n a galaxy … far, far away, a rebel battalion ambushes the armies of the Great Tyrant, Baal. The ensuing massacre results in thousands of innocent lives lost, but the leader of the uprising, Kol (Ross Hagen), is eventually captured and handed a death sentence. He’s ferried to a prison planet, from which no one has ever escaped, as the Commanding Executioner prepares to send the incarcerated straight to hell. This setup is a curious twist on virtually every dystopian sci-fi tale, since the seeming protagonists here are led by someone dubbed a tyrant – and the rebels are the evildoers, recklessly doing away with civilians.

That Executioner Commander (Jan-Michael Vincent) also doesn’t behave heroically at all; he’s severe, gruff, monotonic, dressed in black, and insults his underlings, such as Tara (P.J. Soles), who seems much to genial to be working at this station. Even when a visiting delegate general oversees a barbaric execution, pushing the notion that mercy ought to be demonstrated, the commander remains unmoving and unfeeling; in this profession, there’s no room for sloppiness. “His kind should have never been allowed to breathe.”

As is very much expected, Kol manages to disarm a guard and flee the facility aboard a stolen vessel (concluding an unusually lengthy pre-credits sequence) – which really shouldn’t be possible if the entire planet is dedicated to containing captives, and especially since spaceships shouldn’t be so easy to steal without any sort of takeoff authorization or futuristic key. Nevertheless, he heads to Earth to hole up, where Rick (Richard Wiley) and his fellow RV companions accidentally run him over, then drive him to a ranger station in a California game preserve. As warden Ward Armstrong (John Phillip Law) calls up a doctor and files a report, it quickly becomes evident that he’s completely unprepared for what is coming: a Hunter Unit robotess assassin called an Alienator (bulky bodybuilder Teagan).

“He’s some kind of wacko!” With laser weapon shootouts, cheap costumes, flimsy props, primitive models, simplistic music, poor sound effects, and bad acting, this low-budget schlock is easily identifiable as a Fred Olen Ray movie (hilariously produced by a company called Amazing Movies). It’s also telling that the most entertaining moments are unintentionally funny, such as when dangerous space slugs burrow through human flesh in a matter of seconds, but are unable to get out of a brown paper bag. There are also too many characters; four people in the RV (including Jesse Dabson, Dyana Ortelli, and Dawn Wildsmith), two illegal hunters (Fox Harris and Hoke Howell), a medic, and a retired colonel provide plenty of fodder for the extraterrestrial eliminator (not nearly enough of them actually perish), but these roles tend to highlight just how horrible the dialogue and performances are. Plus, there are a handful of subordinates in the Commander’s penal colony who get more than one scene to stumble through and generic lines to recite.

“You will burn slowly, from the inside out.” Though the story isn’t original, obviously following a comparable concept to “The Terminator” (the advertising tagline is “The Ultimate Terminator”), it’s still a decent premise for action and adventure. But the writing is so pitiful, the character designs so uninteresting or obnoxious (resembling the amateurish personas in teen slashers of the ‘80s), and the special effects so unconvincing (a disintegrator gun merely turns victims into a glowing green light) that the result is outrageously boring. But perhaps most problematic of all with these roles is the fact that Kol is uncharismatic and unsympathetic, and the Alienator is an emotionless juggernaut, adding nothing to the potential humanity of the heroes and villains (who are essentially indistinguishable); the players here are all so shabby and uninspired that it isn’t even easy to root for the killer to methodically dispatch them in ever more violent ways. And a couple shots of gore and a decent flaming corpse sequence aren’t enough to even remotely counter the constant silliness, the gross insincerity, the crawling pacing, the weak fights, and the unvarying uneventfulness (and pointlessness, considering the laughable ending).

– Mike Massie