I am a devout follower of Shudder, the streaming service for all things spooky. But as a science-fiction dork, I am often found crying out for an SF/F companion to the horror streaming service. In the streaming era, what’s replaced Sci-Fi Channel circa 1999?
The closest answer I have found is Tubi, the ad-supported watch-for-free streaming service that, in an effort to compete with the majors, has accumulated a vast library of VHS-ready titles worthy of a mom-and-pop video store. This is where I watched Arena, a 1989 sci-fi movie I had never heard of that I will be recommending to my cult-film-fanatic friends for at least the next year.
Produced in the late 1980s, but only dumped in the U.S. as a straight-to-video release in 1991, Arena stars Paul Satterfield as Steve Armstrong, a space-station-employee short-order cook who whips up the wrong order on and winds up on the wrong bruiser’s bad side. After surviving a brawl in the kitchen, Steve catches the eye of a boxing promoter who believes he might the rare humanoid who can make it in alien boxing. This begins Steve’s career as a champion of the Arena, where mortal men can fight buglike creatures and cyborg beasties. (A sci-fi tech thingamajig is used to equalize the playing field, holding stronger competitors back to the level of weaker homo sapien specimens.)
If that sounds like a thinly veiled attempt to turn the cantina scene from Star Wars into one of the fight-forward Rocky sequels, well good news, it absolutely is.
I was shocked to learn before pressing play on Tubi that Arena had not been riffed on by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew — on the surface, it looks like B-movie junk. And while Arena was produced by Irwin Yablans, who can brag about making Halloween with John Carpenter, his resume is littered with schlock, including the godawful 1978 movie Laserblast (actual MST3K cannon fodder). But everyone involved with Arena seems to have thrown themselves at this lofty premise.
Paul Satterfield did not turn into the next Sylvester Stallone, but he did carve out a career on soaps like General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful, where studs thrive. He does the job here as a hulk of a man in Arena, selling his bouts against towering puppets that look dazzling, even by today’s standards. Many of the latex effects were the work of John Carl Buechler, the SFX makeup artist behind pretty much every great prosthetic of 1980s horror, and Screaming Mad George, a Japanese special effects artist who worked on Predator and Big Trouble in Little China. While director Peter Manoogian (Seedpeople) can’t stage Balboa-worthy boxing sequences between a man and an 8-foot puppet — and I don’t believe even George Lucas and the ILM team could have pulled it off in 1989! — Arena’s fantasy imagery had me howling. The team swings big.
Not every scene in Arena can be an alien boxing match, so thankfully, Manoogian fills the movie with actors you actually want to watch. Joining Satterfield in most scenes is British folksinger-turned-actor Hamilton Camp playing Shorty, a four-armed alien version of Burt Young’s Paulie from Rocky. Claudia Christian, who in recent years has voiced tons of characters in World of Warcraft and Fallout, plays Quinn, a kind of Han Solo-esque boxing manager who takes Steve under her wing. A sharp, determined female character in a 1980s sci-fi movie that isn’t dressed up in skimpy clothes for ogling? They said it couldn’t be done.
But what made me gasp was the appearance by two members of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cast, a quick way for a movie to earn at least one extra star in my book. None other than Marc Alaimo, aka Gul Dukat, shows up to play Quinn, the slimy Arena booker, who looking back seems like a proto version of Dukat. A mobster alien with an aggressive hairline, Quinn is just chewing up scenery and needling Steve at every turn. His fixer lackey? Weezil, played by Armin Shimerman of Quark fame.
There are the classics, there are the cult classics, and then there are B-movie sci-fi cheapos circling the bottom of the barrel on free streaming services. Not every all of them need to be reclaimed with “actually good” endorsements. But Arena deserves a hero to step in the ring to fight in its defense. I am that man, ready to throw a hook at any snarling pigbot who wants to come at me.
Arena is streaming for free on Tubi.