And then New World Pictures got in on the act. New World was, of course, started by Roger Corman, a notorious filmmaker with a reputation of making genre movies on the cheap with quality playing second fiddle to budget. Sometimes this approach proved masterful, as with his sublime Edgar Allen Poe adaptations in the 1960s, but quite often it meant you ended up with trash like Def-Con 4, a messy blend of every sci-fi/action/horror cliché you can think of but without any of the invention or wit of the films it shamelessly rips off, or even the rip-offs of the rip-offs. Granted, Corman was not directly involved in the making of Def-Con 4 but the worst aspects of the ‘knock-‘em-out-quickly-and-cheaply’ philosophy are all working at maximum strength as the crew of a satellite carrying nuclear… stuff (for use of a better word, because science wasn’t the scriptwriter’s strong point) orbiting the Earth witness the outbreak of World War III from space. While the crew debate with all the skill of seasoned negotiators about whether to drop their radioactive cargo on Russia events spiral out of control and the ship’s computer crashes them into our war-ravaged planet, where all sorts of hilarity ensues as the crew become the victims of a gang of terminals, which is the fancy scientific name for the rabid punks that roam the wastelands. Seen this scenario before? You bet you have. There is more to the plot after this but you’d probably be better off watching Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome on half-speed to recreate the levels of frustration and sheer tedium that Def-Con 4 delivers, and at least that movie has Mel Gibson in it for a bit of magnetism. The acting in Def-Con 4 is abysmal even by B-movie standards and it doesn’t help that the dialogue the actors have to deliver is the sort of 1960s sci-fi TV show drivel that didn’t fool anybody back then, let alone in the mid-1980s when audiences were a little bit more clued up to the ways of how things worked.
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