Beware the films of songwriters, who are frequently dazzled by the sight of their own imaginations come to life; it was for this reason that God invented music videos and kept them short. Samuel Curtis (writer/director/star Cory McAbee, of the San Francisco rock band the Billy Nayer Show), our Han Solo–ish interplanetary smuggler from Nevada, has a few problems. He’s got bad sideburns. His current cargo is nothing more than a cat. And he’s being shadowed by the mysterious Professor S. (Rocco Sisto, of Lenox’s Shakespeare and Co.), a bad imitation of a David Lynch psycho who’s nonetheless one seriously homicidal dude.

Sam’s got other problems, too — he’s in a long dull clunker of a film that though purporting to be a musical slapstick sci-fi Western comes armed with exactly one joke, two cowboys, and nobody who can sing. But the cat, the sideburns, and the professor, at least, are negotiable. At a dive bar in the asteroid belt, he trades the tabby to his old buddy the Blueberry Pirate (BU grad Joshua Taylor) in exchange for an embryonic female human clone. Better yet, the fruit smuggler gives him a plan, and what passes for a plot: Sam will head to the all-male planet Jupiter, where he’ll trade the girl for Jupiter’s version of royalty, The Boy Who Actually Saw A Woman’s Breast (Gregory Russell Cook). Then Sam’ll trade the Boy Who to the all-female planet Venus, where the gals, led by The Girl With The Vagina Made Of Glass (Annie Golden), have just suffered the death of their token stud, Johnny R., whose family back on earth is prepared to offer a princely sum for his remains.

You’d think there’d be something funny in there. but the filmmakers seem to be waiting for accidental comedy that never materializes. The movie looks great: shot in heavy-stock black-and-white (and in love with the play of shadows), with chintzy special effects and lo-fi retro-futurist sets, it’s self-conscious camp in the tradition of Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It would’ve made a good song; but as a movie it can’t carry a tune.