For Bob, it was a day like any other in a cheesy minimal effort E.T. the Extraterrestrial wannabe life. Rush through breakfast so he could make the baseball game where he’d be rightfully bullied for his utter failure to hit a fastball, hit the airboat races with his family to watch his dad bring home a sweet $5000 prize and then see one of his father’s competitors get in his face about it. Later on a gator attacked their airboat, knocking dad overboard, causing Bob to lose consciousness and end up kidnapped by a UFO piloted by a talking robot with giant human-like eyes! Damn little dude, I bet you wish hadn’t been so hellbent on hurrying through your breakfast now!
But thank the big astronaut in the sky that he did! Because what crazy life-changing adventures awaited Bob and his new best friend Jay Seven! Cruising the skies of south Florida in their blinged-out UFO, Bob and Jay do what any of us would do. Like hover above a carnival and wave stupidly at some of the kids down below! You can keep your sissy titl-a-whirl, I’m doing warp ten on Jay’s starcruiser, you pathetic Earthers!
But it wasn’t all just leaving thruster burn marks throughout the Everglades! There were tough times Bob and Jay had to endure, too! Like that weird power surge that turned Jay totally freaking evil! One minute Jay is Bob’s best buddy with his friendly wide open eyes, the next minute those eyes turn bloodshot and Jay starts chasing Bob around the ship with a metal pipe!
While the film didn’t have the balls or good sense to have Jay bludgeon the insufferable Bob to death (he cried for no reason way too much to root for when he wasn’t standing around with his creepy toothy grin perpetually affixed to his tear-streaked face), Bob did have to risk his life to stop Jay from destroying the magic apple tree growing on the spaceship! Damn! What drama! What would that robot eat, if he wrecked his apple tree in a fit of tech rage! Maybe Bob!
Magic apple tree on a spaceship? If you’re like me when you heard that, you were like, this is what was missing from The Mandalorian! The awesome magicness of the apples aren’t readily apparently though. At first when Jay picks one for Bob, it looks normal, if a bit small, but then it changes! Into a clear, crystal space apple! But what is its special powers? The best kind of powers. The “in case of emergency, use your apple, dummy!” kind of powers! But what could possibly happen to a kid whose best friend is a super advanced artificial intelligence in dire need of a decent surge protector that he would need a dues ex machina fruit?
The plot of Navigators of the Space (if the title seems a tad, um, stilted, keep in mind that other than the terrifically absurd end credit song, it’s the only thing in the movie that’s in English!) is about go supernova! All awesome space adventures have to come to an end and Bob needs to go home so instead of using his cutting edge spaceship to drop him off at his front door, Jay just lets Bob wander through swamps until he finds the highway and has to hitchhike home! Intergalactic walk of shame!
Even worse though for Bob is that he discovers that several years have passed since he left with Jay Seven! Omg! Like what happened to his family? Did his dad ever get rescued? Or was he just so much airboat champion gator bait? And what of his mom and sister? All those questions and more will be answered when Bob goes home and peeps in the front window!
But what does he see? Well, there’s his sister, but she’s dressed like a hussy in a super tight dress and heels and going out with some randy dudes in a jeep! And mom is serving a turkey dinner to the family, but that’s not dad at the head of the table! It’s dad airboat racing enemy! Good gravy but this makes A Sound of Thunder’s fudged up future look like so much overrated stomped on butterflies! Jay Seven has to be the most evil AI since the Borg! You will be assimilated! Into your family from the Mirror Universe! But wait… are you happy to see how hot your sister is now or is that a magic apple in your pocket, Bob?
Director Camillo Teti is best known for his anonymous Italian war movies, Brothers in War, Bye Bye Vietnam, and Cobra Mission 2 and his tale of a boy, his robot and fantastic fruit obviously stands with ease shoulder to shoulder with those effortless efforts! For reasons that are probably spelled out in some secret international treaty, Navigators of the Space is not available in English or with English subtitles, despite being filmed in Florida with American participants and dubbed in Italian so poorly you’re tempted to just mute all of it and pretend it was shot as a silent film for artistic reasons.
Despite the lack of English, the movie is easy to follow and though you might be tempted to assert this as some sort of compliment to Teti’s skill in telling a story, it’s merely that the story is so basically moronic, you could probably skip the middle section and still get the gist of things.
Amazingly, nothing much really happens once Bob and Jay are flying around on the ship. I guess there could be some finer plot points that were missed when they were jabbering nonstop in Italian to each other on the ship, but hell if I even noticed! If there’s anything more gloriously dopey than your typical Italian exploitation film, it’s the Italian exploitation family film.
For connoisseurs of ineptitude, nothing beats low budget foreign science fiction movies aimed at kids. It’s like a law of physics that they have to be black hole level sucky. Navigators of the Space easily adheres to this theory and if there were times I was staring at Jay Seven wondering if those were just nails straight up nailed into his head, by the time it was over and Jay was back surfing the stars by himself, I was rubbing my own scalp checking for embedded sharp objects to see if those were the cause of my own headache.
© 2022 MonsterHunter
Somebody, somewhere, decided that what the world truly needed was an Italian ripoff of Flight of the Navigator.
And I honestly can’t say whether they were wrong.