Deep Space 1988

[Yolette Langevin]

Secretlyengineered and blasted into space by government scientists, a vile monster crash-lands back on Earth and begins killing everyone it encounters. As the death toll rises, veteran cop McLemore bravely steps forward to crush the scary creature.

Charles Napier Ann Turkel Bo Svenson Ron Glass Julie Newmar James Booth Norman Burton Jesse Dabson Elisabeth Brooks Anthony Eisley Peter Palmer Fox Harris William Fair Dawn Wildsmith Susan Stokey Sandy Brooke Rachel Howard Drew Godderis Jimmy Williams Fred Olen Ray Bob Ivy Joe Praml Richard Hench Michael Forest Tony Montero

Fred Olen Ray's Alien rip-off/ geriatric buddy cop flick. Vagina dentata from outer space.. WITH TENTACLES! The entire movie is populated by middle-aged people, there really isn't a young person in sight. Batman's Julie Newmar hams it up as a psychic. There are many silly moments (Charles Napier trying to seduce Ann Turkel by wearing a kilt and playing the bagpipes).

Charles Napier and Ron Glass are a couple of cops who play by their own rules much to the irritation of their police captain (Bo Svensson). When what seems like a run-of-the-mill investigation unearths a government conspiracy involving Alien-like creatures that crash on Earth, it's up to them to get to the bottom of all the strange going on! They probably don't help themselves when they find a couple of Alien eggs and decide to take them home.

Another sci fi cheapie this time brought to us by low budget film maker extraordinaire Fred Olen Ray! With a similar plot to Olen Ray's Biohazard but with more police procedural elements Deep Space is a fun ride filled with cheesy action and lo fi space alien carnage!

A top secret alien vessel launched into space by the military has crashed on earth. The alien gets loose, military chases it down, shennanigans and bloodshed ensues. The creature doesn't look half bad and is kind of an improved looking alien from Biohazard. There's some great 80s synth action, dramatic performances and a good amount of Tom foolery.

Charles Napier hunts an off-brand Xenomorph in this buddy cop bug hunt from Fred Olen Ray. Schlocky B-movie fun that feels like a 50s creature feature updated for the 80s. The creature effects are surprisingly decent and I found the whole thing to be rather charming. I mean, they establish this thing as some practically indestructible biological weapon, so, of course, Napier goes after it armed with a shotgun and a hunting knife. He also uses bagpipes to seduce women. And I don't want to spoil anything but there's a moment with a chainsaw that scored a lot of points with me. This was only my fourth Fred Olen Ray flick but, based on this one, I fully intend to delve deeper into his rather prolific oeuvre.

Well, hi there.

Okay, so double feature time again. If I didn't take my sweet time with the challenge I wouldn't have to do that BUUT I did so powering through.

The first part will be Deep Space, a film I had never heard off and it doesn't even have a banner so.. potentially a hidden gem? Maybe?

Secretly engineered and blasted into space by government scientists, a vile monthey ster crash-lands back on earth and begins killing everyone it encounters. Yeah, that the monster is mad is completely understandable.

At one point a homeless man wanders down the street, lies down on the ground, is roused from his stupor, gets back up, slowly walks away, then enters a building for no particular reason to discover the Alien.

Charles Napier star vehicles are not exactly thick on the ground, so god bless Fred Olen Ray for making one. At $2 million, this is reportedly the most expensive Ray production, which means it looks about on part with the sort of movie Roger Corman was producing around this time, which means it still looks pretty cheap. That said, a low-budget movie from 1988 was still shot on film and might even have a few car crashes and explosions, which is not the case in most of today's Tubi fodder.

Deep Space Trash. Rubber Garbage Disposal Tetsuo Alien RazorFace always illuminated by pulsating Spencer's Gifts party light. Leaving it's nasty roach eggs all over. Charles Napier fighting Trash Alien Bug with a chainsaw set to some shrilled noise soundtrack that I need to own. Bo Svenson just popping in to finish the thing off. I don't see a problem here.

Ron:So the smallest one was about the size of a shoebox, I guess. I should actually start out by telling you about a medium size one that we had, which was about the size of maybe half of a standard refrigerator, big and heavy. And if it ever ran into something, it could do some serious damage. And so we called it FANG, which was an acronym for Futuristic Autonomous Navigation Gizmo. And so the little shoebox sized one, we called Tooth.

Ron:And then there were a couple of outdoor robots. The first one was this giant six wheeled behemoth that used truck tires. It was the size of an SUV and it called Robbie. And then there were a series of smaller rovers, which eventually turned into the first actual Mars rovers, the Sojourner rover. So a series of prototypes for that rover called Rocky, the Rocky series. So there was Rocky 1, 2, 3, 4.

Ron:On the larger robots that had a few megabytes of RAM, we actually ran LISP on the robot. So the actual code that controlled the robot was written in LISP. Now, the other way which LISP was used for the little robots was designing languages specifically for programming robots and compiling those languages down to embedded code that would run on small processors.

Ron:It was cutting edge research code, so it was buggy and it crashed and things went wrong. We never had any catastrophes, thankfully. I think FANG once went rogue and put a hole in the drywall in the office. But that was the worst because FANG w as easily capable of moving fast enough to do some damage. So thankfully, he never hurt anybody.

Adam:Robbie, Rocky, Tooth and FANG, they were some of the most capable self-driving robots at the time. A lot of self navigation first happened on this team. But while Ron was heads down working on the code, things with the team started to go sideways.

Adam:The operational burden of this approach is really high, whereas a totally self-driving approach has a much lower operations cost. In fact, if the robots could be self driven, potentially more and smaller robots could be sent. I mean, they would have to be very reliable, but each small robot could head out exploring on its own and then more could be done with less. But there is a political problem.

Ron:There were some people who thought that maybe some of this autonomy technology could be used for actual spacecraft, flying in space, and that some of the theories of economies of scale could be applied there. And in particular, NASA got a new director around that time. He was an advocate of this idea of trying to pursue economies of scale in order to reduce mission costs. And he launched a pilot program called the New Millennium series. It was a series of missions, technology demonstration missions with the explicit goal of trying to demonstrate technologies that could be deployed at scale in order to reduce operating costs. And the autonomy technology that we had started developing for rovers was repurposed for that in a project called the Remote Agent that was done in collaboration with the Ames Research Center and some work that people were doing there in planners and diagnostic systems.

There were three or four, depending on how you count, major components of this thing that were developed at JPL and Ames. And one of them came from Carnegie Mellon that were all kind of all together to make the Remote Agent.

Adam:It was called the Remote Agent because it was going to have agency. Just like the rover prototypes, it would have a goal and take actions to accomplish that goal. But this time it was a flight controller and not a rover controller.

Ron:So the New Millennium emissions were divided into two categories. There were the deep space missions which went out of earth orbits and the EO missions that were in earth orbit. And we were slated to fly on the first deep space mission, DS1, Deep Space 1, which was going to go to rendezvous with a comet and an asteroid. And they had a whole bunch of other cutting edge technologies that were going to fly on the same mission and get demonstrated in the same mission. And originally we were slated to control the entire mission with the Remote Agent.

There are all kinds of subtle problems that can arise that are sneaky and un-intuitive and can lead to problems like race conditions and deadlocks. And so this language was designed so that the very structure of the language prevented you from encountering these kinds of difficulties. And the code was even subjected to a formal analysis that we had a formal proof that the safety in variance that this language was designed to maintain were actually maintained.

This was like the second day of the three day experiment. So people were sleeping during this time, but not very much. And my memory of the details here are fairly fuzzy, but it was an all hands on deck situation because the scenario had been designed with safeguards in place so that the odds of actually losing the spacecraft were very low, even if the Remote Agents screwed up.

Ron:So the first thing that we told it was send us a back trace. Send us a dump of the system state, of all the processes that are running. The processes that are waiting for something to happen, what are they waiting for? So that was the first thing we did. That information came back and we looked at it and then it was actually almost immediately obvious what was going wrong because there was this one process that was waiting for something that should have already happened. And so that was a big clue as to what was going wrong. What turned out that the problem was that there was, in fact, a race condition, which was supposed to have been impossible.

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