Arena (1989)

directed by Peter Manoogian
Italy, USA
94 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This is a somewhat niche plot that I genuinely love: A lone human goes up against a host of aliens in a sports competition somewhere very, very far away from Earth. It's not that I go in for the whole rhetoric that a lot of those films seem to have about humans being the proudest, most able species in the galaxy/universe, I just really enjoy seeing humans thrown in among a bunch of aliens. I like seeing us not be special.

It didn't really occur to me until after I watched Arena that there was supposed to be a plot. I mean, there is one- it's about a lowly snack bar worker who's kind of half-coerced into fighting in a ring with various aliens who are much bigger and stronger than him, and his attempts to win despite the corrupt system. But this is all just going through the motions, it's extremely predictable. The actual plot is the boring salad and the creature design is the tasty dressing that makes it worthwhile.

This is a Charles Band picture, but somehow it managed to snag some of the better names in practical effects, so it looks really great. I specifically wanted to mention the big alien that the human fighter takes on first (the kind of sluggy/mantis-y looking one) because I was just enamored with its design. I would love to see the inner workings of it, because it seemed way too fluid to have simply been a puppet, and I think there was at least one person in there piloting the arms, but I couldn't quite figure out where they would have fit. "Horn" is a good-looking alien too just because they managed to make his mouth move really realistically for a prosthetic. Everything else is unremarkable, Star Trek-y humans in various shades of bodypaint.

Also, I kind of hate how none of the aliens were women. The women were reserved for eye candy because nobody wanted to see an alien woman (or woman equivalent) who's big and nasty and muscly and gross. Give me scaly girls! Girls with horns who are so buff they can crush watermelons with one hand! Give me slimy girls who leave trails wherever they go! Amorphous girls! Incorporeal girls! In fact, give me more genders! This film should have had as many genders as stars in the sky and yet, and yet.

But now I'm off on a tangent about a bad movie that I should, by now, know better than to expect anything from. This is a fun, goofy thing with a fluffy and unimportant plot that will definitely keep you entertained and maybe make you laugh depending on how susceptible you are to bad sci-fi humor. Not much more.