Space Mutiny

Space Mutiny (also known as Mutiny in Space) is a 1988 direct-to-video science fiction film produced in South Africa.

Plot
Aboard the generation ship Southern Sun, which is travelling towards a distant world to set up a colony, an explosion in the ship's docking bay nearly kills pilot Dave Ryder, and renders the docking bay out of action for several weeks. Ryder investigates the explosion with the help of the captain's daughter, Lea Jansen, and discovers that the ship's chief of security, Elijah Kalgan, along with chief engineer MacPhearson, are planning to stage a mutiny and take over the ship.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) Incredibly cheap and shoddy production values. Most of the movie is just shot in a warehouse or factory of some kind, and there are only maybe two or three actual sets that they keep re-using with minor changes.
 * 2) They didn't bother covering up the windows that were part of the location they used, completely ruining the illusion that the ship is in space. What's worse is that the film's cinematographer, of all people, actually realized this problem and tried to tint the windows red to make it look like they were heat vents for the ship's reactor, but a screw-up in editing resulted in them being re-tinted back to normal.
 * 3) A lot of the film is padded out with sequences featuring witch-like aliens called Bellerians. These sequences have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the storyline other than some vague implication that the Bellerians are manipulating what's going on, don't even feature any of the main cast members (aside from a brief appearance by Cameron Mitchell in one scene) and somehow manage to look even more cheap and ugly than the rest of the film.
 * 4) Awful special effects. Here's some of the worst examples:
 * 5) *The crashed fighter that's seen in the aftermath of the docking bay explosion is clearly just a pile of garbage that someone's set fire to, and is way too small for anyone (let alone two people) to actually sit in.
 * 6) *An extremely cheap and crappy effect is used for the "transporter" that Ryder uses to escape from the fighter.
 * 7) *The various effects used for lasers all look extremely primitive.
 * 8) *Even the movie's title sequence looks to have been produced by a Commodore 64.
 * 9) *The shots of the Southern Sun itself look decent enough... mostly because they're just stock footage taken from the original Battlestar Galactica. Yes, really.
 * 10) Bizarre casting decisions. Cisse Cameron is clearly too old to play the part of Lea and has no chemistry with Reb Brown, which is really strange considering that the two were (and still are) married in real-life.
 * 11) *The movie also wastes James Ryan, one of South Africa's most famous martial artists, by casting him as MacPhearson, who is crippled and has to use a walking stick.
 * 12) The costumes all look really stupid. Most of the female crewmembers not only wear incredibly skimpy outfits that make the female uniforms from Star Trek: The Original Series look modest by comparison, but some of the female extras with longer hair can end up looking naked from certain camera angles. The ship's commander also wears a bizarre robe which, along with Cameron Mitchell's beard, ends up making him look like the Galactica 1980 incarnation of Commander Adama.
 * 13) Thanks to an editing screw-up, a crewmember who's shot dead by Kalgan suddenly shows up alive in a completely different part of the ship in the very next scene, with no mention of how she recovered.
 * 14) Overuse of "railing kills", where people are either pushed to their deaths over railings, fall over railings after being shot, or are blown over them by an explosion. Part of the climactic action sequence is literally 30 seconds or so of non-stop railing kills.
 * 15) The basic storyline makes absolutely no sense when you think about it. The ship is has supposedly been travelling for 14 generations (about 400 years), and will not reach its destination during the lifetime of any of the main characters. This implies that habitable planets are so rare that such a long voyage is necessary to reach one, yet not only does Kalgan say he intends to find a habitable world to settle down on, one of the characters mentions that some of the nearby planets have space pirate bases, and the Bellerians clearly aren't human, implying that there are plenty of usable and possibly even habited worlds in that part of space. So... why does the Southern Sun need another 50+ years to reach its destination?
 * 16) While Kalgan is at least given something of a motive for carrying out the mutiny - not wanting to spend his whole life confined to the Southern Sun - there's no reason ever given as to why MacPhearson wants to join in. He apparently has some kind of grudge against Ryder, but that's no reason for committing mutiny!
 * 17) Ryder has clearly been on the Southern Sun for some time (and was presumably even born on it), and yet acts like he's meeting the ship's command staff for the very first time after the fighter crash.
 * 18) The film's middle is padded out by lots of scenes of Ryder running around and getting into fights with Kalgan's henchmen. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of the episode cuts these scenes out, and if you hadn't seen the original version, you wouldn't notice they were missing.
 * 19) More padding also appears in a space battle sequence, which is just a few minutes of stock footage from Battlestar Galactica showing the titular ship battling Cylon ships, and is then ended abruptly when the Southern Sun just fires some missiles that instantly blow up the enemy ships.
 * 20) A ridiculous scene late on where Kalgan tries to torture Lea by using a laser beam on her teeth.
 * 21) The scene of the actual mutiny is unimpressive, to say the least. It's just five minutes or so of about a dozen guys on each side shooting at each other, with railing kills interspersed throughout, before Ryder causes an explosion and kills MacPhearson, and then all the mutineers except for Kalgan just give up for some reason.
 * 22) Underwhelming death for Kalgan, who dies when Ryder crashes a small go-kart-like vehicle into a similar vehicle that Kalgan's driving, somehow causing a massive explosion which apparently kills the latter.
 * 23) Cliched ending that tries to hint at a sequel by showing that Kalgan somehow survived the gigantic explosion that seemingly killed him.
 * 24) Burning MacPhearson to death makes the heroes seem less heroic.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Reb Brown does the best he can with the role he's given, and his signature loud screams add a lot of unintentional hilarity to the action sequences.
 * 2) John Philip Law and James Ryan both overact hilariously, making it obvious that they knew what a terrible movie they were in and just decided to have fun.
 * 3) A few of the action sequences are okay, considering the film's low budget.
 * 4) The movie in general has a lot of unintentional humor, due to its awful production values, ridiculous storyline and relying on sci-fi tropes that were laughably outdated even by late '80s standards.

Reception
Very few people paid any attention to the movie when it was released straight-to-video, and it would gain greater notoriety when it was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, becoming one of the most famous episodes of that show. The movie, like many others featured on the show, has gained a cult following for its "so bad, it's good" nature.