THIS GIANT PAPIER MACHE BOULDER IS ACTUALLY REALLY HEAVY

A super geek and two average dudes stumble into an old science-fiction B-movie at a convention and find themselves sucked straight into its black and white cardboard setting world. Once on board the space ship, there is no escape from the fantasy until they have stopped the evil Lord Froth. In between there are explosions of color and a loss of identity, tiresome aliens, wild Amazons, and an iguana inflated into a man-eating monster: director Cristian Nicolson is obviously a fan of pre-digital science fiction cinema, and his wild ride through all the standard situations of the genre is all the more appealing, because although he parodies it, he never, ever does so with irony. Besides: anyone who can turn the caps of water bottles into potentially dangerous control buttons on a homemade, silver-painted space ship console, can only be a great artist deep inside. Nicolson’s directing debut, so rich in twists and attention to detail, is such a delightful exercise in applied fanboyism, it will make your heart flutter with excitement and admiration, and eventually you just can’t help but believe that this giant papier-mâché boulder actually is really heavy.