“Journey through time to a place like no other!”
When I started The John Saxon Project, I knew that I would have to take the highs with the inevitable lows. But seriously, John: how low do you want to go?!
Sandwiched between significant work in Italy (revisiting the Gialli with Tenebrae) and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Saxon plummets to uncharted depths in Terry Marcel‘s über snooze-fest Prisoners of the Lost Universe, a shit kind of Flash Gordon starring the guy from Battlestar Galactica (Richard Hatch), a woman who went on to feature in TV turkey Hitler’s Daughter (Kay Lenz) and directed by a Brit who would subsequently work on Bergerac and crap ITV shows like The Bill and Heartbeat. Cry Hawk the Slayer all you like: the bottom well and truly fell out for Terry Marcel when he was relegated to Saturday night rubbish like The New Adventures of Robin Hood, for goodness sake…
Kenneth Hendel (better remembered as the creepy combover crook in Pete Walker movies) plays Dr Hartmann, an eccentric scientist who accidentally teleports himself, Lenz and Hatch into a parallel universe where John Saxon is some kind of medieval warlord. There’s a gentle giant, a not so gentle giant, a bunch of midgets in lit-up furry helmets and the midget from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. There’s also some badly choreographed “action” sequences, extremely odd cartoon-like sound affects and a LOT of lame humour, but none of this could ever compensate for the mind numbing mediocrity that sets in approximately five minutes after the film has started.
Prisoners of the Lost Universe has TV Pilot written all over it. Whilst it’s nice to see John Saxon play a Genghis Khan type figure, he looks pretty weird doing so adorned in a fur waistcoat and sporting a well groomed “parallel universe style” goatee beard. Everything about this feels sadly desperate – cobbled together by a group of people who didn’t have much else going on at the time and who had figured a sub-standard medieval parallel universe swashbuckler sounded like a good idea. Basically, there’s nothing here you can’t find elsewhere. Except maybe for the bunch of midgets in lit-up furry helmets who get tossed, lemming-like, over the edge of a cliff…
So yeah, maybe watch it for that…
