The lights had just gone out in the Museum of Schlock and I was frantically trying get my flashlight to switch back on. I furiously tapped the back, realizing I should have bought Energizer instead of saving the three cents by buying No Frills. The bulb flickered on. My hand shook as I strobed my surroundings. I saw the bloody bodies of the gang members in my exhibit for Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. The bloody display may have been due in part to the fact that I had an actual corpse on display in that exhibit, a corpse that was supposedly cursed, but I never believed in any of that mumbo combo voodoo horseshit until now.

— To be continued.

Tonight’s movie is 1985’s Enemy Mine from director Wolfgang Peterson? Wait! What? The Das Boot guy made a movie about spaceships and aliens!

Enemy Mine takes place in the future, when humanity has united as one to colonize the vast reaches of space. Unfortunately, there’s another alien race called the Drac claiming “squatter’s rights” to the various planets the humans are trying to colonize. War breaks out between the two races.

We’re introduced to Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid), a hotshot fighter pilot who’s pursuing a Drac ship after it shoots down one of his comrades. He destroys the enemy ship, but the Drac pilot ejects. A piece of the Drac ship hits Willis’s ship and he has to make an emergency landing on stage, alien planet. Willis’s co-pilot doesn’t survive so he’s all alone now on a dangerous planet. Only he’s not alone. The ejected Drac is on the planet with him.

This is a bad place. Meteor showers happen every so often sending great balls of fire hurtling down to the surface. And then there’s the nasty wildlife that keeps trying to eat everything. One creature hangs out in a sand pit. You slip and fall in, can’t climb out, and then a long tentacle rises up slowly before wrapping around your thigh and dragging into the depth to be devoured by something not even its mother could love.

Willis can’t be bothered worrying about that hostile environment for the moment. He’s got a Drac to kill. This Drac’s name is Jareeba Shigan and is played by the great Louis Gossett Jr. in an amazing performance that manages to come through all that make-up and prosthetics. Jareeba goes for a bath in a nearby lake. Willis breaks open the Drac’s emergency fuel canisters and sets the lake on fire, hoping to kill the “toad-face.” Jareeba escapes the flames and subdues Willis, but doesn’t kill him.

Later on when Willis has the opportunity to kill Jareeba, he doesn’t do it. The two understand that they need each other in order to survive. They learn each other’s languages, each other’s faiths and philosophies, and maybe learn that humans and Dracs aren’t so different as they had originally believed. Other than the fact that Dracs can reproduce asexually. Anyway, check out Enemy Mine. It’s a good science fiction movie with heart.

In Memory of Louis Gossett Jr.

Louis Gossett Jr. is another screen legend who is sadly no longer with us. Whether it is was playing tough-as-nails sergeants and colonels in movies like An Officer and a Gentleman and Iron Eagle or teaming up with Chuck Norris to go on an adventures in the Cannon Films classic Firewalker, his presence always reassured my young self that what I was watching wouldn’t be a waste of time. Here’s to a lifetime of great roles that included starring in the original Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. 

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.