Set in a drug addled mining colony on Jupiter's moon Io, it features an excellent Sean Connery in what is essentially a sci-fi update of "High Noon"; a lone white hat surrounded by corruption and having to take on the bad guys unaided.
Making use of the same blue collar vibe as Alien, with added lashings of the ever amusing "music of the future" and oily PVC clad space pole dancers, it's a pretty decent film. But the standout memory for the young me, seeing this movie as a thirteen year old kid or so, are the exploding heads.
People have drug freak outs in Outland. They think their working spacesuits have spiders in them, and they take their helmets off in a panic. Exposed to the vacuum, they undergo a troublesome cerebral expansion...
The fun doesn't stop there of course, and entering a depressurising airlock without a spacesuit is seen to cause major gastric issues.
When the bad guys arrive, despite being alone, Sean Connery is of course well up to the task. This David Crosby lookalike falls foul of the cunning of 007 and a chain smoking comic relief Doctoress.
The special effects, consisting of what appear to be inflateable footballs with crude faces stuck on them, are of course laughable now, as is the science - you don't blow up like Mr Creosote when exposed to a vacuum. But to a teenager, it was damn scary to imagine the panic, the fear, the terror of feeling your face, and eyes, and skin, and tissue, expand out into the unforgiving cold of space and rip you to shreds in a lengthy burst of stretchy agony.
Brrrr. Shivers...
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