FATAL CONFLICT (2000) *

The stars of Halloween 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, and Hellraiser 7 were brought together for this muddled, joyless, and dull mix of Sci-Fi, action, and Women in Prison cliches.    

Leo Rossi and Jennifer Rubin are a pair of incestuous brother and sister space age criminals who take control of a prison ship and intend to crash it into Los Angeles.  Kari Wuhrer is a disgraced pilot who is given a Snake Plissken-type deal to infiltrate the prison and take them out.  Along the way, she gets help from the imprisoned captain (Miles O’Keeffe) to complete her mission.

You would think that any movie that begins with scenes of girls mining space ore while wearing skimpy t-shirts and panties would be promising.  However, the editing is piss-poor, and the way they try to explain what’s going on during the opening credits is goofy and confusing.  Also, it looks like they stole footage from another movie and awkwardly spliced it into the proceedings to help pad out the plot.  Add to that, there’s weird narration, random cutaways to crappy special effects, and repeated shots, which creates even more confusion.   

The middle section of the film is cheap, but at least it’s semi-competently put together.  The ending isn’t quite as crassly thrown together, but it’s still crappy.  The special effects look like they came from a different flick, the final scenes between Wuhrer and O’Keeffe are played out via voiceover exchanges set against a starfield.  It's enough to make you theorize that the production company ran out of money somewhere along the way and just had to cobble what they had together in order to release it.  Either that, or they ran out of time and never got around the filming the ending (or the bulk of the beginning), so they slapped some half-assed ADR on the end and called it a day.  Either way, it’s the pits.

Director Lloyd A. (Chained Heat 2) Simandl is no stranger to the Women in Prison subgenre.  Unfortunately, this time around he forgot to sleaze it up.  I mean if you’re going to make a Women in Prison movie (even one set in space), you’ve got to toss the requisite amount of T & A in there.  As it is, it’s all rather tame, not to mention boring.  (The scenes of the scantily clad prisoners breaking rocks get monotonous.)  Some amusement can be had from the cheapjack production values and inconsistent effects (this is one of those movies that takes place in the future, but people still listen to CD players), but for the most part, it’s a slog.

Once Wuhrer stows away on board the ship, things pivot into a galactic Die Hard clone.  This portion of the film is a slight improvement over the Women in Prison-inspired scenes, but not much.  Although Wuhrer looks good shooting big guns like a lady Rambo, her character is paper thin, and her “tough” dialogue is pithy.  Rossi and Rubin get shortchanged as the villains too.  Making them have the hots for one another was a good idea, but the movie is too chickenshit to properly exploit it.  O’Keeffe gives the best performance of the film, but his efforts are ultimately all for naught.  

In short, Fatal Conflict deserves to be lost in space.  

AKA:  The Prey.