Say what you will about Cory McAbee. The guy’s got the market cornered on sci-fi/western/musical/comedies with a heart. He’s currently making the rounds on the festival circuit with his latest offering, ‘Stingray Sam,’ of which you can read my review right here. While maybe not as polished, not as heartfelt, and with songs that aren’t quite as catchy, McAbee’s first feature film, ‘The American Astronaut,’ is still light years better than most big-budget offerings studios give us today. It’s the type of film that cries out “cult classic,” and it lives up to that moniker in every aspect imaginable.
McAbee stars as Samuel Curtis, an interplanetary trader in an alternate history where every planet in our solar system, and most of the moons, are inhabitable. Curtis finds himself in an asteroid saloon where he is delivering a cat. In exchange for the cat, he retrieves a cloning device that is in the process of creating a Real Live Girl. Curtis is approached by a long-time acquaintance, the Blueberry Pirate, who tells Curtis that he is to take the cloning device to Jupiter, an all-male mining planet where women are as much as mystery as the Heavens. Here, Curtis is to trade the device for a young boy, The Boy Who Actually Saw A Woman’s Breast. He is then to take the young boy to Venus, a planet inhabited entirely by women who, every generation, take a young man into their colonies and make him their sex slave. Curtis is to trade the young boy for the remains of a former king, which he is to take back to the former king’s family on Earth.
Along the way, Curtis runs into various, eccentric characters including the Blueberry Pirate and Professor Hess, a villain who will kill someone for no apparent reason, but does not kill anyone he actually has a reason to kill. Got that? It’s confusing, I know, as is much of the imaginative incidents and details that come out of McAbee’s head. Professor Hess is a character obsessed with Curtis, and cannot kill him because of some long-brewing transgressions Curtis committed ages ago. Hess plans to capture Curtis, forgive him for these transgressions, thus leaving an open pathway so that he may kill Curtis.
Curtis and the boy also come across a group of Nevada miners who have been living in a cabin in space for decades. They have been living in space for so long, in fact, they have acquired Space Punies, or atrophy, and have metamorphosed into strange, deformed creatures.
All of these unusual dealings and exotic locations and characters are presented in wonderfully brilliant black and white. McAbee and cinematographer W. Mott Hupfel III create some splendid imagery that serve the overall tone of that part of the story. The scene in the space cabin with the miners is very dark, and very little can be made out from the flashlights Curtis and the boy are carrying. The bar in the opening of the film is smoky and under lit, creating a sense of the American Western. All the while, however, McAbee never lets the mood of the film get too dark. There are some very humorous aspects to ‘The American Astronaut.’ Tom Aldredge perfectly plays the part of an old comedian whose job it is in the asteroid saloon to get the crowd revved up for a dance competition. Hess carries a ray gun that turns its victims into piles of ash, and an incredible dance/musical sequence occurs after he has turned an entire auditorium of men into hundreds of small piles. It’s incredible to look at, and McAbee’s atypical ideas come to life tremendously.
Humorous as it may be, there are no grand moments of physical humor or over-the-top sight gags that are played up for the audience. Much of the humor found in the film comes from the mood McAbee and Hupfel create from scene to scene, and the matter-of-fact way things are presented. The Boy Who Actually Saw A Woman’s Breast is on a stage in front of a group of Jupiter miners, and his sole purpose is to describe what it was like to observe the body of a female. After an elaborate dance number he simply says, “It was round and soft. Now go back to work.”
Peculiar, strange, unique, and all-around entertaining, ‘The American Astronaut’ is an independent, sci-fi flick that fans of anything out of the norm should be seeking out. While it doesn’t seem like McAbee is going to be leaving this genre any time soon (‘Stingray Sam’ fits into each of these categories, as well), it doesn’t seem to matter. He’s perfected this type of film, and, though ‘The American Astronaut’ hasn’t hit cult status on the level as something like ‘Rocky Horror’ or ‘Eraserhead,’ it certainly isn’t because it doesn’t deserve it.
You know you have something special in your sights when it is difficult to describe, so I’m not even going to try. However, having said that, I will say ‘The American Astronaut’ is as brilliantly crafted as anything from the German expressionist movement, is as eccentric and comedic as anything from Monty Python, and offers up a list of songs as memorable as anything Richard O’Brien has ever written. The film is an insanely entertaining bit of independent filmmaking, and it proves once again just how little of a factor budget is when you have something this creative.
