Last night I watched Stranded in Space, another in a long line of MST3K episodes I haven’t seen yet. In case you can’t tell, I’m trying to see the whole series from beginning to end.
The alternate title, The Stranger is much more appropriate, as this movie was a whole bunch of Stranded and about 4 minutes of Space.
The basic story is that three astronauts are on a deep space mission, returning to Earth. Their navigation equipment is having trouble, and on their way back their capsule is hit by something and spins out of control. The main astronaut wakes up in a hospital with the doctor dude from Buck Rogers trying to convince him he’s returned to Earth. It turns out he’s really on Terra, a planet in the same orbit as Earth, but on the opposite side of the Sun. Supposedly this explains why they have telephones, Pontiacs, etc and all speak English.
The astronaut breaks out of the hospital when he realizes they’re drugging him and milking him for his knowledge of Earth. He runs into a lady doctor on his way out who immediately turns him in when he lets her go unharmed. He still escapes, and slowly begins to realize he really is on another planet. A planet where everyone is left handed, which seems to be one of the only real differences between Terrans and us Earthlings. Anyway, he holes up in a bookstore when the aged proprietor tells him he can rest there when he nearly collapses while looking for history books.
The Terrans have deleted all history before about 35 years previously, since the New Order took over and made everyone’s lives “better.” The book peddler calls for a doctor without consulting Mr. Astronaut, and lo and behold, the same lady from the hospital shows up to help him. He kidnaps her and makes her drive him around the countryside. She flips on her two-way radio so the authorities know she’s been kidnapped. Then Astronaut helps her realize the New Order isn’t good, and they kidnapped and possibly killed her brother. She throws in her lot with astroboy, and takes him to an old teacher of hers who, despite having been under previous suspicion, is now a high-up dude in the Terran space program. They (without the doctor) cook up a plan for Astronaut to take the place of a Terran astronaut and slip aboard the next rocket, which happens to be launching tomorrow morning.
The lady doctor follows them to the launch facility because she “must see him one more time”, but we know that she’s previously been captured by the bad guys and is really helping them find the Astronaut. After they drilled holes in her head and buggered up her brain. He almost makes it to the rocket, but ends up having a gun fight with the bad guys and shoots a tank of liquid oxygen, blowing everything up. As he does this, Astronaut jumps into the ocean and is saved. He swims back to shore, where he is found by some campers. He tells them his ship sank and they offer him a ride up the coast. The movie ends there. He never gets home, or gets the girl. Or anything.
I could still hear this moving sucking after I had put it back in my DVD case and went to bed. I rate this movie two empty seats, for the two additional astronauts that were in the capsule with astroboy but never had any additional part in the movie after the first five minutes.