Stuart Gordon's 1996 Science Fiction Comedy Space Truckers Is Way More Exquisitely Fucked Up Than Either Its Abysmal Reputation or PG-13 Rating Would Suggest

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

I am very much enjoying my patron-funded journey through the complete filmography of fright master Stuart Gordon. But I am struck by how many of his films revolve around disgusting monster-men trying to defile beautiful women with their grotesque sexuality. 

That’s somehow even true of 1996’s Space Truckers, a PG-13, twenty-five million dollar space adventure with a villain who’s like a steam-punk Hitler Frankenstein with a repulsive, homemade robo-penis he’s intent on putting inside a beautiful waitress played by Debi Mazar. 

Space Truckers has an irresistible premise. Space. Truckers. Space Truckers. Truckers in Space. What’s not to love? If I have one problem with the world, it’s that they just don’t make enough movies about trucks and truckers. 

The world, unfortunately, did not appreciate Space Truckers. It’s perhaps the biggest disappointment of Gordon’s career. It’s the most expensive movie Gordon directed but it did not even have an opportunity to make back its sizable budget because it skipped the theaters en route to a discreet direct to video burial. 

I was fortunate enough to see it in a theater when I was a college student at University of Wisconsin at Madison because Gordon was an alum whose career began in the Madison theater scene and it played on campus either as a one-off or as part of a festival. 

I don’t remember what I thought of Space Truckers the first time around but I found myself digging it during this go-round in no small part because I am deep into an exhaustive exploration of Stuart Gordon’s movies and Space Truckers benefits from an auteurist interpretation. 

Space Truckers is more expensive, mainstream, commercial and family friendly than the rest of its director’s oeuvre but part of what I love about it is that it’s still not mainstream, or commercial, and sure as shit isn’t particularly family-friendly. 

Making the movie PG-13 feels like a miscalculation. A glorious degenerate like Gordon should be able to let his freak flag fly with a hard R rating conducive to all manner of debauchery. To its credit, Space Truckers is a violent, sexed up, intense, child-unfriendly R rated movie that somehow ended up PG-13. 

The viscerally disturbing, vomit-inducing android body of head bad guy Captain Macanudo (Charles Dance) alone should have resulted in an R rating, as it is something that no innocent child should ever have to see. 

When we first meet Dance’s unforgettably disgusting, very Stuart Gordon bad guy he’s Dr. Nabel, an evil scientist for a corporation that is more malevolent than most, in that produces things like an unstoppable cyborg warriors that kill everything their paths. 

The mad scientist is betrayed by the corporation’s power-mad CEO E.J. Saggs (Shane Rimmer), who tries to kill him. The crazed villain does not die, however. He re-names himself Captain Macanudo after painstakingly rebuilding about seventy percent of his body by himself, including a mechanical penis that apparently needs to be revved up like a gas chainsaw in order to almost function adequately. 

To people unfamiliar with Gordon’s aesthetic, Dance’s character might just seem gross, not to mention way too creepy and disturbing for a PG-13 space adventure. Within the context of Gordon’s life’s work, however, Dance’s character is the latest in an impressive gallery of arch-villains played by character actors of note who take the filmmaker’s fixation with body horror to new and repulsive extremes.  

Dance and his disgustingly inventive character design, make-up and costuming make almost too inedible an impression, to the point that it throws the balance of the film off. Compared to a bad guy like Dance, even Hopper can’t help but come off as a little bland by comparison. 

Hopper affably plays John Canyon, a veteran space trucker who is a proud independent in a realm where everyone else has gone corporate. Canyon is delivering a load of genetically engineered square pigs at a truck stop-style space station. 

As with Fortress, Space Truckers uses practical effects and miniatures to portray the future as a grubby, lived-in world of grit, grime and grease. It’s a blue collar, working class realm that just so happens to exist somewhere out in the cosmos rather than the American South. 

For pragmatic reasons, Canyon ends up taking a deal to transport a shipment of sex dolls to earth alongside waitress Cindi (Debi Mazar), who has agreed to marry the older gentleman in exchange for transport to earth, and Mike Pucci (Stephen Dorff), a recent graduate of space trucking school. 

When Hopper’s grizzled space trucker is away Mike and Cindi bond over their shared youth and attractiveness. Also, their near-nakedness. It is VERY hot in space so Dorff and Mazar’s characters have to strip down to their space underwear. 

This, along with a LOT of violence and perversity and heavy intimations of sexual violence and killer cyborgs somehow was not enough for an R rating. 

The ship is eventually captured by Regalia, a pirate ship ruled by Dance’s deranged Captain Macanudo. The revenge-mad lunatic takes an interest in Cindi, who very reluctantly agrees to have sex with him if he agrees to let them live and leave. 

It’s not entirely sure how sex would even work with a figure like Macanudo, who created his own penis-like entity after losing the original and isn’t ENTIRELY sure how, or even if, it will work. 

Cindi, needless to say, is horrified as well as less than impressed in a sequence that goes on far longer than you would expect in a movie ostensibly less deranged and perverted than Gordon’s usual fare. 

It’s as if Gordon is throwing down the gauntlet and saying that you can give him twenty five million dollars and famous actors and a mandate for a PG-13 rating but he’s going to be just as twisted as usual, and somehow almost get away with it. 

It all ends up being moot because it turns out that John’s space truck is actually carrying a fleet of killer cyborgs, one of whom activates and runs amok. 

At this point Space Truckers turns into yet another variation on Alien as our working class heroes try to prevent a battalion of highly skilled robot killers from making it to earth. 

I have learned to enjoy and appreciate movies for what they are and not what they could be or what I want them to be. So while I wish that Space Truckers had spent more time casually exploring trucking in outer space I nevertheless quite liked its grungy, homemade take on the science-fiction genre as well as the production design, special effects and world-building. 

I have nothing against Stephen Dorff but whenever I see him in a movie I find myself thinking that I would enjoy it substantially more if it starred anyone other than Stephen Dorff. 

That’s the case with Space Truckers. I would have loved a hard-R version of this material with Jeffrey Combs in the Dorff role but he has a nice, easy dynamic with the more charismatic Mazar and Hopper. 

What I like most about Space Truckers is how neatly it reflects its director’s caustic worldview and finely wrought pessimism as well as his ability to pervert and corrupt even an ostensibly commercial idea like truckers in outer space to his own sick ends. 

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