Reel 2 Reel Films, out now

A space explorer travelling from Mars embarks on a reconnaissance mission to Earth – which lies in ruin – to figure out what happened to the ‘humans of old’.

I get no delight out of giving a movie a hard time, not least because I appreciate that no one sets out to make something bad, but sometimes you just have to call out a turkey for what it is.

Andrew Balek and Joe Bland’s z-grade sci-fi flick (written by Bland and Cyrus Cheek) is so poor on every level that I struggle to know where to start. Narratively, it’s in the same ballpark as one of those countless Italian Star Wars rip-offs of the late 70s (The Humanoid, Star Crash), though this one doesn’t have the excuse that the dialogue may have got lost in translation.

The dialogue isn’t so much performed by the charmless and wooden cast as thrown out, with none of the jokes landing. At one point the sidekick droid (yes, there’s one of those) makes a dig at R2-D2, and that tells you all you need to know. What else? Most of the backgrounds are CGI, the visual FX are of base level entry and the synthesised, over-the-top score desperately tries to convince us that everything is far more thrilling than it is.

Verdict: Even as a straight-to-video low-rent product, this derivative nonsense fails. I have no idea what the makers were trying to achieve. 1/10

Nick Joy