Space Truckers (1996)

Dennis Hopper is the last independent trucker in the solar system. Everyone else has signed up with the Company for the smart uniforms and the benefits, but John Canyon owns his own rig, hauls genetically engineered square pigs between space stations and answers to nobody. Then he gets stiffed on a payday, takes a no-questions-asked load bound for Earth, and is told it’s 5,000 sex dolls. It is not 5,000 sex dolls.

This month’s Patron’s Pick comes from patron James (no, not that one), and it’s a film neither of us can believe doesn’t have a bigger legacy. We do have questions about Cindy’s mum, though...

Space Truckers comes from Stuart Gordon, the man behind Re-Animator and From Beyond, with former National Lampoon editor Ted Mann on script and a budget of around $25 million, the biggest of Gordon’s career. They shoot it in Ireland, where things get interesting fast: the local producer who’d promised £7 million turns up having raised £2 million, and the production leans on Irish film board money to get over the line. Brian Johnson, of Alien and The Empire Strikes Back, comes in on effects, and the killer robots are designed by Hajime Sorayama, the airbrush artist famous for painting sexy chrome robots. Which explains the sex dolls. It reaches UK cinemas in May 1997 with a 12 certificate. In America it skips cinemas altogether and turns up on HBO.

In this episode we get into Charles Dance playing a peg-legged, Nazi-coded cyborg pirate completely straight (right up to the moment he revs his seldom-used reproductive sequencer like a chainsaw), the InterPork question one of us cannot let go of, and the cryogenics twist that turned one of us right off John Canyon.

Pull up a stool at the space diner, keep your hot dogs away from the pigs, and settle in.

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Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time.

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