Second Sight, out now

Just a standard day for your average space haulier – taking the Bitchin’ Betty from point A to point B – until someone takes too much interest in the cargo…

Space Truckers is never going to be high on anyone’s list of top films. It would struggle to be in the best films of its year, to be honest. But it is a fun ride that doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Dennis Hopper plays the independent space trucker who gets caught in the fight between Scott Tracy… sorry, Shane Rimmer and Charles Dance, along with his passengers Stephen Dorff and Debi Mazar (yes, they all have character names, but to be honest, none of them really sticks in the memory). There’s plenty of action and a decent amount of humour, with Dorff in particular doing his utmost to sell the reality of the piece.

The mix of model work and CGI may have been good for its time (if you look up contemporary reviews, you’ll see some people raving about its quality), but it doesn’t always stand up to the high definition treatment it’s been given here – and it would have helped if some of the CGI had been applied for wire removal in some of the zero-gee sequences. (To be fair, director Stuart Gordon puts his hands up for that in the new interview on the disc.)

As you might hope, Second Sight have given this a good package of extras – as well as the new interview with the director, there’s an eight minute interview with the art director, Simon Lamont, as well as twelve minutes with the composer, Colin Towns.

Verdict: Nothing ground-breaking but a solidly entertaining 90 or so minutes. 7/10

Paul Simpson