n experiment goes awry when an assistant accidentally cuts himself before touching a pulsing egg-like structure inside an incubation housing. By the time the lead scientist, Dr. Frank Darden (Bryan Cranston), arrives to look over the situation at the research facility on the planet Phablos (or Phaebon, as printed in marketing material), a significant mutation has occurred. A short time later, freelance controller Commander Steve Krieger (Marc Singer) responds to a distress signal from the lab, but he’s momentarily distracted by enemy vessels that open fire and weaken his own ship’s defense shields – as well as damaging his android pilot, executive officer Tinpan. “How much trouble could a couple of scientists get into, anyway?”

When Krieger lands on the station, he’s greeted by head of research Dr. Emily Stote (Judith Chapman) and geneticist Dr. Marissa Salinger (Laura Tate), who claim that the distress call was a false alarm. But things aren’t adding up (such as their perfect makeup, bright red lipstick and nail polish, and careful hairstyling) – the genetic meddling on the Delta 5 virus that they’re conducting in the high-security building, resulting in a metamorphic mutant, is secretive yet incredibly dangerous. “We ended up creating a monster.”

Sure enough, it’s not long before the gooey hellion leaps out of its container and burrows into the face of Devon Latham (Liz Rogers) – the sole survivor of a previous biological containment incident that destroyed a space station – requiring immediate surgery. Inexplicably, the “virus” resembles an extraterrestrial symbiote that lives only to kill – an obvious derivation of the antagonist from “Alien.” Several of the crew’s tactics for isolating and locating the monster similarly resemble methods from that aforementioned sci-fi/horror masterpiece (alongside yellow emergency sirens and even a line of dialogue). Motives are also comparable, since Darden wishes to preserve the entity, while the rest of the group wants to terminate it on sight. There’s a hint of a mystery, but it’s flimsy at best. “Her cerebrum has been eaten away.”

This rickety adventure, though flourishing amusing sets that make zero sense for a research institute – including smoky meeting rooms, dimly-lit corridors, cold metal flooring and paneling, and creepy personal quarters (with lots of odd beams of light) – is clearly one-note in its efforts to craft a tale about science run amok (and people getting killed off one by one in a haunted house in space). And it’s rather shoddy in its orchestration of suspense, which is essentially just a series of jump scares. It does meander for a moment to add a seemingly obligatory sex scene (“I can’t believe I just slept with such a worm”), but even that is interrupted by a sudden attack; brief sequences of calm are routinely jolted by standard horror movie ruses.

Though the score by Daniel May isn’t half bad, generating minimal excitement, the ultra low budget of “Dead Space” is its greatest weakness (it’s a surprisingly shabbier, loose remake of “Forbidden World,” a prior picture from Roger Corman’s Concorde productions). The monster effects are simply too deficient to pose any sort of believable threat; when the alien is revealed in wider frames with brighter lights, it’s obvious how comically rubbery it is – and how unwieldy and uninspired it is to match (in some angles, it resembles the brute from “Leviathan” [itself an “Alien” rip-off], or like a Jim Henson puppet, sort of immobile and stuck in a corner, thrashing about). For sci-fi thrillers like this, it’s crucial that the central beast appears formidable and scary – which is decidedly not the case in “Dead Space.” And since that’s primarily all that it has to offer for entertainment value, it’s painfully far from a success. At least the climax is hilarious in a chaotic, bloodthirsty way. “The hell with research!”

– Mike Massie