• Written, produced, and directed by Ken Dixon
• Starring
  • “Elizabeth Cayton” (aka Elizabeth Kaitan)
  • Cindy Beal
  • Don Scribner
  • Brinke Stevens
  • Carl Horner

It’s been said before, but naturally it bears repeating: the home video revolution of the ’80s decisively took off when home video realized that it was the reincarnation of the old time drive-in. People didn’t plunk down several hundred dollars for a clunky top-loading VCR and sign up for a video rental membership because Star Wars and The Godfather cried out to be watched that many more times; this was a venue for less assuming and engaging features, where the importance of an all-encompassing cinematic experience took a back seat to the convenience of being able to disengage from the movie at will. Sure, pause buttons are great, but the real key to home video success was movies that, while superficially interesting, didn’t monopolize your eyes, ears, and frontal lobes.

“Boom, baby!”

Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity fits the bill perfectly — it’s a title that not only pins the subject matter succinctly, but proclaims that this is not a movie that will whine for your attention like a jealous lover. It’ll be perfectly happy to run its course on the TV while you watch, or make a snack, or clip your toenails, or thumb through the back of the TV Guide looking at other titles that are similarly much more enticing than the movies they label.

But as much as I want to tout mediocrity as a positive, SGFBI (ain’t writing it out every time, nope) carries it a bit too far. Surely, a wholesale retelling of “The Most Dangerous Game” set on an alien planet, with loincloth-clad starlets as the prey, should have at least a bit of a spark about it, right?

“Well, at least we’re working on our tans!”

Our heroines are Daria (Elizabeth Kaitan, here credited as “Cayton”) and Tisa (Cindy Beal), who are, well, slave girls. One would think that interstellar slaveships would have more sophisticated restraints than manacles chained to a floorplate in a pit, but then, one might expect space-age slave girls to wear something other than ragged leather bikinis. (Ragged polyester bikinis, maybe? Or lamé bikinis?) How they got there is unimportant, or at least unexplained; suffice it to say that they’d really, really rather not be slave girls. They therefore effect their escape by pulling their chains until they break, shorting out the electronic lock on the pit by touching it with the end of a chain, beating two slavers with lead pipes, and stealing a shuttlecraft. Given how easy the escapade is, you start to wonder if maybe there are no other slaves on the ship because everyone else has already escaped by the same or better methods.

Once out into open space, though, they find that they’re in really open space — no major planets anywhere. (Again, maybe all the smart escapees got out while they were still near civilization.) Then they pick up a landing beacon from a small planet nearby, get caught in a tractor beam, and crashland in the planet’s ocean. Washed up on the beach separately, they each make it to the one structure anywhere near on the planet, a huge castle-like hunting lodge. (No, it’s not unlikely that they would both end up there; it’s really very easy to get there. Leave the rocky beach, cross the abrupt transition to the shadowing jungle set, and follow the path to the castle set. Piece of cake.)

“When I answered that ‘MAKE HIM A M6N OF ST33L!!!” spam, I wasn’t expecting this…”

Their host is Zed (Don Scribner), a dark and mysterious man who lives there alone with his two android servants. He’s a surprisingly sedate fellow, especially when he’s got the place decorated to fit the tastes of the Squire of Gothos. But he does have a passion — hunting! In fact, he could wax rhapsodic about it at dinner for… well, far longer than he does, which is far too long anyway. His audience isn’t just Daria and Tisa, by the way; he’s also got brother and sister Rick (Carl Horner) and Shela (Brinke Stevens) as houseguests, as their ship managed to crash mysteriously right by Zed’s place as well. How weird — I mean, what are the odds?

Rick gets Daria alone and explains that things are more than a little creepy around here; there were some other survivors of their crash, but they’ve been disappearing nightly, with Zed explaining their absence as “gone hunting.” And that night, Rick discovers that his sister has disappeared from her room. It doesn’t take the three remaining to put it all together: Zed’s hunting humans.

Far too much of the middle of the movie is taken with Daria and Rick creeping out in the middle of the night to try to set traps in the jungle and beat Zed at his own game when their turn comes. (“Gee, in this whole wide jungle, where is the one place we can set a tripwire vine?”) Action through here is interspersed with the obligatory topless scenes for each of the actresses, but for an exploitation flick, they’re not very sexy scenes: Zed forces himself upon Shela, chained in his trophy room; Tisa leads an android (a very lonely android, apparently) to the seashore for some bathing to distract it from the other two’s field trip; and Daria and Rick make out in his room to cover for her absence from her own room in the morning. Rick makes the mistake of getting taken with Daria — a mistake largely because Zed then chooses him to be the first prey from their group. (He lasts about ten seconds.)

“Ahhh. I love it when my women pose like Frazetta paintings.”

And then, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Zed turns all three women into the jungle with a headstart, challenging them to get to the weapons cache at the far end of the claustrophobic jungle set before he can catch them. Can you stand the heartrending suspense? (Hint: I think you can, after all.)

Despite having the broad outlines of a successful if minor movie (I mean, there’s enough inherent cool in the original “The Most Dangerous Game” to rub off on scores of adaptations and ripoffs), the movie comes across as almost bizarrely lackluster. How lukewarm can a movie about bikini babes being hunted in the jungle be? Pretty lukewarm, as it turns out. Among all of the minor flaws, these three stand out:

- The young starlets cast as the protagonists got the role for a single reason: They look good in leather loinclothery. Giving them plenty of dialogue is problematic; giving them supposedly snappy dialogue is a major tactical error; and giving them dialogue with more technobabble than the Engineers Suite at a Star Trek convention is like dropping a depth charge down your pants. (In a bad way, I mean.) Brinke Stevens is naturally the best of the bunch, but even her effectiveness is sabotaged by giving her the most pretentious dialogue. (Hint: When the obsessive guy who controls your ability to leave the planet expresses an overwhelming interest in hunting, it’s probably not prudent to challenge him on the morality of his hobby.)

“So HOW much of our budget went to this one matte?”

- Sorry, but Zed’s just not scary. Manic, yes; hardened and ugly, sure. But commanding and impressive in the raw hunting power he wields? Not so much. In the end he’s just a doofus who took up residence on a deserted planet so he could decorate his bachelor pad with animal pelts and wear pirate shirts every day.

- And sorry again, but that jungle set isn’t fooling anyone. They tried to cover for its limited size by crowding it in and making it look overgrown, but I think we all know the real reason the girls never run through the undergrowth is that they wouldn’t have time to reach any real speed before they’d have to break to a halt at the far wall.

I don’t think anyone’s surprised that the movie attached to a title like Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity is less than a classic. But it’s a shame that the only movie that will ever bear that title is this one.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 6
• explosions: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0