Galaxy of Terror (1981)

• Directed by B.D. Clark
• Written by Marc Seigler and B.D. Clark
• Starring
  • Edward Albert
  • Erin Moran
  • Ray Walston
  • Bernard Behrens
  • Zalman King
• Produced by Roger Corman

Roger Corman has a reputation for selling the sizzle instead of the steak. More concretely, that means that he doesn’t sell movies; he sells posters. Galaxy of Terror’s poster is a humdinger with sex appeal, a monster, and bright eye-catching colors. It’s not high art, but it has plenty of appeal. Corman sells the poster; the poster sells the movie. And if the movie sold by the poster delivered even a quarter of what the poster promises — hell, even a tenth — I’d have no complaints. But Galaxy of Terror is a movie without any appeal. It’s not close to the worst movie ever made, but it’s a complete failure on every metric of creativity, entertainment, and technical adequacy.

Air hockey – of the FUTURE!

And that’s despite starting with a broken-in but serviceable sci-fi premise: the spaceship Quest is dispatched to find and rescue the Remus on the planet Organthus, from which there has been mysteriously no communication. Throw in something monstrous, and you’ve got a recipe for a solid Alien-ripoff. How hard could it be? Easy enough that Galaxy of Terror has to keep shooting itself in the foot to make sure it doesn’t work.

Captain Trentor (Grace Zabriskie) of the Quest is old enough that the thirty-year-old actress has to adopt extremely unconvincing age makeup. She’s the only survivor of the “Hesperus massacre,” which is simultaneously something everyone has forgotten about and something that keeps getting brought up in conversation with her about every twenty seconds. She’s also quite insane; she gives a thirty-second-warning to the crew for blastoff, and exults as they scramble to their harnesses and dodge unsecured cargo. Then as soon as they get smoothly into orbit, she discards the hyperdrive presets given to her and makes a jump by the seat of her pants, giving the crew another mad scramble for stability. Great leadership ability, there.

Wait — they have headlights on their backpacks? I guess that works, if what you want to see is straight in front of you and five feet off the ground.

Good thing she’s only the ship’s captain, not the actual commander of the mission. No, that’d be Ilvar (Bernard Behrens), who’s spent the last twenty years as a desk-bound bureaucrat until ordered to command this rescue by the Planet Master of the planet Xerxes, a man whose entire head is obscured by the orange glow that emanates from it. Ilvar doesn’t know why he’s there, and neither do we.

The rest of the crew (actually divided between the ship’s crew and the rescue team, although they all wear the same style of uniform so it takes us a while to realize there’s a distinction) is a half-dozen individuals with perfunctory characterizations that are waved in front of us then promptly forgotten. The only ones of note are Alluma (Erin Moran, Joanie from Happy Days), whose claim to fame is being “psi-sensitive,” a talent that contributes absolutely nothing to the plot¹; Ranger (Robert Englund before he did all the things that people know him for), who’s worth noting because he gives the only halfway decent performance here, even with a severely underwritten part; and Kore (Ray Walston), who probably was thinking the whole time what a step down this was from starring in My Favorite Martian.

“Oh no! Something dimly seen has got me!”

They immediately crash-land on Organthum — pulled down by a mysterious force, not by Captain Trantor’s antics — right beside the Remus. They explore the empty hulk of the Remus, getting picked off one by one by barely-seen things of the “slimy and rubbery” variety. Having determined that there are no survivors aboard the Remus, they then search for the source of the mysterious force which pulled them down, and find a huge alien pyramid. They explore it, splitting up enough that each of them gets attacked and killed, though most of them also have an opportunity to act irrational and out of character for what little we know of each character. And somewhere right in here, I started holding my forehead up in my hands to keep my head from slumping in complete disinterest.

Because I didn’t care. At all. None of the characters had any distinguish personality, save some sketched-in animosities that afford the bickering and sniping which are the hallmark of lazy screenwriting. (Production designer and second unit director James Cameron certainly learned a lesson from noting the flaws he saw; the characterization of the Space Marines in Aliens (1986) gets right everything that Galaxy of Terror gets wrong.) It wasn’t until the end of the movie that we find out who the protagonist it supposed to be — it’s crewman Cabren (Edward Albert, son of Eddie Albert), and the fact that I haven’t even had to mention him before tells you how central he was to the story. All of the dialogue and behavior seem like what would appear in a script written by someone suffering from severe Asperger’s Syndrome.

Stained glass cathedrals — of the FUTURE!

To complement the murky script, we have consistently murky cinematography, which disguises not only what the creatures look like (recommended on most low-budget monster movies) but what the characters are doing. The brightest of scenes, aboard Quest, are dully lit as if by a couple of low-watt reading lamps. Everything else is dim to the point of almost complete invisibility. There’s nothing like asking an audience to squint through overshadowy scenes and choppy editing, to see what’s happening to characters they don’t care about, to make them wonder why they’re watching the movie in the first place.

All of this leads up to the twist “answer” to a mystery that was established in the opening scene with the Planet Master; unfortunately, the “answer” answers absolutely nothing, and would prove frustrating and puzzling to the audience if the audience had not already lost all interest in the events on screen.

“Wow! A serial-killing pop-cultural phenomenon? You really think so?”

Director/co-writer B.D. Clark directed exactly four movies, of which this was the last (his most recent prior movie had been 1972’s Hammer); it was also his final of three writing credits. If you’ve ever wondered just how talentless a filmmaker has to be before even Roger Corman won’t work with him anymore, well, now you know.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • Edward Albert (Cabren) played “Zayra” on the DS9 episode “A Man Alone”
  • Ray Walston (Kore, the ship’s cook) played “Boothby” in the TNG episode “The First Duty” and Voyager episodes “In the Flesh” and “The Fight”
  • Sid Haig (“Quuhod,” a member of the rescue team) played “First Lawgiver” in the original episode “Return of the Archons”
  • Jack Blessing (“Cos,” another member of the rescue team) played “Dulmur” in the DS9 episode “Trials and Tribble-ations”

1. She makes Deanna Troi look useful by comparison[back]