Sin City sci-fi: Local filmmaker Mike Conway makes a major motion picture Terrarium - in his backyard

If they gave out Oscars for energy, chutzpah, tenacity and sheer irrepressible enthusiasm, Las Vegas filmmaker Mike Conway would be a shoo-in for a nomination.

Like Sin City's answer to Ed Wood, Conway is a one-man movie industry who, with a lot of help from his friends, has made Terrarium, a feature-length sci-fi thriller about a bunch of astronauts who become tasty snack food for a ravening monster, after their spacecraft crashes on a distant planet.

Following in the illustrious footsteps of indie-flick legends like Robert Rodriguez (who famously made El Mariachi for $7,000) and Kevin Smith (whose Clerks reputedly cost $27,000) this uncompromising visionary, and his actress wife Sheila, maxed out their credit cards to raise the film's budget - which, by a serendipitous coincidence, was also $27,000.

In the even grander tradition of Garland and Rooney in all those old MGM musicals where the perennially perky Judy and Mickey said, "Hey, kids, let's put on a show in the barn!" Conway literally shot the movie in his backyard. There, with the help of associate producer Paul Folger, the University of Arizona graduate built the set of the futuristic "Cetus 1" spacecraft. This 64-foot monstrosity immediately incurred the wrath of the movie-hating misanthropes in the city planning department, who insisted the unauthorized structure should be demolished. Fortunately, more sympathetic bureaucratic heads finally prevailed, and allowed the wannabe George Lucas to leave the thing standing just long enough to complete his magnum opus.

Conway wrote, directed, shot (on 16mm, transferred to digital video), edited and composed the music for his 92-minute film, as well as handling makeup, pyrotechnics and sound effects. Finally, he organized his very own theatrical release, at the Paradise discount theater, where Conway installed a sophisticated video projection system linked to a computer hard drive, and even rejigged the less-than-perfect sound system, to ensure that the full effect of his elaborate sound mix can be heard.

The plot of the movie, whose appropriate tagline is "What if you were the goodies behind the glass?" is relatively straightforward. After a brief opening sequence, in which ex-astronaut Timothy S. Daley is recruited by the head of the U.S. space agency (TV weatherman Eric Randall) to lead a mission to colonize the planet, the action switches to a lengthy press-conference sequence. (Funny how the agency's HQ looks remarkably similar to a large convention room in the Treasure Island hotel). Here, Daley's fellow crew members are introduced: botanist Yvonne Beirne, biologist Foster Boom, engineer Jason Hall, architect Jim Hendrickson, mineralogist Kristina Krider, cryogenics expert Carlos Marroquin, metallurgist Jeff Rivera, meteorologist Lily Santoro and chemist Shae Wilson. Rounding out this highly qualified team are Sheila and Mike Conway themselves, as the mission's feisty chef/nutritionist and religious minister, respectively.

Mercifully, to ease inattentive viewers' confusion, half the members of this large group of protagonists are hastily dispatched when they wake from suspended animation, 11 1/2 light years away from Earth: "I can't believe this," moans one. "Fifteen years' sleep and I still can't get enough." The astronauts soon discover that the ship's crash has trapped them in their vacuum-sealed, glass-walled cryo-bunks, too weak to flee, and that the aforesaid carnivorous creature is picking them off, one by one.

Like the titular lunar invader in Phil Tucker's immortal 1953 Robot Monster (a now world-infamous winner of the Golden Turkey Award), this hideous predator is actually a guy in a gorilla suit - though unlike the robot monster, this one doesn't wear a diver's helmet. Also unlike Tucker, Conway cannily keeps glimpses of this supposedly terrifying extra-terrestrial to a bare minimum, to heighten the suspense.

The beast's depredations leave our r

emaining plucky heroes (Tim, Jason, Sheila, Shae, Jim, Carlos and Jeff) to duke it out with other briefly-glimpsed aliens, who seem to have surrounded the ship with an impenetrable glass wall, apparently to study their behavior, like rats in a cage, from somewhere out in the bleak alien landscape. (Seen through the protagonists' night-vision goggles, the alien planet's topography bears an uncanny resemblance to the desert around Lake Mead and Red Rock Canyon). And well, sci-fi buffs, you can probably guess the rest.

It's not likely that this homegrown drama will be casting a Blair Witch-like spell on the cellphone-toting crowds in Park City, Utah anytime soon (the current commercial run disqualifies it for consideration for Sundance). But though it sounds like a backhanded compliment, this creditable grassroots effort is certainly no worse than half the puerile crap - with budgets a hundred times bigger - that Hollywood regularly foists on hapless moviegoers.

Post-nuptial disagreement

Also playing with Terrarium is Conway's 14-minute 1999 short RoadKill, a nicely-edited, Vegas-shot love-triangle drama, detailing the deadly vehicular confrontation between Sheila Conway, Jason Hall and Sonny Dyon - as wife, lover and jealous, estranged husband, respectively.

Terrarium and RoadKill are now playing. Details: CineLife, Page 44.