In 1991, in the appropriately named Arizona city of Oracle, eight people thought they were stepping into a massive vivarium for a two-year, 24/7 science project. And they were. But they failed to realize what else they were stepping into: a shitstorm. Known as Biosphere 2, the “prefab paradise,” as dubbed by Diane Sawyer, soon became a magnet for controversy, including allegations of cults and charlatans.

And that’s only part of the story, decades in the making, told by documentarian Matt Wolf (Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project) in Spaceship Earth.

With $250 million backing and inspiration from the sci-fi oddity Silent Running, Biosphere 2 was the dream project of John P. Allen, a nomadic Oklahoma native who took a left-of-left turn after Harvard and assembled a countercultural theater troupe whose members then built themselves a self-sustaining ranch community, and after that, a seafaring research vessel, just because, hey, why not? Honestly, from there, an artificial ecological system doesn’t seem like a stretch.

Aided tremendously by copious home movies capturing seemingly every move of Allen and his crew, Wolf’s can-do New Age tale of wonder and might restores the credibility the brave and bold experiment initially had, until public curiosity beget a media circus, which in turn beget a controversy with no real stakes.

Whatever your stance, Biosphere 2 was a big deal when it opened — and then closed, hermetically speaking — but memories of it have fallen away. (And yet, the mindless comedy it inspired, the Pauly Shore vehicle Bio-Dome — unacknowledged by the doc, for the record — is retroactively regarded as a “classic” by people who clearly saw it too young, before they developed taste.) The only thing more surprising than Spaceship Earth’s Rue McClanahan cameo is that of multishirted serpent Steve Bannon, but every good story needs a villain. —Rod Lott

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Having been a cult-film cutthroat for most of my life, Al Adamson is a brand name that fans of filmic trash have come to know and adore. Having rented titles like Satan’s Sadists, Dracula vs. Frankenstein and I Spit on Your Corpse as a teenager from the local video joint, I knew that as dirt-cheap as his flicks usually were, you were at least guaranteed a good time of breasts, blood and beasts.

What I didn’t know about Adamson, however, is the lurid way that, at 65 years of age, he was ruthlessly murdered by a conman. Yikes.

The son of an Australian Western star, Adamson became famous in America’s grindhouse theaters and rural drive-ins, pumping out outrageous titles and usually making more than a few bucks on them. The documentary Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson goes into great detail, with hard-boiled talking heads like Greydon Clark, John “Bud” Cardos and Fred Olen Ray coming together to tell tales of low-budget excitement in cinema’s gory days.

Adamson’s life, however, took at dark turn in the 1980s when, after having directed a lost “docudrama” in Australia about unidentified flying objects, he allowed a drifter named Fred Fulford to work on a couple of his houses; Fulford would eventually take over Adamson’s life, stealing his money and then burying him under 6 feet of concrete in the basement.

Director David Gregory — who did the equally great Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau a few years back — crafts this film as if it were one of Adamson’s double-bill shockers: one half a rip-roaring action flick and the second half a true crime mystery. Despite the terrible ending, I think Adamson would have been proud. —Louis Fowler

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