The Horniest Alien Ripoff Just Got A 4K Update
Let's go bag ourselves a dingwhopper.
With The Electric State having transformed its $320 million budget into a reception that looks up at tepid with envy, it’s easy to be nostalgic for the good old days. No, there was never a time when every sci-fi flick that rolled out of Hollywood was a masterpiece, but at least studios used to know how to churn out crap that was cheap and titillating rather than expensive and boring.
Few masterpieces inspired more crap than Alien, which spawned a wave of low-budget knockoffs immediately after its 1979 release. 1980 gave us Contamination and Italy’s very unofficial Alien 2: On Earth, while 1981 blessed the world with the dubiously named Inseminoid and the Roger Corman-produced Galaxy of Terror.
The B-movie master also produced 1982’s Forbidden World, which just received a 4K UHD/Blu-ray update from Shout! Factory. The horny, shoestring copycat reveals how big Alien’s shakeup of sci-fi was, and how our forefathers’ junk was made to be dumped into theaters and dusty Blockbuster shelves rather than Netflix’s shadowy depths.
Forbidden World was also marketed as the even more straightforwardMutant.
After a dogfight with some recycled footage, unspecified authority figure Mike Colby and his robotic companion, SAM, are summoned to the dusty planet of Xarbia, where a top-secret research team is trying to stave off a galaxy-wide food crisis. Unfortunately, their attempt to bioengineer the ultimate food source has accidentally produced the ultimate predator instead, and the so-called metamorph slaughters their lab animals before sequestering itself in a cage.
Colby recommends dousing the critter in acid before it can escape, but Dr. Gordon Hauser, the project lead, insists it still has scientific value (why Colby was summoned, then, is one of many questions you’ll be left with). Naturally, himbo janitor Jimmy (future Breaking Bad neo-Nazi Michael Bowen) immediately lets the monster escape, and it’s all downhill from there.
Our “heroes.”
“In space, no one can hear you ejaculate” wasn’t Forbidden World’s tagline, but it might as well have been given how Colby juggles the needs of his job with the demands of his libido. Essentially a 77-minute speedrun of genre characters making terrible decisions to advance the plot, the metamorph efficiently slaughters the station’s crew while still leaving our hero time to bed one of the two female characters and reach second base with the other, all over the most ‘80s soundtrack imaginable.
Featuring a lot of cheap practical effects and a couple of legitimately gnarly ones, there’s a certain schlocky charm here, as director Allan Holzman shot Forbidden World with enough flair to suggest some sort of vision. Reportedly filmed in 20 days with less than a million dollars and a script being written on the fly, crews were hammering sets together whenever Holzman’s stars weren’t acting on them. It is, in its own way, an impressive technical achievement, especially since even its hokiest props have more personality than today’s CGI slurry.
It helps if you’re in the limited demographic sci-fi was marketed at in 1982 — namely, one that would enjoy a gratuitous space shower scene of one naked woman helping another naked woman scrub gunk out of her hair — but there’s enough going on in Forbidden World to keep you entertained over its scant runtime. You may not be impressed, but from the metamorph’s gross lifecycle to the unanswered question of why SAM looks like an old-school Cylon but sounds a bit like Lisa Simpson, you’ll never be bored.
The brutal slaughter of your colleague is no reason not to hit on the new guy.
The new 4K release includes a director’s cut that adds a whopping five minutes, a commentary track from Holzman, a making of feature, and interviews with Corman and special effects artist John Carl Buechler, among other goodies. If your Alien appetite is endless, you could do worse.
And even if you’re not a gorehound, Forbidden World is a timely look at a dying Hollywood career path. Holzman did not go on to enjoy cinematic success, but Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, and James Cameron all cut their teeth with Corman’s fast and cheap production ethos. Some of Forbidden World’s sets were even designed by Cameron, albeit for Galaxy of Terror. Naturally, Corman had them reused.
Many a eulogy has been written for the B-movie, a demise punctuated by the loss of Corman himself in 2024. Horror still produces big hits on relatively small budgets, but as The Hollywood Reporter argued in 2024, there are now fewer paths into an industry taking fewer risks. It’s getting increasingly difficult to make the jump from low-budget to big-budget, and one flop at the big-league level can blackball you, even if you were only following endless studio notes.
We’re missing out on something now that rookies with raw talent are increasingly unlikely to be given spare change and free reign. Sure, Forbidden World was a completely disposable cash grab (Corman would have it remade less than a decade later), but Netflix’s disposable cash grabs could fund small armies and don’t even have the good grace to be memorable. Yesterday’s schlock may still be shlock, but dammit, it was shlock with a little pizazz.
Forbidden World is now available from Shout! Factory in 4K UHD/Blu-Ray.
