Badlanders (AKA Prison Planet) (1992)

Film review #690

Director: Armand Gazarian

SYNOPSIS: Blaine is tasked with finding the exiled King that is believed to be on the notorious Prison Planet. He heads there to find a wasteland populated by barbarians and violent gangs that prove to be problematic in his quest…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Badlanders (also known as Prison Planet) is a 1992 sci-fi film. The film opens with scrolling text which provides the backdrop of the story (Just like Star Wars), about a planet named Anakin (Just like Star Wars) whose King named Himshaw mysteriously disappeared, and his brother Akira took the throne and became a bit of a tyrant. None of this factors into the story. We see Blaine, a freedom fighter, gets himself arrested and sent into the wastelands of the prison planet. There, he sets a group of women free from slavery, which angers the local warlord that they were for, and seeks to hunt him down. This film is essentially a whole lot of nothing: just wandering about the desert with cheap fight scenes interspersed with some shouting. Despite the lore dump at the beginning of the film that sets up a bunch of stuff, it no way translates to the film proper, which is just another Mad Max derivative in a genre saturated with them. Eventually Blaine finds Himshaw, who is a budget Obi Wan Kenobi (Just like Star Wars), but it still adds nothing to the plot and the whole issue of him being a King or something is never addressed.

The acting is all awful and has no direction or expertise, making the characters lifeless. The only thing which stands out of the warlord Goah, whose acting is so over-the-top it is hilarious, and a wig and moustache which is distractingly bad. It’s impossible to take him seriously. In a world full of Mad Max rip-offs, Badlanders is one of the worst: it’s just some fumbling around a desert, with poorly choreographed fight scenes, directionless story and atrocious wigs. There is nothing else of substance to comment on.