aka Scontri Stellari Oltre la Terza Dimensione, aka Star Crash, aka Female Space Invaders

• Directed by “Lewis Coates” (aka Luigi Cozzi)
• Written by “Lewis Coates” and Nat Wachsberger
• Starring
  • Marjoe Gortner
  • Caroline Munro
  • Christopher Plummer
  • David Hasselhoff
  • Robert Tessier

By popular demand, this review has been upgraded to a regular screencapalooza. Enjoy!

It was a moment of weakness. I look at the stack of screener DVDs on my shelf, and my heart tasted ashes. I knew that some of them would probably be very bad (I’ve still got three screeners waiting to be seen from the same people who sent me Living Nightmare); some would be merely adequate. If I were lucky, one or two might even be pretty good.

But I strongly doubted that any would be fun. Mostly what qualifies as “fun” among independent genre movies these days is either ironic self-deprecating winks meant to gain forgiveness from the audience for the movie’s shortcomings, or pseudo-transgressive “edginess”. Because you know, there are just so many envelopes left unpushed these days.

I didn’t want cruel edginess. I didn’t want overflowing irony. I didn’t necessarily want something good, but something inside me was crying out for a movie overflowing with giddy, colorful fun.

And my newly-purchased DVD of Starcrash fit the bill, a movie so sublimely bad that it bends the continuum around into a circle and crosses the line back over into exquisitely wonderful.

Produced in the heady days immediately post-Star Wars when anyone who had ever even seen an issue of Cinefastique was being hired to kit-bash spaceship models to ride the coattails of the space opera fad, Starcrash is perhaps a perfect storm of bad choices, the first one being in director Luigi Cozzi (aka “Lewis Coates”). Cozzi’s work best known to American audiences are the two Lou Ferrigno Hercules movies, and this movie certainly is no departure in terms of competence. The man simply didn’t know how to do these movies right, but to his credit, that didn’t stop him: if he was going to do it wrong, by golly, he’d do it wrong for all he was worth! And thus what resulted here was the funniest, most captivating train wreck of a supposedly non-comedic movie since the golden age of Ed Wood. (In fact, with dear Mr. Wood having achieved room temperature not long before Starcrash’s theatrical run, it’s elegant to imagine that his ghost stuck around and infused the production with that singular Woodian enthusiasm for the indefensibly lame which so elevates Plan 9 From Outer Space (1958).)

In space, no one can hear your jaw drop.

Starcrash boldly announces exactly what trend it intended to rip off with its opening shot: Against a backdrop of colorful stars (way, way colorful stars, which would look more at home on a Christmas tree on the dance floor of a discotheque), a big ol’ spaceship fills our field of vision. (The quick-eyed will note the name of the vessel — the “Murray Leinster.” Is this how the old pulp SF master would have chosen to be immortalized?) The crew, we soon find out, is wearing uniforms that look like they were cobbled together from whatever leftovers from Planet of the Vampires (1965) were still in storage, with the gold-painted helmets wedged down over the ’70s hairstyles. After some dialogue highlighting inane technobabble and some foreshadowing that really doesn’t matter, the ship is attacked by huge red bubbles of light in outer space. (Throughout the movie, this danger will be referred to as “the monsters,” though that’s not the description that paint-tank special FX usually suggest to me.) Three escape pods jettison from the ship (again, what movie were we ripping off?) before the mothership explodes.

And then comes the obligatory screencrawl… written in French. Yes, that’s right, the recent DVD release from Substance uses a French-language print, although the sound is in English. And as long as I’ve ended up talking about the DVD (something I rarely do — I also rarely comment on the pizza box while I’m eating the pizza), I should tell you that the DVD presentation falls into the “Yeah, I guess it’s better than VHS” category. Blips and bloops to the film print aren’t corrected, and there are extra little margins of space inside the letterboxing from time to time. But I first saw this movie back in high school when I taped it in EP mode from a late-nite showing on a staticky broadcast channel, and was still entranced by it, so I’m not going to complain. (And rumor is that this DVD is still better than the one available from St Clair Vision under the alternate title Female Space Invaders.)

Space… The sparkly frontier!

Anyway. My schoolboy French isn’t exactly up to the task of translating the entire crawl, but thanks to the IMDb, here’s the English version:

In a time before time, life existed in the outer galaxies.
Vast star nations prospered under the kind rule of the Star Emperor.
Until… the rise of the evil Count, Zarth Arn, arch ruler of the haunted stars. In the secrecy of his hidden domain on the phantom planet the Count created the ultimate weapon, a weapon designed to destroy the very minds of those who would oppose him.
Knowledge of this weapon soon reached the Star Emperor. An Imperial starship was sent to locate the Count and confirm the existence of such a weapon.
The starship was destroyed.
It was an easy victory for the Count and proved that his dark world was invincible, that the forces of evil could rise again and ultimately dominate the galaxy.
From the haunted stars to the edge of the Universe, Count Zarth Arn would spread his terror and treachery.
The time had come for rebellion.

That last sentence doesn’t make much sense, does it? I mean, if the Star Emperor is the legitimate ruler, then it’s the Count who’s doing the rebelling. Any opposition to Zarth Arn isn’t rebellion, it’s law enforcement. And it’s not like we needed the word included as a signpost for those viewers who couldn’t decide if this were REALLY supposed to be a Star Wars ripoff.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in this far-flung (but, really, surprisingly small) universe, two space rogues are gearing up for a run-in with the space cops. The role of pilot Stella Star is played by Caroline Munro, if by “played” we mean to indicate that she showed up on set every day and let cameras be aimed at her while she said the words written down in the script. Munro achieved a level of fame during the ’70s in genre features by playing mysterious, exotic, and largely silent females; this movie may well have put the fizzle in her career when she was forced to recite lines, and audiences discovered that she couldn’t act her way out of a wet paper bag, even with rapturous legions of fanboys volunteering to further wet the bag with their tongues. Her copilot is Akton, played by Marjoe Gortner, who is himself a piece of work: A former child preacher who embarked on acting “career” after a series of decidedly unchurchy scandals (“career” is in quotation marks because Starcrash pretty much marked the high point thereof). I will say this for Gortner, though; of the entire cast, he’s the only one who visibly intended to act when he came to the set every day. I’m not saying that he did it well, mind you, but at least he had some concept of what he was being paid for, unlike Munro or several other cast members we’ll meet shortly.

Oh, and the space cops pursuing them? One is a poorly-realized robot with a Texan accent named L (played by Judd Hamilton, with voice by Hamilton Camp); the credits list the character as “Elle,” but seriously, this android’s overflowing with far too much testosterone to use such a femmy spelling. Ahe other is career movie heavy Robert Tessier as a green-skinned bruiser named Thor. (“You’re Thor becauthe your partner ith an angular metal robot, thilly!”)

Caroline Munro demonstrating “smell-the-fart acting” really, really well.

After running away through some cutrate hyperspace effects, Stella and Akton discover an escape pod floating derelict in space, with a single survivor aboard who claims to have been attacked by “monsters.” Distracted by their care for the survivor (because compassion is a well-known attribute of interstellar smugglers), Stella and Akton end up getting captured by the space cops. Their trial is conducted by the older and larger cousin of the Martian commander from the original Invaders From Mars (1953), whereupon Stella goes to a prison where she and the other inmates spend their time dropping globes of radium into a furnace. (Gee, a nod to the Flash Gordon serial. I’m touched.) Though all of the other prisoners wear shapeless bolts of burlap, Stella’s outfitted in something black and strappy which would make perfect sense if Mike Grell were the costume designer. (Will I ever be able to top the pure geekiness of that reference? I doubt it.)

“Whaddaya MEAN, there’s no way to give the universe the finger? You’re fired!!”

By the way, somewhere in here we’re also introduced to the evil overlord mentioned in the crawl, Count Zarth Arn. Lemme tell you, if you’re going to be evil, go all the way. The Count foments his nefarious plans from a space fortress shaped like a huge dark hand, and possesses the most EE-vil wardrobe this side of the Monty Python “Spanish Inquisition” sketch. His minions are either humans wearing costumes almost identical to those worn by the good guys (except that their ill-fitting skullcap-helmets are black, of course), or stop-motion robots who look like they were assembled in the back of a kitchen supply warehouse.

The sign of a true Dark Lord: Helmet hair, without even wearing a helmet.

But hey, you don’t want to hear about some greasehead in a velour cape, you wanna get back to Stella in her barely-there prisonwear, right? Stella proves the only one who could instigate a prison break, because no one else ever got the idea of hitting a guard and taking a gun. After a billion bodyshot explosions, she escapes to the outside, where she’s met by an unexpected rocketship, piloted by Thor and L. They’re not there as captors this time, though; her sentence has been commuted, as has Akton’s, and they’re to undertake a special mission for the Emperor.

“Going for a ride in a strange vehicle, in my scanties? Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Christopher Plummer.

It’s amusing. All actors have fallow years, and especially in the days before the direct-to-video “ghetto,” it was fairly easy to ride high, then spend a few years slumming in drive-in fare, and bounce back to theatrical attention. At least Christopher Plummer didn’t spend any time in a loincloth, like another actor I could mention. But throughout his screentime here, clad in golden armor and moonboots, he exudes a very palpable attitude that declares two things: (1) “I am doing this only for the paycheck,” and (2) “I am going to spend half of that paycheck on alcohol to erase my memory of this role.”

“No, THAT’S your career. Over there. Receding into the distance…”

The Emperor appears as a holographic projection to Stella, Akton, Thor and L, giving them the mission for which he had the smugglers freed: To find any survivors from the lost spaceship. (For the benefit of any audiences who experienced the screencrawl in French, he rehearse all of that information, and adds a tidbit: The captain of that vessel had been his only son. Which would make him, I’m thinking, a bad candidate for that kind of dangerous mission in the first place, but what do I know of the machinations of imperial succession?) Oh, and to discover the Count’s secret weapon which the lost ship had been searching for, something so large that it requires an entire planet to hide it. (Planet-sized weapon. Yup. Heard that somewhere before, too. Although the fact that the weapon is hidden on an actual, pre-existent planet means that it’s not nearly as portable as one would hope a galaxy-conquering weapon to be.)

This was as close as Plummer could get to phoning it in.

This, then, forms the mainspring of the plot, or at least the second act: finding survivors. As the lost vessel originally had three launches (of which they’ve found one), that leaves the two other launches plus the wreckage of the mothership to find. And why, exactly, did the Emperor need to commute the life sentences of two small-time smugglers to accomplish this mission? Because Stella is (ahem) the best pilot in the galaxy, and Akton the (hmrph) best navigator. From what we’ve seen so far, to say nothing of what’s to come, this would seem unlikely at first glance, until one remembers that Thor and L represent the cream of the Imperial Guard. Wherever and whenever this story is meant to take place, it looks like heat death has come to the galactic talent pool.

“Jeez, way to tear up the beachfront.”

Because there are three lost vessels, and due to the well-known law of physics which says that any spacecraft set adrift will immediately crashland on a nearby planet instead of drifting through interstellar space for infinity, there are three planets to search. Our intrepid foursome immediately settle into a pattern: L will accompany Stella, wearing as little as environmentally feasible, to the planet’s surface, whereupon their asses will land in a crack, until Akton and Thor, waiting in the ship, come and bail them out. Hey, if a system works…

“Not the comfy chair!”

The first planet is the obligatory Planet of the Amazons — in this case, Planet of the Paranoid, Man-Hating Amazons (even compared to the baseline for amazons, who are notorious paranoid misandrists). Their queen Corelia (Nadia Cassini) demonstrates that even dubbing can’t completely disguise a truly bad actress. Immediately captured by the Amazons as they inspect the launch, Stella and L escape only because the Amazons are as stupid as everyone else in the cosmos; nevertheless, they almost end up stomped by an ungainly golden stop-motion statue with protuberant ladybumps before Akton shows up to save the day. After this comes a space battle which demonstrates how boring space battles when desperate editing is used to try to cover the fact that every ship only flies in a straight line. (I’m really trying hard to gloss over the action here, because if I start examining the events in any more depth, I’ll find myself pointing out the multiple inanities in almost every moment of screentime — the poor acting, the wooden script, the inadequate special effects, the mismatched editing… Not since Plan 9 From Outer Space itself has a single movie exhibited such an inadvertently laughable misapplication of storytelling skills, practically down to a frame-by-frame scale.)

Ladybumps — of DOOM!

The second planet is an ice-covered wasteland, so cold that Stella actually puts on tights for protection. This is the crash site for the mother ship, which — despite the destructive explosion we saw before the credits — not only touched down largely intact, but is surrounded by the undamaged bodies of the crew. Stella abruptly exhibits a futilistic attitude about their quest which seems to mark her as a sufferer of a seasonally-affective disorder. Although she is right in a way, as aboard the ship, Thor suddenly clubs Akton over the head; he’s a double-agent for Count Zarth Arn, and will leave Stella and L to freeze as the sun goes down… as soon as he can figure out why his ship isn’t lifting off. (Hmm… An ice world whose temperature drops too low to sustain human life at sundown… This move came out before The Empire Strikes Back (1980), you realize. You have to wonder if George Lucas might have wandered into a cinema during Starcrash’s abbreviated theatrical run and — Nahhh.)

“Boy, something on that craft services table really didn’t agree with me…”

Of course, Akton isn’t dead — when has clubbing someone over the head with a wrench ever killed someone in a movie? — and easily overcomes Thor with his powers. Powers? Yeah, Akton has powers. Up until now, they’ve mostly been the uncanny ability to make meaningless sine waves appear over his hand, but now he shows himself impervious to laser fire. And when he gets L and Stella back aboard, he also projects heat waves to thaw Stella out (and give her hair extra bounce and shine, too). And best of all: When Akton explains that he sabotaged the ship himself because he already knew that Thor was a souble-agent, Stella exclaims: “Then you can see the future!” Um, yeah. That’s the only possible way that Akton could have known that Thor was secretly working for the Count. It couldn’t have been the “XOXO Zarth Arn” pinup he saw in Thor’s locker. Or even the simple fact that Thor’s played by Robert Tessier.

“For my next trick, I shall make — a squiggle! Much like my last trick.”

On they go to the third planet, where their ship is attacked by the red blotch “monsters” in space. All three of the crew almost goes crazy from their effect, until… well, until the blotches fade away and leave them alone. Boy, that was close. And when they then achieve orbit, Stella’s apparently still okay with Akton, the guy who can see the future, sitting in the comfy chair on the ship while she and L brave the unknown. This would be the Planet of the Kung Fu Cavemen, who prefer to enter a scene, when at all possible, via unseen springboards. L gets bashed to bits, while Stella is carted off bound hand and foot, in classic barbarian style, back to the homestead cave. All seems desperate for a moment, until Stella is rescued by… no, not by Akton the Future-Boy, by a guy in a golden mask who can shoot laser beams from his eyes. And once he takes off the mask, he turns out to be…

New and uncharted territory? Well, Stella’s wearing pants…

You know, this is one of those moments in the movie where contemporary audiences couldn’t possibly have appreciated it the way we can now with thirty-plus years of pop-cultural hindsight. How could anyone have known that this young, unknown actor under the mask would a generation later add a whole extra layer of metatextual enjoyment to the movie? Who could have anticipated the absolute glee to be felt when the mask is removed, revealing the young and unlined face of David Hasselhoff?

Stella? Frigid.

Stella and Hasselhoff’s character Simon spend a few seconds exchanging exposition (“You’re a launch survivor? I’m LOOKING for launch survivors!”) before being attacked again by cavemen. With the batteries running low on the golden laser mask, it looks like certain death — until, again, Akton runs in to save the day. (Look, just because you know the future doesn’t mean you can cut it so fine.) And just because it’s been at least a few minutes since the last blatant reminder of what blockbuster movie provided the impetus for this production, Akton wields what can only be described as a “laser sword.” I guess his precognitive powers assured him that, no, Lucasfilm wouldn’t think this cheap ripoff worth suing over.

When Lava Lamps Attack!

Akton then demonstrates his brain power (two whole functioning neurons!) compared to the other two by concluding that this, indeed, is the planet which conceals Count Zarth Arn’s secret weapon. The reasoning he uses to arrive at this conclusion is so weak, I’m not even going to repeat it. Let’s just leave it at, “The weapon needs a planet to conceal it, and this is the planet we were near when we got attacked.” He then leads them over to the concealed elevator which leads down to the nerve center of the weapon. At no point does Stella exclaim, “Then why the hell didn’t we just come here in the first place, Prophet-Boy?” That’s because Stella is an idiot.

BOING-G-G!

They’ve just barely had time to ooh and ahh over all the cheap vacuformed plastic decorating the nerve center set, when Zarth Arn himself comes in, mwa-ha-hahing to the best of his abilities. Because not only has be captured Stella and Akton, but Simon is the Emperor’s son! And thanks to an anonymous tip, the Emperor himself is on his way! And the planet is boobytrapped! And the two golem robots (remember them from way back?) are going to make sure that the three good guys stay right here until the Emperor arrives, so that they can all blow up real good together! MWA! HA! HAH!

“Yeah, but every time I fire this thing, it ruins my night vision.”

As soon as Zarth Arn leaves, Akton whips out his laser sword (no, that’s not a euphemism) and starts hacking away at the two stop-motion robots, who are themselves armed with swords. He sustains a terminal wound — everyone, say it with me: “Whoops, didn’t see that coming!” — but Hasselhoff grabs the fallen sword and shows off Hasselhoff’s mad fencing skillz. Akton dies, or at least fades away in a superimposition of sine waves, just before the Emperor strides through the door.

“It’s actually a Lite-Seibre. Completely different.”

The planetary explosion is set to happen in like fifteen seconds, but the Emperor has a trick up his sleeve as well:

“Imperial Battleship, halt the flow of time!”

(Immediately thereafter, Christopher Plummer went back to his trailer and drank himself to sleep, crying bitterly.)

That gives them three minutes of a bad green lightbeam effect, just enough time to get back to the battleship and leave the radius of the explosion.

“I — am not left-handed!”

I guess that Zarth Arn figured on not needing this awesome weapon anymore if he can blow up the Emperor. And since the Count can’t know yet that the Emperor and his retinue has survived, he orders an all-out assault on the Count’s Interstellar Space Hand of Meanness. This, then, is the space battle you were waiting for! Ships! Flying! This way and that! Bad approximations of Industrial Light & Magic laser beams! Explosions all over the place! And, of course, the crowningt achievement of interstellar warfare: Missiles! Missiles which crash through the picture windows of the Space Hand, into the Count’s throne room! With no loss of air pressure! Missiles which don’t do anything as sensible as explode — instead, they pop open to reveal a couple of Imperial soldiers, who shoot their laser guns around at Zarth Arn’s forces until they get shot themselves!

Caroline Munro, Christopher Plummer, and David Hasselhoff… All smelling the same fart.

AHAHAHAHAH (gasp) HAHAHa ha ha… Can you see why I love this movie? This is monumental badness raised to the level of genius. Anyone can achieve mediocrity, but only those few savants can craft a motion picture so horrendously, ludicrously, gloriously bad.

“No, painting my spaceship gold doesn’t really accomplish anything. But I need to feel pretty.”

All of this is observed from the Imperial battleship, which means that the Emperor, Simon and Stella all stand around watching a viewscreen for the duration of the assault. Which, I should point out, doesn't work. (Hope the guy who thought up the missile assault wasn't planning on a performance bonus.) The Emperor looks around morosely, devastated by the fact that the nadir of his career involves him sitting around in a golden tinfoil costume and... No, wait, that's Plummer himself. The Emperor's upset because Zarth Arn's Five Fingers of Starfaring EE-vil survived the attack. But there is one option left to them:

Starcrash.

“You don’t have to say ‘Zap, zap’ when you shoot, you fool!”

What, you thought they’d go the whole movie without referencing the title? No, “Starcrash” is their plan of last resort, alternately titled “Head-On Collision.” All they have to do, see, is ram the Floating City, a huge residential space station, into the Big Black Hand of Fiendishness. Evacuation? Takes place in under two minutes. And of course Simon and Stella are set to pilot the city into the handship, which, having seen the competency levels of the rest of the people in the Emperor’s employ, is looking more and more reasonable. Stella insists on Simon staying behind because, you know, heir to the throne and all that, so she and a recently rebuilt L pilot the Floating City into the Stinky Fingers of the Stars. And wouldn’t you know it, it works! Mainly because whichever of Zarth Arn’s soldiers was in charge of looking out the window for big things heading straight for them does not look out the window and notice the big thing heading straight for them until too late.

“No, I can’t change the channel. I lost the remote.”

Explosions! More explosions! Zarth Arn standing on his bridge, waving his velvet cape in defiance to the fates! And then…

Then Christopher Plummer is called upon to lend his voice to the following speech to no one in particular, which he does in a manner befitting a particularly mellow William Shatner:

Well, it’s done. It’s happened. The stars are clear. The planets shine. We’ve won. Oh, some dark force, no doubt, will show its face once more. The wheel will always turn. But, for now, it’s calm. And for a little time, at least, we can rest.

[For the full effect, download the podcast of this review, which contains the audio from that inspiring scene.]

” I — I — I really wish I’d thought of something profound to say!”

I think this was probably the day that Plummer had to be half-sauced before arriving on the set in order to make it through the day.

This review, I realize, was twice as long as my normal ones. But even then, I feel I haven’t told you a hundredth part of the magic that is Starcrash. In fact, what I’d really love to do is show this movie to everyone. Friends, neighbors, enemies, politicians… Wouldn’t the world be a better place if it were a world in which everyone had seen Starcrash? Can you imagine Republicans and Democrats, Israelis and Palestinians, Sunni and Shia, rubbing their eyes as the lights come up after a showing of Starcrash, looking around at the world with a new vision? They’d be all, “I can no longer hate you, or wish harm on your family. For we have watched Starcrash, and we have watched it together.”

Why do I feel a Carpenters song coming on?

Such is the power of Starcrash, a movie whose like comes along only once in a generation. What a wonderful time to be alive!

“Why am I smiling? Because I’ve got my agent’s body in the back of my Datsun.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 43
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 130
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Christopher Plummer (the Emperor) played Chang, the bald evil Klingon in Star Trek 6 (and also in the Star Trek: Klingon Academy video game)
  • Hamilton Camp (the voice of L) appeared on two DS9 episodes as the Ferengi “Leck,” and on the Voyager episode “Extreme Risk” as “Vrelk”