, a disgraced space soldier who is currently exiled on a planet with a lizard woman he helped evade capture from his fellow troops. One day, three more soldiers show up looking for a kidnapped prince and princess, who have been taken by an awakened overlord named Sinjin, who is hellbent on ruling the galaxy. Saber Raine is enlisted to help them on their quest.
If Star Wars had maybe half the budget of your typical Asylum picture, I imagine it would look a lot like Star Raiders. For a modern, bottom budget attempt at a sci-fi picture, Star Raiders can be mildly amusing in how silly it is, but it's so damn earnest about itself. I'm not entirely sure what the intent of the picture is, because I'm positive these people knew they weren't making high art (or something all that good, for that matter), but there seems to be some sort of effort to either ignore its budgetary constraints and pretend it's destined for greatness or to just embrace itself and just have fun. It might even be a mixture of the two, as certain cast and crew might be seeing this movie as two different things. I can't really find much info on this movie either way, and based on its cliffhanger ending it seems to have been made with the intent of creating a sequel or two. Whether that will ever happen, I'm not sure.
Several things I can say for certain about this movie: 1. There isn't much Star Raiding. 2. There aren't many adventures for Saber Raine. Technically this movie is about a singular adventure for Raine that takes place on a single planet. There doesn't seem to be much money for changing settings, so the majority of the film takes place in a rather lovely forest locale. Saber and his compadres spend most of the movie wandering around or jogging, depending on if they're fighting bad guys or not. The villain scenes are usually shot in a generic cave set, without much wiggle room.
The film does have some touches where it's reach exceeds its grasp, and sometimes charmingly so. The alien effects are flat out adorable, with the really bad make-up jobs that this movie refreshingly doubles down on. One of our main characters is a blue-skinned reptile woman who has a prominent role in the film, but her make-up is a very stiff mask with a mouth that doesn't close. So they paint her lips black, have her constantly keep her mouth agape, and try and hide her mouth (unsuccessfully) when she says her dialogue to prevent showing that the two sets of lips aren't connected (I also suspect that her dialogue is ADR too, but I'm no expert on that). She's hardly the only poorly created alien, as there are also bug men and a dude that looks like mutated Erhardt from the MST Black Scorpion episode. Also, our main villain is missing half of his head, and it's awesomely silly.
But, as I mentioned before, the movie is incomplete. No, I don't mean that the effects aren't finished or they didn't finish shooting the film, I'm sure the movie is as it was always intended to be. But, it ends with our villains getting away and our heroes chasing after them, and the bad guys tease some other scheme being set into motion. The blatant sequel bait makes the ending frustrating, not because you want to see more, but rather you've watched this nonsense this far and you don't even get an ending. I might even see a sequel just to spite the cliffhanger, but that might very well be what the filmmakers wanted from the audience's reaction: to get the next one rage clicks. That idea seems puzzling, but this is a puzzling movie.
The Live Show
"This is from eighteen months ago."
Octaman was a more interesting bad movie to me than Star Raiders. I have more questions about Star Raiders, personally, but the movie as a whole is fairly vanilla, dime-a-dozen, DVD bin trash. As a result, I wasn't that "into" Star Raiders as it played out at the live show, though I found myself having fun with the show itself.
"Can anyone tell what it means to tell the truth?"
"I CAN! I'm sorry, I'm lying."
Let's start off with the short, which admittedly starts off a little slow. The big problem with this short is how meandering it is, which sometimes makes it a struggle to riff. But once the short starts to dive into a general direction, the riffs start to climb, and by the time we get that wild image of children stuffing lots and lots of rocks into their pants, the short becomes officially hilarious. As more event happens, the laughter rolls with more ease, and this show gets off to a rollicking start thanks to this appetizer.
And remember..."CHUBCHUBCHUBCHUBCHUB!"
Star Raiders puts up a false appearance at its beginning, with a cheesily rendered CGI space chase, which gets the audience in the mood for more ugly looking computer animated nonsense, but then switches itself up almost immediately with slumming on a forest planet. Because there's a misrepresentation in how it presents itself early on, we get a wild swing of laughs early on then it steeply drops off after that as we wait for the movie to...do something. It's not all that dissimilar to the experience of the short after that, as it escalates, albeit at a slower pace since it's much "longer."
I use quotations there because this Rifftrax Live is one of the shortest ever, running barely longer than an hour and a half. Star Raiders is a short movie, running around 80 minutes, and that's including credits (which are cut out of this version). There's not much foreplay with the riffer introduction, which is basic stuff like shouting out Kickstarter backers and a minimal amount of smalltalk. One can't say the Live show of Star Raiders isn't efficient, because of how tight it is, but because of that tightness, the slow moments do tend to stand out more. But if you're patient, the laugh quota will climb and by the time our favorite blue reptilian alien shows up, the strong humor starts to become a regular occurrence. I especially like the riffs on her and the other aliens, because they're so fun and silly looking. There's a great line where she alludes she can't have a sexual relationship with Casper Van Dien's character, to which Bill responds "I have one hole for every bodily function." They also get some mileage out of the bug man, who they dub as "Gary" and claim he's their favorite character.
This is another one for the solid string of Live shows we've been getting. So far we haven't had a genuinely great one since Samurai Cop, but I'd claim that with Octaman and Star Raiders, 2019's offerings have easily blown 2018 out of the water. Next up is a re-riff of Giant Spider Invasion, and as a general rule I'm not entirely enthused by re-riffs. But that would be an interesting film to see on the big screen, so I hope they make something fun out of it to cap off this good year of Live performances.
But that's looking into the future, so let's concentrate on the present, and I feel Star Raiders is one worth watching. And if by some act of God allows that sequel they're baiting to get made, then I hope we get a Live show of that too.
Good
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