Amazon Streams: Five Treasures drug up from Prime's Post-JAWS Riverbed (+ AVALANCHE)

It's so cold here in the New World, one thinks of summer. And the beach and the water, and the sharks, and the river... piranha... up the Amazon.... Prime....  And all of a sudden, many of the streaming prints from Roger Corman's independent label New World and Concorde films have been upgraded to HD anamorphic loveliness. Many of the New World pictures look marvelous, especially the ones from the 70s and early 80s, when the drive-in was still hopping and demanding their fare be shot on 35mm widescreen film. Those were the last golden days before VHS rentals and cable turned low budget filmmakers towards the less pictorial demands of the small screen market. 

While they're not often great, or terribly original, New World pictures are usually wild and wooly, with never a dull moment, flying by in under 90 minutes and most remain still highly re-watchable today. I return to them time and again in times of trouble, and since Prime has so many, I'm compelled like a gratitude-filled Marx Brother after eating that big free dinner in Night at the Opera, to give back, by organizing a musical interlude of manly prose in their honor. Let it commence!

 SCREAMERS

(1979 -aka Island of the Fishmen)
Dir. Sergio Martino

*** / Amazon Image - A+

The great Sergio Martino came off the nortorious Slaves of the Cannibal God before making this film, called Island of the Fishmen, and The Great Alligator in the same jungle location and with the same lead actors, which New World distributed here in the states, with a gory prologue added and re-titled Screamers for some reason . In fandom circles, it's since gotten a bad rap, but seeing it now it's hard to guess why, unless it was badly cropped and scanned for VHS (it's a film clearly meant for widescreen). Now, on the gorgeous new presentation print, its Victorian era 'aquatic research post'-steampunk Jules Verne-y sets impress and the endless supply of weird drug addict fish monsters with their sharp teeth and bulbous fish eyes, do a man good to see. The cast includes Joseph Cotten in a small role as a misguided geneticist, Barbara Bach (in lots of wet clothes) and Martino's go-to hero, Claudio Cassinelli doing his usual self-righteous heroic meddling. The spooky synths of Luciano Michelini's score sting anywhere the pace lags and swaying monstrous shadows darken our heroes cross-island fleeing. Sudden surges of native drums build to a cliffhanger style, rousing and rollicking, very Jules Verne-esque climax with island destroying volcanic eruption and everyone, for the most part, dead. 

But first, a spooky prologue sequence, added in the US by a different director, after Corman found the PG original too tame for American drive-ins. Out of step with the rest of the film but very welcome just the same, it's filmed in the real nighttime on a rolling shore, beautifully lit, with glowing drifting out of a huge cave entrance and the slime of the fishmen claws and half-dissolved but still living corpses really glisten via Prime's HD print. Mel Ferrer (in old age make-up), Beryl Cunningham (whose red coat looks great against the glowing nighttime fog), and Cameron Mitchell (as a scruffy sea captain) row ashore to investigate a cave supposedly containing  a cache of Aztec treasure. Shifty synths thud in warning, and weird, whispery monster breathing creeps into the pockets of the sound mix, the heads start coming off and gory effects have the desired "R" in their sights.

The rest of it is the actual Martino film - beginning on a lifeboat, manned by a dirty dozen of Devil's Island-bound prisoners and ship doctor Cassinelli. The monsters attack their boat, some of the men make it ashore, and in comes Barbara Bach and her husband, the island's mysterious plantation owner--played by that other Martino mainstay, Richard Johnson. Suspicious goings on at this mysterious Moreau-like compound ensue, with the castaway number ever-dwindling down to just Claudio. In one great highlight, we follow Bach through the day-for-night jungle and sees her stripping down to her nightgown to wade out into the lagoon feed green drugs to a bunch of smitten fish monsters! Yes, queen!  Fans of those 60s AIP Jules Verne adaptations starring Vincent Price (like Master of the World and Warlords of Atlantis) should love all the diving bells, ancient treasure, Victorian trimmings, Atlantis miniatures and the big volcanic eruption / rocks falling on burning sets climax. I did! Even Joseph Cotten seems to be awake, and Bach's round-eyed ethereality has never been more vivid (though her lack of participation in her own rescue gets irritating). In short, Saturday afternoon matinee thrills galore!

UP FROM THE DEPTHS

(1979) Dir. Charles B. Griffith

*1/2 / Amazon Image: A

A genre film should deliver some thrills, maybe some laughs, an explosive climax, and as few credits as possible Anything beyond that can either lead to lionization (The Terminator) or the abyss of boredom.  Even the lesser New World monster pics have understood this; They're fast, sexy and thrill-ridden entertainment clocking in under 89 minutes (to save Roger money on film cans). Anything artistic or experimental is usually snuck in by young writers and directors trying out new ideas, almost more for their own termite amusement rather than mainstream recognition; as long as it comes in under budget and delivers the 'goods,' Roger's cool with it.. A perfect example of this, Up from the Depths was edited with a trowel, blocked and shot by a blind man, and has a melange of post-sync dialogue you can sometimes barely understand. And yet, this fractured, drunken style leads, if you're hip, to an archly hip Mad meets MASH (the movie) kind of 'overheard' at the bar vibe that simultaneously evokes dubbed Japanese monster movies, group commentary DVD tracks, and the Armitage/Altman style of improv overlapping tossed-off wit. So it can't be 'all' bad - can it? 

Yes. But then again, it's delivering some laughs and maybe some thrills,  \clocks in at under 90 minutes, and surely came in way under budget. Roger is satisfied! 

The rarely seen monster this time is a giant rabid coelacanth who's been eating up tourists off the coast of a Hawaiian (actually the Philippines) hotel resort. Its stressed manager/owner Mr. Forbes (a terribly hammy Kedric Wolfe) first denies the deaths are happening (it will kill his business!), then blames them all on beach bum Timothy Bottoms and his charter boat captain uncle (Virgil Frye). These two shaggy dudes hang around the resort's outdoor beachside bar looking for guests looking for adventure, selling them to charter the boat and search for a bogus treasure. Frye is fun as the grizzled drunk Tom Waits/Nick Nolte kind of shaggy dog captain; he saves the film, almost, from the harpooning effect of Forbes' relentless 'rabid Franklin Pangborn'-style hissy schtick. Doesn't Griffith realize that his overacting is sinking the whole movie?  It's hardly buoyant to begin with, but it's partly afloat when Wolfe isn't onscreen. Mostly this is thanks to the hip off-the-cuff Altman-esuque overheard conversation overlap post-dub, the gorgeous girls who, as in most Corman joints, are capable professionals. Susanne Reed is the heroine hotel PR maven and possible Bottoms love interest; Denise Hays as a leggy model in town on a shoot, destined to be fed to coelacanth ere long; and; the Phillippines can often look (to me) too umid and grotty, but here the beach scenery all beautifully HD thanks to (I'm guessing) the Shout Factory Corman upgrade.

Charles B. Griffith, longtime Corman script writer, directs with a nice leisurely (i.e. fairly inept) hand, figuring that if he follows the Jaws chalk marks while sneaking in hipster gags and soaking up the tropical charm, he can coast by on fumes. But his camera is so sloppily placed it seems like half the movie is going on in the background while the foreground lingers on a couple of tourist stereotypes shooting the shit at the lobby pamphlet rack (though I guess this too evokes Altman, who--confidentially--I find sexist and overrated - shhhhh).

The action picks up once the death toll is so high that greedy hotel manager Forbes can no longer hissy fit it away so he--in a moment of ingenious inspiration-- offers a cash prize for the monster's head, prompting a run on the Tiki lounge's decorative spears and the local pawn shop's gun section. That's when it gets real Mad Magazine sight gag-crazy (thus rewarding your sticking with it so long): a Japanese salaryman busts out his kitana, doing moves out on the rocks, probably presuming the coelacanth will shortly jump out of the depths and impale itself, while two guys in full frogman suits walk backwards down the hotel stairs with harpoon guns, and so on. It would almost come off like a savage satire of American 2nd amendment zeal if it was filmed with a bit more panache. 

But where Depths really deserves its 2.8 imdb rating is in the total wash of an ending (there hasn't been a more 'whoops we ran out of $$' climax since Cat Women of the Moon's) but fans of the New World will forgive it, especially when Bottoms uses their chewed up icthyologist friend (Charles Howerton) as bait, stuffing his wetsuit with plastic explosives while Susanne Reed protests indignantly (shades of Shriek of the Mutilated!). As the resort's publicist, co-star Reed can seem professional even when she's jaw-drop alluring in a bathing suit and grass skirt. She endures Forbes' hammy conniption fits too easily though; and seems pretty naive to go alone to an uninhabited island with some skeevy German amateur photographer so she can get his sleazy 'camera club'-style rocks off. The counterweight to her sober ease and come-and-go passivity is Denise Hayes, who gets the best lines as the stoned supermodel there to shoot a magazine spread. ("How do you like Hawaii?" asks a reporter as she disembarks from her limo, "I've never been there.")

And Hey! Guess what else is on Prime? Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), also written (not directed) by Griffith. A sublime example of his brand of deadpan comedy done right (i.e. in Papa Roger's capable, swift  directorial hands). The pair make a great late night double bill, with a combined time still shorter than Jaws and twice as funny. See 'em together on a late-late Saturday night and feel the ocean rocking you to sleep as moments of genuine idiocy mix with moments of genuine wit until one can't tell which is which. In way they are the harbinger of all the tongue-in-cheek Asylum monster movies on Syfy to come! Rejoice, brother! 

3. PIRANHA 

(1978) Dir. Joe Dante
Writer: John Sayles

***  / Amazon Image: A

Some New World Jaws don't make much a splash (get it?) but here is the enduring feel-good classic that put Joe Dante on the map. Heather Menzies-Urich stars a the sexually liberated PJ Soles-ish detective who hikes up the mountain in a big woodsy forest area, recruiting local drunk Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) to help her find two hikers who made the mistake of swimming in the wrong seemingly-abandoned government research water tank. In typical John Sayles pinko style (he scripted), the detective thinks it's her right to trespass at the station and then dump what could have been any kind of chemical poison into the pristine river just to see if there are skeletons in there, then beat up Keven McCarthy when he tries to stop it. And THEN she gets all high and mighty about the military's ghoulish irresponsibility! And THEN the coup de gras, Grogan opens up the valves on a smelting plant to dump all sorts of toxic waste into the river to kill them, never worrying that with this final act he's utterly destroying the river system that provided for this mountain nigh over a million years. Along the way they find time to assault a police officer, and commandeer a police vehicle, all while never doubting their moral superiority. Meanwhile Grogan leaves his young daughter behind at the post-summer camp bloodbath, and leaves Keenan's dog to just stand there at his dad master's shack, helpless and lost, rather than rescuing it and bringing it along on the raft and all subsequent adventures. Only the ever-Satanic Barbara Steele, as a badass scientific researcher teamed up with the military, comes out of this mess looking good (once we wise up to Sayle's script's stealth socialist sanctimony). 

Skunked again, eh, Grogan?

In case you can't tell, I am not as big a fan of this movie as some, but Dante is clearly loving this chance to break out of editing trailers for Corman (his only feature film up to that time had been the old New World-footage-heavy Hollywood Boulevard, with fellow-trailer editor Allan Arkush). You can tell from his framing alone that he's going to make it big, laying out the style which will be his signature - a mix of monster fan reverence for the classics (insider jokes, cameos, icon casting (i.e. Steele) and a deft ability to etch surprising depth and maturity into relationships with very little screen time (he'd do it even better with his big break-out hit, also penned by Sayles, The Howling). Subtext aide, this one has it all: prison escapes, scuba-diving, 70s-style casual hook-ups, Paul Bartel as a summer camp director determined to make Grogan's hydrophobic daughter learn to swim, and even an evil general throwing kids in the bloody water so they don't swamp his raft! Want more? How about Dick Miller as a nervous resort owner? No presumed crank call about a lot of killer fish is going to disrupt his gala lakefront opening! G'head Dick Miller! You got this. 

4. HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP

(1980) Dir. Barbara Peeters

**1/2 (Amazon Image - A)

It's a kind of Jaws from the Black Lagoon with an Alien chaser as horny mutant salmon/men infiltrate a Pacific Northwestern coastal town to nonconsensually mate with human women (and kill their surprised boyfriends). Townie bigot Vic Morrow blames the incidents on the local Native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), who's been waging a one man-tribal war against the planned installation of a fish cannery (were they borrowing that hackneyed eco-suplot from the previous year's big studio budgeted-- but largely forgotten--Prophecy?). "Good" fisherman Doug McLure and his liberal Mark Hammil-ish son say no, Johnny is a good boy; but they also support the cannery and even take its reps out fishing. Morrow and Johnny Eagle blame each other for their dead dogs (why are dogs always the first to suffer?) and there's a brawl at the town hall dance. The next day McLure's Luke-alike son and his hot girlfriend go have a beer down at Johnny's shack to show solidarity and learn a thing or two about treaties while Morrow's rednecks paddle quietly up with Molotov cocktails.

Enough with the liberal soapboxing! This is New World, so chop chop make with the monsters. A cannery-sponsored genetic scientist (Ann Turkel) shows up to investigate. I'm sure you figured out that, like Steele in Piranha, she's not exactly shocked by what's going on. But hey, this was directed by a woman and the monster rape scenes were played down (so Corman had extra breasts and violence added, oh Roger!). While offensive, the monster rapes are too over-the-top sleazy to traumatize my sensitive feminist soul and while one might bemoan their shitty taste in men, the girls never lose their dignity or resourcefulness -- even the scantily clad Miss Salmon (Linda Shayne) stops screaming long enough to bash her attacker's brains out with a rock. And it's all leading somewhere we might well guess, considering the Alien was being ripped off in addition to Jaws.

To me, actually, the most objectionable thing in the film is that a smirky toe-headed ventriloquist (David Strassman) almost gets it on with a girl in a tent, his puppet poking suggestively through the zipper of his bag over terribly snarky post-sync double entendre about his "woodpecker." Was this the crap that was shot later, like by Jim Wynorski or Fred Olen Ray? Little things like the way the cannery rep calls Turkel a "great little scientist," and the way high school creep Jim slobbers over his date, leave a bad 80s-heralding taste in the mouth. In 1980 we could still find trashy movies without those varsity jacketed little shits in them but-- like unspoiled rivers, or drive-ins--they were getting scarce. Wynorski and Olen Ray were taking over, like those scabby kids Phillip Baker Hall brings to Jack's 1980 New Years party in Boogie Nights.

Whatever, it's trashy, no one's arguing that, and though I do like the way Dr. Turkel bosses around her co-worker Edward, even she mispronounces 'coelacanth.'

And then without further ado, all hell breaks loose in one of the best monster attacks on a local waterfront salmon festival in cinematic history. It goes on and on through the night, monsters crashing through the boardwalk, marauding like a pack of rapey vikings, with no music just endless screaming. The monster suits themselves are both funny and scary. With their long arm extensions and habit of swaying back and forth like seaweed-dipped Igors, their incessant sexual aggression becomes almost refreshing in its pre-cognitive innocence, like it's creating some new genre in being so blatantly free of subtlety. And hey, how can anyone not like a movie where Doug McLure's young wife (Cindy Weintraub), home with the baby, eviscerates her own slimy attacker long before he lumbers to the rescue?

James Horner's eerily familiar score of eerie strings and harp glissandos evoke John Williams's Jaws horns and Jerry Goldsmith Alien woodwinds stabs and the moody Daniel Lacambra cinematography captures a nicely overcast Pacific Northwest. What's not to love, aside from that woodpecker bit? 

5. THE GREAT ALLIGATOR 

(1979) Dir Sergio Martino

**1/2 / Amazon Image: B-

Sergio's next feature after Island of the Fishmen / Screamers (above), this hybrid of the post-Jaws 'amok nature' and cannibal massacre genres takes place at a newly-opened African safari/jungle resort (it was filmed in Sri Lanka, though the natives look alternately Aborigine and African-American). Barbara Bach and Claudio Cassinelli plays a self-righteous photographer at the resort to shoot promo shots with a leggy black model (who quickly disappears after going on a midnight boat tryst with a local boy). Bach is the resident anthropologist, who speaks the language of the primitive locals and tries to balance out the greed of her boss (Mel Ferrer)--who's sunk too many millions into this dubious venture for it to go belly-up now, alligators be damned--and the sanctimonious alarmism of Cassinelli ("we have to evacuate, now!"). Building a hotel so close to the native's huts isn't very smart it turns out, for either side; and dynamiting palm trees to make room for bungalows along the water wakes up a giant alligator god that's been sleeping for generations. Bach wonders how an alligator got to Africa in the first place, instead of crocodiles, but she never finds out. The sole survivor of an old batch of white missionaries alone knows its might firsthand. He's been hiding from it in a cave behind a waterfall for nigh under forty years, making a truly impressive totem sculpture in its honor. 



Soon enough, the first group of guests arrive and then it's dinner time. The natives are pretty pissed that their angry god has been woken up so once night falls they start killing off every white person in sight. In one long grand dusk-to-dawn stretch there's a 40-foot Alligator killing everyone in the water and natives killing everyone on land, so the tourists are caught in between. 

That alligator really tears in, and it's quite gratifying to the soul to see. Martino never resorts to stock nature footage inserts for his gator attacks. Sure the oversize big gator itself might by only marginally convincing (its legs don't move, the miniature used in the long shots looks like a rubber toy I used to have) but its still awesome - the full-size giant jaws go up and down atop screaming tourists, all splashing and screaming and trying to climb over spiked fences whereupon their shot by flaming arrows, and Martino knows how to film the melee so it's easy to follow, with lots of screaming close-ups and quick cuts.

What a film! There's even a helicopter fished out of water, Bach offered on a raft for human sacrifice, and a big underwater dynamite climax. The soundtrack mixes Stevio Cipriani's cocktail score, replete with funky electric guitar and loping bass, with a beguiling tapestry of thumping diegetic jungle drums,  chanting, birdcalls, screaming that might or might not be human, and then ---suddenly -- a tiny splash....and silence.

I wanted to keep this all in the New World/Concorde/AIP family, but there's no sign of ALLIGATOR (1980) the Lewis Teague-directed, John Sayles-scripted, Robert Forster-starring classic, on Prime. Luckily Prime does have Forster in a different kind of hybrid eco-disaster replete with a denial-ridden resort owner and a preachy naturalist Chicken Little, also produced by Corman....

AVALANCHE

(1978) Dir. Corey Allen

**1/2 / Amazon Image - B

Once they ran out of aquatic monsters, 70s filmmakers were forced to move inland for their threats, thus came The White Buffalo, Prophecy, and the mighty Grizzly. And from there it's a short fall to disaster threats like skyscraper fires, virus outbreaks, insect swarms, demonic totems and, when all else fails, AVALANCHE! Millionaire idiot hotel owner Rock Hudson refuses to heed the dire warnings of hip conservationist/photographer Robert Forster, so process with cutting down the tall mountain firs that usually break up avalanches in order to make his dream house. It's only a matter of time. Mia Farrow is Rock's ex-wife, willing to try give their marriage another chance (if he can get off the phone for five minutes). A tomcattin' ski champ, Bruce (Rick Moses), a foxy figure skater Peggy (Annette River) coached by Corman regular Anthony Carbone, and Rock's fur-encrusted mother (Jeanette Nolan!!?) round out the immediate side stories.

While we wait for the big dump to fall, we may gaze in amazement at Hudson's dashing grey-tinged rug and Mia Farrow's unconvincing long hair extensions. She's way too short and meek for a gigantic man like Rock. Looking up at him with big saucer eyes, she denotes "you're a force of nature." We agree, and no way he'd make it with this fragile waif without doing some damage to her hips. A much better fit is Forster,  who actually 'sees' her for who she is, whisking her up to his cabin for a tryst after Rock acts like a jealous ass during the big pre-avalanche party in the lounge (where there's a very groovy rock band so we get to see Rock dance!).  Bruce (the tomcat skier) fools around with Peggy (the naive skater), though he's got a much hotter girl named Tina (Cathy Paine) up in their suite. Tina runs out into the snow in her negligee after walking in on them in bed! "Tina put that apple down or throw it at me!" he demands the next morning before she vaults into a hysterically jealous/insane/gibbering fit. Great stuff! You can tell Corman added it for a little mid-film spice, as it's a nifty variation of a similarly gratuitous interlude in Corman's St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Corman, you're a genius. He surely wasn't happy it was rated PG, despite the obligatory New World nude scene (in Rock's very groovy 70s shower/steam room). PG was a big tent back then.

After the gratifying and strangely hilarious avalanche (lots of miniatures, dissolves, and 2-D stills) comes the long dig out: Rock's mother and that assistant are trapped inside a windowless room, but there's a piano so they can try to sing before succumbing to the gas leak; Tina's TV newsman husband (she gets around) and some kid are stranded up on a teetering ski-lift; and the odious Bruce ponders his tomcattin' sins while buried upside down under 20 feet of the same snow he's so blithely skied over all his life. Ever mindful of our patience, producer Corman can't resist making the whole thing clock in at under 91 minutes even though the average disaster film is at least 2 1/2 hours long. We're not complaining! Whole reels of drab drama between Farrow and Hudson seem to have been shorn away, perhaps waiting for us in hell if we continue to make the same ecologically irresponsible choices.

Here it.... comes... 

So... that's Avalanche ... it's not good or bad, but it delivers enough stunts and snow you don't feel cheated. For Corman devotees of a certain age and predilection, it's comfort food. When I needed it, it came to me. There's plenty of Corman's sly black humor (a lot of characters die even right as they're being rescued; emergency workers hoisting black bagged bodies in rows atop a flatbed truck punctuate the 'unsuccessful' attempts) and fine examples of Corman's brand of sexy, strong women  Former kid actor Corey Allen directed and no one would be surprised if Corman hired him just to get his name ("Allen") on the poster, to subliminally evoke the disaster-synonymous Irwin Allen, who was like the big name in big budget disaster films. If so, it's genius. GENIUS, Roger! Though filmed on location in Colorado with lots of gorgeous Rocky mountains in the background, there are backgrounds that are obviously projected photos, while the Amazon image quality is pretty good, it's not HD, and the colors are kind of washed out but it is rather white up there anyway so what do I expect?  Don't fight it, Erich. Let it wash over you in a comforting narcotizing.. freezing... weighted white blanket.

A screenshot from Devil Fish to show Prime ain't picky

and a lot of its titles look like they were transferred from an old VHS rather

than a 35mm negative. 

Avoid the DEVIL FISH, matey!

Pick the cleaner sandy 35mm shores...

that's why you need me as your captain. Argh! Where's that bottle? 

Seven Dope Analog Sci-fi Nugs (Post-STAR WARS, i.e. 1978-87)

Biiitch, and I mean you youngsters: you're all spoiled with your blah blah, but (cranky presuppository insert). But back in the day all we had was STAR WARS, and its special effects were analog. The ships were made with model airplane parts; the stars were made by poking pins through black felt and shining a light behind it. Child, we made everything ourselves, high as shit on Testor's fumes circulating in our D&D dungeons. Computer Graphics were still at the Pong-stage; Atari was just giant pixels floating around a cathode tube. Life in space was tactile, vast and loud. But the biggest problem with STAR WARS, easily the most influential film of the late-70s? Just one woman in the whole damn thing. It was crush on Carrie or get lost. Ditto Raiders of the Lost Ark and, basically, Jaws. If you wanted women characters on par with men you had to go to Italy, or Roger Corman.

Corman and New World and the Italians, watching the box office from the wings, they knew - add more babes in positions of power and intellect, dressed to bug the eyes of teenage boys in ways Leia's Heidi-style braids couldn't hope to match. Scrap the John Williams pomp in the score, turn up the synths, crank up the jams, let fly. Don't just crib from Lucas, crib from his sources: Flash Gordon, Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and Akira Kurosawa movies. 

Often maligned as imitations by us pre-teen virgin nerd film snobs at the time, often undone by terrible cropping for VHS and bad dubbing (which we read as a sign of weakness), today these scrappy influence-gathering sci-fi pack rats glow anew, and for a very simple reason: DVD, widescreen HD, and an overload of bad CGI. Now free of their cropping and color-graded to glow anew, our appreciation for their tactile analog special effects and grainy 35mm film reborn thanks to solid HD restoration, Italian imports and New World pictures can once again make full use of widescreen for their imagined drive-in audience's windshield. Now with restored HD colors and anamorphic widescreen on a solid HD TV with deep blacks (like my beloved Sony Bravia), oh my my my! And Prime's got 'em.

1. SPACEHUNTER: 

ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

(1983) Dir Lamont Johnson 

*** / Amazon Image - A+

Time and widening sharpening HD video has been especially kind to this weird fusion of elaborate junkyard art design and middling everything else. What was once just another blatant PG blender-pureed Star Wars / Road Warrior virgin cocktail (Molly Ringwald as the semi-feral ragamuffin- her red hair niftily color-coordinated with her dirty clothes) now beguiles and corrupts with its beauty. Filmed for 3D (as the plethora of things flying right at the camera will confirm), it holds up better in 2D now that the whole (wide, anamorphic) screen is visible (the reviews at the time pointed out that with the 3D glasses it was too dark - and indeed there is a lot of shadow and night/twilight scenes that probably got lost in 3D or on pan and scan home video). I guess that means no more being a 16 year-old smartass bemoaning seeing his beloved Road Warrior wasteland besmirched with a PG rating, terrible cropping, and a bratty redheaded tomboy companion (at least she didn't have an 80s perm).

Peter Strauss stars as a bounty hunter free spirit on a rescue mission to a wild wild desert planet wherein virtuous maids that crashed there are held captive by a slavering bandit chief. The reward should be massive, but is 'Spacehunter' out of his faux-Solo depth? His Chewie is a cute girl alas killed in the first big firefight after the hostages are whisked away by crazy glider hooks (a very cool stunt!). So this time it's personal! He's going into the Forbidden Zone to get those girls, no matter the danger. His particular set of skills may seem limited to acting scruffy and rougue-ish, and he may not be Harrison Ford, or even Christopher George, but Strauss sure gives Andrew Prine a run for his money, were he in a running mood.

Though the pacing is off and the whole thing kind of a hodge podge of re-furbished early-80s sci-fi iconic moments, it's the spectacularly termite-detailed art direction that makes it work. Now that we can actually see all the details, the film bumps up two stars in rating. Cars are immaculately dirty and surreal. The sail -(wind powered)-trains are life size and move on actual railroad tracks. Hang gliders swoop down and capture people in low hanging talon attachments, none of these things are miniatures of models but life-size); characters show up out of nowhere on roofed circular motorcycles; a barrage of deflated Michelin man-style blubber people come sliding obscenely forth from hanging cocoons; big trippy neon tunnels suck soul energy; and--the big highlight climax--Molly Ringwald is thrown into the pit to try and survive an obstacle course spring-activated buzz saws, spikes, whirring lawnmower blades, fire jets, and an ever advancing spike-fronted bulldozer. Hot damn!

Funny enough, the main reason my buddies and I sneered at this film at the time was due to our reverence for the The Road Warrior. How could we know George Miller destroyed that reverence himself by filling Thunderdome with Tina Turner's imperious overacting, a cadre of scruffy orphans, and a 'Thunderdome' that includes bungee bounciness. What's next, George? An ewok? And don't make some lame joke about Angelo Rossitto. The man is a treasure. I didn't care for having to imagine a whole layer of pigshit under the city. That's disgusting, George!

It was a rough time to be a teenager, the mid-80s, during sequel fever. Greedy filmmakers forgot all the best films we saw repeatedly in theaters--Raiders, Ghostbusters, Conan, Star Wars -- had no kids in them. It was like they'd turned to writing of the sequels over to TV sitcom hacks for whom learning kids liked a movie meant putting actual kids in the sequel, which is a kind of dumb "you got an F in viewer psychology class and all you got was this lousy 7-figure writing gig" habit of Hollywood's. So Star Wars developed an ewok problem the same year (1983) as Spacehunter came out; Raiders of the Lost Ark's 1984 sequel had that insufferable Short Round, even Ghostbusters 2 (also 1984) had to have a baby in it. As I've said, kids hate to see themselves in movies unless they're legit savages -see CinemArchtype 21: The Wild Child - rather than merely slightly scruffy brats with big black velvet painting eyes.

Well, Ringwald gets a pass because, though her acting is all over the place, at least she's a girl, and cute, and not insufferable. Well, she's kind of insufferable, but the color coordinating of the maroon-brown clothes and her cherry red hair go a long way.

So, let's bury the hatchet and savor the anamorphic HD screen and Amazon's lovely streaming print, which allows us to savor so many elaborately and creatively detailed settings. The bad guy's big lair, for example, is about three stories tall and full of so much welded-together artfully-rusted bric-a-brac it should have been made into a permanent interactive art installation the moment filming wrapped. Instead it's just raced through by the actors on their way to the next Big Moment. I can only imagine the sorrow of the craftsmen who labored on such spectacular mise en scene only to have it all torn down after the wrap, see the film barely recoup costs, and then have 90% of all their work lost on pan and scan home video, never---as far as they knew--to be seen again. Redemption ahoy!

For example, the space above, a beautifully natural-industrial flooded cavern/basement kind of environment, neither indoors nor out, with mangrove tree roots that are actually pipes, and so forth, is the kind of 'in-between' zone Antonioni would approve of were he making a sci-fi film in his post-structuralist Red Desert period. And then these sex hungry sirens cohere out of the mist, debating whether to use our wandering mercenary Peter Strauss for breeding purposes, a great idea (he's into it), but that's scuttled almost immediately with the arrival of a small dragon/snake thing (like an X-mas garland with teeth) which the sirens are all afraid of but seems easily dispatched by their spears or elaborate nets. That's a wrap on the sirens - were they edited out to make this a "G" rating? No one even mentions them again. and YET, Strauss and Molly Ringwald are too scared to go back into their parked car; they escape up a hatch to the surface and leave their car behind so they can wander the desert and almost die of thirst. Jesus - why didn't they just back the car out? It makes little sense, and this great set and sexy siren thing is just forgotten for the rest of the picture- we're onto another gorgeous, creatively ingenious set, should have been an art installation, but Strauss and Ringwald just run through it and it's never seen again.

Lastly, in my continuing push to restore some kind of platonic good faith between women and straight men, I recommend the film not just for the beautiful visions and creativity of the sets and vehicles, but also the unique relationship between Molly and Peter Strauss's characters. There's never any sexual intention between either one of them - never even a thought of it. She's obnoxious, but that's okay - I like she cuddles up to him in the dead of night because she's cold, but that it's no more than that for either of them or for the director, script or any unspoken subtext. She's more an adopted orphan, a scrappy Oliver, a Dr. Who companion, and his disinterest in even having her around speaks to, ironically enough, his worth as a mentor. It's a testament to a more innocent time, when real men were trusted to be caregivers of teenage redheads because, unlike celibate priests or pent-up nerd weirdos, they were laid, loose and not Archie Lee desperate or Humbert creepy.

Best of all, PG or no, it all ends with cocktails!

2. BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS 

(1980) Dir. Jimmy T. Murakami, Roger Corman

Script by John Sayles; Art director: James Cameron

(New World) - ***1/2 / Amazon Image - A+

The idea that this film was actually put out by Corman's New World seems absurd- it looks like a movie that would cost at least 100 million today but actually just cost 1. Imaginatively written by John Sayles (adapting the plot of Magnificent Seven/ Seven Samurai) it's got a zingy cast including John Saxon as the evil warlord; Robert Vaughn as a professional killer hiding in a dusty old space arcade; starry-eyed Richard Thomas as the farmboy hero pressed into action; George Peppard as a kind of Han Solo meets cowboy truck driver; buxom Sylvia Kristel as a diminutive Valkyrie; and--a personal favorite--a robotics engineer played Darlanne Fluegel, whose haunting gray eyes perfectly compliment her blonde hair and gray-piped pink jumpsuit.

James Cameron worked in the art direction unit, which--as with his work on Galaxy of Terror--may partly explain why every frame pops to the point Star Wars now seems hopelessly square by contrast. Just look at the ship John Boy flies in (above) - it's both phallic and fallopian, like some Frank Frazetta barbarian lost a fight with a sexy slug --why wasn't there a toy version of that instead of the tiresome Falcon? I'm also a big fan of the cozy spaceship and planet interiors, full of warm hued-lighting and interesting touches that give them a 70s shag carpeted / older brother's van kind of aura. Every ship has its own homey touch, you want to live in them and get to know these people (most of them anyway), but since it's a Corman joint it has to be over in under 90 minutes so Roger can save money on film cans. (Would there was a longer director's cut).


There are still negative voices out there for this movie, but if they're going by some old video pan and scan or other, they need to shut dey mouths and watch it again... in Prime's widescreen HD, where it glows and beguiles. And if they don't appreciate Sayle's weirdly Buddhist script (lotsa talk about the 'Vardas' preaching nonviolence) or the gorgeous matte shots and creative ideas bouncing all over the place, then to hell with them. For me, the only sour note concerns the scarfaced moron underlings of Sador, who have balding ginger 'fros and piggy noses, who pick up a peasant girl and presumably rape her in the back of their spaceship (it's an oddly sleazy addition, unnecessary moment). There's also some weird misplaced hostility from John Boy with the arrival of Kristel's valkyrie, and her sudden appearance as a right-sized (and how!) maiden is never explained. If I have to get this minor to quibble, you know I loved the rest of it. Hubris kept me from watching it at the time it came out-- it seemed such a blatant ripoff to my 13 year-old Star Wars-ophile senses (Empire Strikes Back was out the same year)--but today I could care less about Star Wars whereas I'm a big-ass fan of Battle Beyond the Stars. Hey, it even has more than one female character --they even talk to each other in one scene! Maybe George Lucas should have been ripping it off instead of vice versa?

3. STARCRASH 

(1978) Dir. Luigi Cozzi

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

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If you're watching all these as part of an Acidemic-azon Prime festival, let me warn you that it's better to watch this one first, because the FX are so crude it can feel like you just got demoted to the kid's table. That's not to say that--in their badness-the special effects are not peculiarly charming, they sure as shit are. If you remember Lite-brite ("making things with light"), HO scale airplane models and erector sets, you'll feel like you made this movie and just forgot. And hey, the film you made is a blast... a big terrible blast. Directed by the "Italian Ed Wood," maestro Luigi Cozzi (working here, as he often did, under the Americanized 'Lewis Coates'), Starcrash moves so fast from cliffhanger to cliffhanger it seems to have more in common with one of those compressed feature film versions of the 1936 serial Flash Gordon (right down the helmets, and the hero's escaping his/her stint shoveling fuel into the enemy blast furnace) more than its clear source in$piration, the previous year's Star Wars. The sets, guns, and costumes are all super kinky and wild, and clearly Cozzi lavished attention on weird details, leaving the big picture a tad lumpen, but never flaccid.

The story has outer space adventuress Stella Starr (Caroline Munroe) squaring off against her future Maniac co-star Joe Spinell as the evil-laughing, mustache-twirling, cape-swirling Baron. Spinell is clearly having fun so it's too bad he (as well as Munroe) were dubbed by other people. In league with "dark forces," the Baron has created a weapon "so vast, so huge, it would take a whole planet... to conceal it," Clearly, when it comes to Star Wars rips, Coggi don't kibitz -- (there's even an actual light saber at one point). On the other hand, his real yen is clearly to do The Golden Voyage of Sinbad in space -and to that end there's a stop-motion giant 'metallic' warrior woman guarding a beach, a sword fight with a pair stop-motion skeletons, a benevolent stranger in a gold mask, treachery from an evil double agent, and Caroline Munroe (that's why Cozzi cast her and made sure she brought her heavenly midriff).

Now the bright side: even if you don't like Munroe's co-star Marjoe Gortner (perhaps due to some archaic prejudice against overly white teeth and curly hair) one has to admit that--maybe thanks to his being an ex-child evangelist--he handles the scenes of mystical magical force-casting with admirable dead-eyed focus and his red and black leather uniform is way cool.  Munroe's 'sexy' outfit looks like it was cut out of a naugahyde car seat by contrast, though it's still a striking image that cuts through the years like a knife (especially if you're old enough that you remember her Starlost magazine cover). But oh, if only there was more of the evil Amazon queen, Corelia (Nadia Cassini -above)! Tossing off classic bon mots ("put her in the mind probe!") in her repurposed gladiator movie brocade, tossing her dynamite bangs back from her eyes while tossing Stella to the mines, with a few extra lines she might have been a new Aura or a gender-reversed Vultan. Sadly, like every other challenge they wiz past, Stella and her inexplicably Texan robot, "L", escape from her clutches mere seconds after falling into them. On the other hand, what a blast. And refreshingly, not even the mildest feint toward actual science: the Baron's ship has windows which the good guys fly into via two-men torpedo ships, crashing in and opening fire. When Stella need to jump from one ship to another she just needs a bubble helmet and off she pops. It's very Mongo.

By the time we meet the king of the universe (Christopher Plummer) you can tell he's important because his ship is bright gold and he's dressed in all sorts of Versace-ish golden chains and frills with weird little gold codpiece diaper shorts) we may feel as winded as an grandparent dragged through an aquarium by a sugar-addled first grader. Barely conscious, the one pure male heart left in Hollywood does a great kind of reverse hamming, trailing off into elliptical pauses for effect (or to read his cue cards ): "you must sail... to the haunted stars....(barely talking in a whisper, while schmaltzy grand piano refrains in the background almost drowning him out), "and find the Count's... secret ship... and destroy it."

We feel the greatness enter the room in fisher king style.

As for John Barry's titanic score, Legend has it that Cozzi didn't let him see the actual film while he was composing, lest he back out of the deal, which was a smart move. Barry treats the material like it's big budget grandeur and rises to the task in a way that puts John Williams 'rousing sci-fi adventure' refrains to shame. Some of the melodies are truly grand.

Ah, the more you see this film the better it gets. It's over before you can even start to appreciate the great leather outfits and cool helmets of the bad guy minions. But, dude, find Cozzi's HERCULES and start the madness anew - it's even worse/better. The same erector set is used, this time for flying monsters, three-headed dragons, and... I already forgot what the other monsters are. Praise this kind idiocy... and the aging process... and weed.... for together they erase... each plot... point.. Cozzi is the true king of sci-fi cinematic folk art. (Ed note: see Happy Birthday Cozzi!)

4. THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

(1979) Dir. George McCowan

**1/2 / Amazon Prime - B

Here's a weird Canadian oddity from the post-Star Wars TV era when Gene Roddenberry was coming up with TV movie pilots starring John Saxon, and Battlestar Galactica was making Sunday nights nominally less boring.  This Canadian feature doesn't have that kind of intellectual pedigree or major studio budget, but who cares when there's Jack Palance in a purple cape, laughing megalomaniacally while commanding an army of robots! He's supposed to be supplying the moon with minerals but now he's asking for interplanetary domination instead!  John Ireland is the pacifist senator who wants to get all Chamberlain appeasement to Palance's Hitler-ish demands. A salty old commander dying of radiation sickness (Barry Morse) won't cave, taking his experimental ship out on a fool's errand, replete with a fetching young girl with fabulous hair (Anne Marie Martin) who controls a sassy robot! There's also the salty commander's fresh-faced young idealist (Nicholas Campbell, who looks familiar because he played Kerouac in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch); and Carol Lynley as Nikki, leader of the human resistance on Delta-3. What more do you need? In budget-conserving TVM manner, a lot of scenes are shot outdoors in autumnal fields or what looks like a high school boiler room. On the bright side, Palance's inner chambers are 70s sound booth-style sexy, and there are enough cool miniatures, spacecraft, optical effects, devious weapons, and evil robots to make this the perfect feature to doze off to some cloudy Ontario afternoon. So keep it handy. 

I do, and I live in Brooklyn. Zzzzz!

5. SPACEBALLS

(1987) Dir. Mel Brooks

*** / Amazon Image - A-

Time's been kind to this lumbering doofus of a film.  A favorite of good friends of mine, it never used to make it past my three strikes rule. Strike 1) the off-the-beat comedic hamming of Rick Moranis as 'Darth Helmet' (it's a big helmet - get it!?), 2) the gross eating habits of Barf (John Candy's dog-wookie character), and 3) the disgusting 'Pizza the Hut'. But those are just the breakwaters, the first five or ten minutes. Once someone made me stick around to the end I started to really vibe with the madness. Once Daphne Zuniga shows up as a runaway bride in a gorgeous wedding gown, a beautiful white number that exposes her toned, lithe, tan arms, I'm on board. Escaping a marriage to sleepy Prince Valium by jumping into the space Winnebago of Bill Pullman as the Han Solo / Clark Gable (in It Happened One Night), Zuniga's charm takes over the picture and lifts it over ugly hurtles. She and Pullman have a palpable chemistry and both play the whole thing deadpan straight, which helps immeasurably especially when we have to endure oversize sight gags like the industrial strength hair dryer and the troopers 'combing' the desert.

See, folks, Brooks makes films for a big audience to laugh at, loud and progressively raucous, in a theater. That means pratfalls carry pauses for presumed guffaws and if you're not feeling it, you can groan audibly. On the other hand: he takes the time to hit all the mythic narrative bases, delivering the feel of his sources (The cinematography and special effects are all as good as the films he lovingly sends up) and avoiding instantly dated ephemeral pop culture references. Lovely detours into poker-faced absurdist post-structuralism--as when the bad guys watch a VHS tape of Spaceballs to figure out their next move, or when the Yiddish-accented Yogurt (Mel Brooks) shows off his collection of Spaceballs merchandise ("ver da real money is made")--give the whole thing enough of a deconstructed edge you don't feel too stupid for liking it. Brooks plays the evil emperor as basically the same corrupt mayor he played in Blazing Saddles - only instead of a buxom redhead secretary to bark at there's an 80s punk-short haired imperial officer onscreen at the urinal (dig her wry smile to camera upper right); Joan Rivers provides the voice for the cockblocking C3PO chaperone; and there's some great inside bits like sound effects guy Michael Winslow as a radar technician and John Hurt in his Nostromo duds chowing down at the local space diner (uh oh).



Really though, what puts it all over, for me, and gets me watching again and again (after decades of resistance) is the discovery of Daphne Zuniga's Druish princess. She starts the film whining about  her industrial strength hair dryer and ends up blasting enemy platoons to atoms when they dare to mess up her perfect hair (and it is perfect: auburn, perfectly curled, down and free-flowing) and she sings a low octave blues ("Nobody knows / the trouble I seen") when locked up in space prison. She and Pullman generate great chemistry, too. Spaceballs has already led me safely out of two panic attacks -- such is the power of the schwartz and Brooks' innate love of classic genre cinema. Alas, we're supposed to laugh when Barf molests a waitress with his errant tail. Barf, you cretin -- the days when that was funny are gone forever! Hurrah! 

6. SATURN 3

(1980) Dir. Stanley Donen

**1/2 / Amazon Image: A

Kirk Douglas plays "the Major" i.e. Adam, a hydroponic botanical scientist trying to solve a rapidly dying earth's food shortage in an experimental, octopus-armed hydroponic garden in a cave.... on Saturn's third moon. His Eve is played by the 32 years younger Farrah Fawcet. She's never even been to Earth! She doesn't know how lucky she is, so Earth has to come to her, in form of insecure (a dubbed, but with excellent eyelashes Harvey Keitel) who lets her know they're so hard up on Earth they eat dogs, and everyone has to share sex partners, or else it's considered stealing. And people take pills called 'blues' just to relax enough to fall asleep. Yes please! Benson lusts for Farrah and thinks it's unfair Adam gets her all to himself; he thinks Adam is obsolete, old, and "inadequate.... in every area!" 

Keitel builds a giant robot named Hector. It's powered by a stack of brains, but it goes crazy when he inadvertently uploads his own stalker obsession onto its organic hard drive. Thus begins a very long interesting stalk and chase sequence. There's no way to radio for help while S3 is on the far side of Saturn. Hector has all the time in the world to lumber around the tentacles of the garden after our fleeing lovers, all the while hoping to mate, somehow, with Farrah. Does the name 'Hector' stand for the razzing the December end of May-December relationship receives from his racketball buddies (ala BREEZY)? Or is he merely a symbol of time's attack on the male libido?

Clearly conceived of (by Martin Amiss!) back when priapic middle-aged white men were still allowed to be punk rock, (and sci-fi was for them rather than kids), it stands today as a yet under-appreciated mecca for detailed and highly imaginative art direction. Costumes, sets and effects are all of a unique, highly organized mixture of organic and mechanical: bizarre green/black insectoid space suits, a robot chassis styled after Da Vinci sketches, and winding hallways through the cavernous rock lit with an array of white, green and gleaming blue luminescent wires and pipes like a combination giant human arterial system, ocean floor tentacle mazes and Spencers / Space Port at a 70s mall. Good Elmer Bernstein music too, and Kirk is clearly feeling it - his fuck you to the social order at the end gets me cheering every time, even if it's from inside my own navel. (full)

7. GALAXY OF TERROR

(1981) Dir. Bruce D. Clark

*** / Amazon Image - A 

I read all the hostile reviews when this movie came out and vowed never to see it. Little did I know it would hold up so well, not for any special reason but, like Battle Beyond the Stars, from surfeit of termite detail, aided in no small measure by ambitious production designer James Cameron and the genius of cinematographer Jacques Haitkin (Nightmare on Elm Street).  The space ship interiors are gorgeous, cozy and amniotic (love those padded walls); the strange mist-enshrouded giant space pyramid the crew scale and enter is a haunted world of eerie gel lighting worthy of Bava.



The crew is there to investigate the crash and demise of a previous crew who crashed a strange planet. But what they find are demons of their own minds, reflected back on them. Each meets their doom in a brutal, gory ironic way, one after the other. The cook (Ray Walston) knows more than he's saying, but just smiles enigmatically when questioned; Sid Haig plays a weird cult member whose devotion to his 'crystals' as his only weapons borders on absurdism (they break so easy it's a wonder they lasted him a week); Robert Englund winds up fighting himself (don't we all?); Erin Moran (Joanie!) is an claustrophobic empath who winds up having to slide through ever-narrower embryonic tunnels; sexy Taaffe O'Connell (below) is ravished by a giant slug monster (she hates slugs). Zalman King provides the scowling as the second in command. He's even more peevish than usual!  Soulful-eyed Edward Albert is the Tom Skerrit-like natural leader. Grace Zabriskie plays the ship captain with her usual alien-eyed conviction. She's one tough old salt, saying things like "come get some chow, boy." And somehow seeing her wide-awake face lit only by those cool red dashboard lights makes me feel grounded. Sure, she ends up tough as a burnt steak, but I don't think there's ever been a female space commander quite like her since. Or before. (see Angels of Death vol. V)

Trouble is, the film moves so fast that you've barely met her, or anyone else, before their ranks dwindle down to almost nil. Better that, though, than drag too long, I guess. Speaking of fast, see if you can spot that little stop motion lizard man thing from Joe Dante's Piranha. And if the end of the ride comes too soon, too super strange and mystic, to satisfy, well don't get uptight: you can always go back and ride it again. That's the joy of streaming. You don't even need to rewind anymore. Not even Phillip K. Dick could have predicted that kind of instant gratification.

SEE ALSO... IF YOU MUST:

7.  MESSAGE FROM SPACE

(1978) Dir. Kinji Fukusaku

** / Amazon Image - B-

Released the same year as Starcrash (but costing twice the budget) with a Seven Samurai-style plot (ala Battle Beyond the Stars) this Japanese Star Wars-cash-in is serving a pre-Avatar style tale of oppressed elf-like tree people, living on an asteroid/planet that can jet through space (they wear leaves in the hair so you know they're good; the oppressors dress like Shogun Warriors so you know they're bad). The good tree people have a Yoda-like old vizier who recruits eight special warriors from other worlds by throwing glowing chestnuts out into space. You heard me. Actual chestnuts.

The trick is, unlike the other post-Star Wars films, this is set in a future where Earthlings roam the galaxy dressed in a post-modern array of studio wardrobe department cast-offs (pork pie hats, loud sportsjackets, Stevie Nicks gossamer head sashes) in search of "resources and colonies." So one nut is found by a kookie Goldie Hawn/Stevie Nicks-style gaijin heiress (Peggy Lee-Brenan) in a private charter plane and two more are found dopey hot dog fighter pilots racing each other through asteroid belts, dodging "the Space Patrol" (who have helmets, aviator shades and Freddie Mercury mustaches, ugh); there's also a dopey hipster dressed like the Music Man-gone-disco and a gambler in a Hawaiian shirt (as the loanshark). In short, this is one of the post-modern futures where all the past styles are happening at once, probably to save money on new costumes. Crazy disco dancers dress like 20s mecha-Berlin art deco gods; bartenders in red bowties and silver lame jackets make cocktails; Vic Morrow manages to keep a cool demeanor even after finding a glowing space chestnut in his drink. He even manages to no roll his eyes while trading quips with a dumb cutesy robot ("yer beginning to tawk like my ex-wife").

On the other side is garish uniformity: the Darth Vader style villain and his evil army are all painted in silver (it looks like the paint is still wet) with uniforms in matte primary colors; they dress like the old Shogun Warriors action figures.

Terrible hamming and tacky costumes on the human end and some of worst wire-work outer space swimming I've ever seen (their home spaceships are literally photos pasted on a blue board behind them) make it hard to warm up to this mess. Add a long static scene like the one above (right) that seems like it was shot in spoiled artist kid's storage shed and there you go, Message from Space is so bad it's bound to make you revere and love Battle Beyond the Stars and Starcrash all the more by comparison.

On the plus side, if you do decide to settle in and stop being so snide, there are a few good things going on over on Message to Space: there's an evil old witch and her reptilian son, and another separate old woman as the conniving mother of the Darth Vader-ish warlord. Two evil old crones in one science fiction movie? Lucas could barely handle one female character in his entire series! This has four! I hope he saw this and was ashamed of his nerdy fanboy cowardice. There's also Sonny Chiba as the displaced real ruler of Gavanas, and surprisingly good stretches of war-blasted landscapes and model work / dogfights, with ships folding out to detachable smaller ships, and ramming each other and emitting various cool laser effects.  If there were more of all that and less of the annoying young can-do Earth heroes cheering shrilly over their glowing nuts it might even be watchable. 

The director made the excellent Green Slime (1968), proving he was adept at shooting in English with international casts. Kinji, my man, what happened?

----

GALAXINA 

(1980) Dir. William Sachs

* / Amazon Image - B-

There's no accounting for taste; in the rush to imitate Star Wars, but with a little sex in it, they came in droves. But the world actually wondered about--and wanted to like--this one, thanks to the presence of former Playmate Dorothy Stratten, whose tragic death at the hands of her twitchy cokehead ex-boyfriend/manager (as played by Eric Roberts in Star 80) shook the world. Alas, though she looks beautiful and is very well-lit, she doesn't get much to do; there's too much time spent with the rest of the characters. There's some Joe Buck type strutting around the ship's engine room (which looks just like back boiler room of some depressing factory), boring his fellow men with his cliche'd disco studliness. There's a detour to a costume party bordello scene that stretches on forever and looks just like any other house party chaos of the time, only replete with all the cliches of bad westerns and disco movies folded into the melee. Shots of Galaxina doing cool shit (like watching TV) are cut short in order to spend more time watching the inescapable Avery Schreiber mug horrendously as the ship captain. One only has so much time to watch bad movies that aren't good-bad, even if Stratten's lipstick shimmers with just a tinge of orange in the eerie ship lighting. I lover her glowing chair too (above). Too bad the somewhat well-lit movie around her is so badly written, acted, edited and directed --otherwise it would be so good, bro, like Dark Star but with a literally (just touching her kills men instantly) and figuratively hot girl!