YMMV / Space Mutiny

• Awesome Music: The movie may be cheesy as all hell, but Steven McClintock's "Edge of a Dream" is genuinely awesome.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Any scene featuring the Bellerians with their strange dances and poses for no discernible reason.
• Cliché Storm: Many tropes show up in the film seemingly just because other, better movies used them, too.
• Complete Monster: Elijah Kalgan is the leader of the conspiracy to take over the Southern Sun, so he can use it to land on another world and sell the populace not in his conspiracy into slavery. To do this, he kills 38 Enforcers to consolidate his power in the group, commits acts of sabotage that cost several lives and kills anybody who happens to get in his way. Anybody who displeases Kalgan is kidnapped and tortured, being shot into space after giving all information of use and cryogenically frozen if of more use in the future. After David Ryder puts a stop to Kalgan's scheme, Kalgan and the remainder of his men blast their way through a crowd of scientists to get to his foe.
• Cult Classic: Thanks to Mystery Science Theater 3000, of course.
• Designated Hero: The way Ryder dispatches the evil MacPhearson is pretty brutal. It doesn't help that MacPhearson was helpless at that point and basically begging for his life.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Lobster Boy" for Kalgan's bodyguard, who wears crinkly red armor plates that make him look like a lobster. And is played by a guy named Guy. Guy Pringle ("Wow, wouldn't wanna slam a stack of that guy.").
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000 made a Running Gag out of making up nicknames for main character Dave Ryder, or rather Big McLargehuge!
  • Lea is known as "Grandma-Daughter" & her dad is "Captain Santa".
  • Lea is often also referred to "Dr. Lady" by Mystery Science Theater fans.
• Fetish Retardant: Lea's dance scene.
  Tom Servo: She's presenting like a mandrill!
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The fact that all of the space shots are recycled from the old Battlestar Galactica is pretty funny to begin with, but it all got even funnier — or at least, that bit more ironic — when the final season of Battlestar Galactica (2003) had a major arc involving, yes, a mutiny in space aboard Galactica, which was also spearheaded by a power-hungry Machiavellian type and a trusted member of the crew who walks with a pronounced limp. Plus, the Captain bears an uncanny resemblance to the Galactica 1980 version of Adama.
  • All the jokes about how the inside of the ship looks like a brewery are even funnier in light of Star Trek (2009), in which the engineering section of the Enterprise really is a Budweiser brewery.
  • An infamously poorly received science fiction work about a colony ship protected by a hero named Ryder?
• Memetic Mutation: Courtesy of Rifftrax doing a live show of the film, fans have started putting Ryder's infamous scream face everywhere.
• Mis-blamed: While credited director David Winters tends to get all the blame for the film's faults, he actually quit as director relatively early on in shooting, leaving another director (Neal Sundstrom) to handle the rest of the film, and then a third director (David Prior) to film the Bellerian sequences when the initial cut came in short. However, the film's credited writer, Maria Dante is actually just Winters under a pseudonym, meaning that while Winters may not be entirely to blame for the shoddy production, he is very much to blame for the storyline (sans anything to do with the Bellerians).
• Moral Event Horizon: Elijah Kalgan crosses it when he reveals his plan to sell the majority of the population of the Generation Ship he's on into slavery after he takes over.
• Narm:
  • All over the place, but one moment where Ryder screams before [calmly] jumping out of the speeder stands out.
  • The scene where Engineer Parsons gets killed was no doubt intended to show a principled officer meeting a savage end at the hands of the mutineers. In practice, it comes across more like a bunch of school bullies beating up a whiny kid for his lunch money.
    Mike (as Parsons): "Wh-what I meant was, I totally endorse what you're doing, g—ow!"
    Crow (as one of the mutineers): Rip his band uniform! Then he'll have to pay for it!
  • The way Parsons is killed is also ridiculous, MacPhearson stabs him to death with his cane, which might sound scary, but just comes across as silly, mainly due to the low camera angle, which makes it so we can't see the actual stabbing and makes it seem more like he is inflating a tire (indeed, the MST3k episode makes this exact joke). It also raises the question of why his cane would be sharp enough to kill a person in the first place, as that actually seems really dangerous for him (what if he stabs his leg or foot with it by mistake?)
  • The floor buffer chases, which we can clearly see are moving slower than walking speed.
  • Kalgan laughing at random moments. It's just....so out of left field and odd.
  • "Take this, you space-bitch!"
  • Ryder inexplicably taking extreme offense to a rather innocuous line from Lea. Mike and the Bots are understandably left wondering if she was supposed to have more lines in between his increasingly angry deliveries, which just weren't put in for some reason.
• Padding: The Bellerian sequences are the most blatant example of this trope, having nothing to do with the rest of the storyline. However, the MST3K episode also cuts out a bunch of sequences midway through the film of Ryder getting into fistfights with random mutineers, and if you hadn't seen the longer cut beforehand, you wouldn't have any idea that they were supposed to be there.
• Questionable Casting: James Ryan, an accomplished martial artist, is cast in the role of a crippled man who is barely able to walk.
• Retroactive Recognition: Film music fans may be surprised to see pre-Speed-Con Air-Twister-Moana-Bad Boys Mark Mancina as one of three credited composers.
• So Bad, It's Good:
  • Many viewers (not limited to MST3K fans) consider Space Mutiny to be an archetypal example of the trope: Far too stupid to be taken seriously, but just sincere enough to avoid being dismissed as a cash-grab or ripoff.
  • The whole movie can be likened to an expensive cheese: smelly, but quite enjoyable if you're in the right mood (or paired with a good wine).
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Much of the action takes place in a treatment plant with visible sunlight. Bricks in the walls are visible in many of the shots.
  • Not to mention the Enforcers' "Speeders", which are either golf carts, floor waxers or "Hervé Villechaize's death car[s]" capable of "reaching speeds of 3!" Also, all of the Speeders have "Enforcer (some number here)" written on the sides, and the letters aren't lined up properly at all.
  • Even the titles aren't immune to this trope, looking as if they were produced on a Commodore Amiga Video Toaster by someone using it for the very first time. (And that's an insult to the Video Toaster, which defaulted to better graphics than the super-blocky text on the screen.)
  • Plus they had to swipe footage from Battlestar Galactica! *sheesh*! Also, many of the costumes are so stupid that even a 1950's B-movie sci-fi character would be embarrassed to wear them!
  • The "bridge" (well, the place the leaders spend most of their time, anyway) looks like some kind of office complex with a few Apple II e's set up. You probably wouldn't even know it was meant to be in a spaceship if they didn't tell you. Made especially bad in the uncut version where we get a few shots of the Battlestar Galactica's bridge during the pirate fight, which, needless to say, looks a million times better than the bridge in the actual movie.
  • If you look carefully at the shot just before Ryder's speeder crashes into Kalgan's, it's obvious that his "speeder" is just a stationary prop with a dummy in it (they show the dummy from behind, but it's still extremely obvious since it's completely still, then we immediately cut to Kalgan's face screaming while tilting his head back.)
  • When Ryder ostensibly teleports out of his ship, there is a very obvious transparent outline of him before he actually "materializes".
• Squick. Lea's totally-not-obvious seduction of a pudgy henchmen. Hell, every time Lea tries to be sexy.
• Strawman Has a Point: Depending on your perspective (and which version of the movie you watch), Space Mutiny can seem much closer to Gray-and-Grey Morality than it's intended to be.
  • The movie tries to present the mutineers as evil, and they aren't given any obvious redeeming features. Their leaders are essentially card carrying villains, Kalgan with his stated goal of "accumulat[ing] wealth and power" and MacPhearson, in the longer video cut, being motivated mostly by revenge against Ryder. That said, consider the story from their perspective. The mutineers didn't choose to spend their entire life on a ship - that decision was made for them. Space is clearly inhabited beyond the Southern Sun, so why aren't people who want to leave allowed to just leave? It's not hard to see the mutineers as simply trying to escape the flying jail they were unlucky enough to be born in, even if they are going about it in a bad way, and a few minor characters indeed voice these sentiments though the film doesn't spend much time exploring them.
  • It's not helped that the film's argument against the mutiny is melodramatic and poorly stated at best, or non-existent at worst. The best the movie can muster is that the mutineers are wrong because their plans go against some nebulous, ill-defined "law of the universe" and because Kalgan himself is an irredeemable villain. It's possible to view the mutineers as misguided idealists who are being manipulated by Kalgan for his own, less idealistic ends.
  • Admittedly, some of this ambiguity is due to the cuts made for the MST3K version. For instance, some dialogue was trimmed from that version stating that Kalgon & MacPhearson were going to sell everybody in the ship to the Space Pirates as slaves, and MacPhearson's grudge against Ryder is barely even suggested, making him border on a Well-Intentioned Extremist. Ironically, these edits made for time probably made the film a shade more complex than the creators intended.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • There seems to be exactly one female Enforcer. She's never given a name but is implied to be Kalgon's girlfriend or something. While this could have given him some depth and made him more than just a one-dimensional bad guy, she's never given any characterization, and what exactly happens to her is unknown as she's never seen again after a scene about half way through the movie
  • The Bellarians also count. Other than a single scene where one of them gives the Captain some kind of psychic Info Dump, they are completely superfluous to the plot, and don't interact with the other characters at all aside from when they first arrive, and one scene where an couple enforcers go in to talk with them, at which point the Bellarians... somehow make them dance around or something and they fall asleep, which explicably makes Kalgan really mad.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Lt. Lemont. They're the only apparently-female character not wearing a Stripperific outfit, instead wearing a regular uniform; and in an "off-duty" scene wears what appears to be a standard women's leotard but which inexplicably includes a jock strap or cod piece. Doesn't help that the actor/actress is named Billy Second, though they're referred to as an actress on IMDb and their other roles have names like "Cleo", "Karen", and "Mrs. Yates".
• Vindicated by Cable: Yet another film saved from complete obscurity by Mystery Science Theater 3000. The cuts made by MST3K actually improved the movie significantly, removing or greatly paring down many scenes that were confusing, flowed poorly, were obviously out of order, or simply ran too long and accomplished too little.
• The Woobie:
  • Poor Steve.
  • Lt. Lemont, the only ship's officer with an IQ above room temperature... though this is undone by her amazing and unexplained return from the dead.

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