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Filmed in Card-o-Vision, made by "puny Earth slaves" and featuring a square-jawed B-movie hero, Captain Eager and The Mark of Voth is a no-budget parody of Dan Dare-style sci-fi. Strung together by bedsit CGI effects and more than a few cardboard loo-roll tubes, this British comedy tries to make a virtue out of its glaring flaws as outdated intergalactic spaceman Captain Eager (James Vaughan) is despatched in his "non-metric" rocket ship to save the universe. It fails miserably.
There's no doubting the Blue Peter-style ingenuity of writer/director Simon DaVision and his production team: space helmets are made out of salad bowls; sets are created from yoghurt pots and elastic bands; homebrew green-screen trickery brings model spaceships to life. It's so cheap it makes Red Dwarf look like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. That in itself is enough to raise at least one wry smile, the film playing to its ropey visuals with a cheeky wink and a grin as it gracelessly clunks about on-screen.
"NEVER RISES ABOVE A ONE-JOKE MOVIE"
Pity, though, that there's a black hole where the rest of the jokes should be. The nonsensical plotting unfolds without a single punch line and is so convoluted it comes with its own "Expositionite", a computerised narrator who claims that "In the story that's about to unfold exposition is your only hope". He's lying. Not even his intermittent clarifications nor the presence of comedians Tamsin Grieg and Mark Heap (from Green Wing) can make anything out of this mess. As the Card-o-Vision look begins to bore, watching Captain Eager is like having your brain cells zapped one by one by a Martian ray gun. Lacking gags, proper characters or any comprehensible plot, it never rises above a one-joke movie - and that joke's on us. It's humour Jim, but not as we know it.
Captain Eager and The Mark of Voth is out in the UK on 18th April 2008.
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