Starcrash (1978)

I can only ponder what a modern youth would think of Starcrash (1978); a kid who begs for more Star Wars action after watching the six films, and accidentally stumbles across this 70’s Italian B-movie at the local video store. I sincerely hope that happens, somewhere. Such brain-jarring accidents used to happen more commonly, in the days before the Internet, when a trip to the local video store was so central to kicking boredom, until you inevitably became overly familiar with your local store’s selection, down to every unexpected find. As a child and pre-teen, I wasn’t allowed to rent R-rated movies, so I scoured the shelves, and made it a mission to rent every single PG or G-rated fantasy, science fiction, and horror film. Thus, I was weaned on Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff instead of Jason Voorhees and Michael Meyers. I saw every Ray Harryhausen movie a hundred times. I watched Hayao Miyazaki’s NausicaƤ of the Valley of the Wind (1984) when it was just a dubbed, cut-down VHS tape called Warriors of the Wind, featuring a misleading cover in which the giant lava-creature from the film’s climax is holding a lightsaber as though he’s some kind of Jedi sidekick (and the heroine is shoved off into the corner of the image, usurped by a blonde Luke Skywalker-looking fellow). No lightsabers were featured in that film, to my disappointment, but I couldn’t say the same for Starcrash. Rather, this film craved to be the Star Wars clone I was looking for. When my little fingers popped it into the VCR, I quickly realized that I’d stumbled across…something. Something that was aching to deliver everything I wanted, but was instead producing ninety minutes of Starcrash. I was befuddled, but I wasn’t bored.

A typically colorful starfield (and looming claw-shaped spaceship) from "Starcrash."

I recognized two of the stars: somehow, Caroline Munro I was aware of (probably from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad); and I was certainly intrigued by the VHS tape boasting of the presence of David Hasselhoff. Michael Knight, in a science fiction space opera? Sold! Yet as the film begins (with a spaceship passing slowly over the top of the screen, exactly like the opening of Star Wars), the Hoff was nowhere to be found. Instead, my heroes were apparently Munro, as Stella Star, and some blond guy with a perm named Akton (Marjoe Gortner), both of them badly dubbed. Worse, these two space bandits quickly acquire a sidekick in the form of a robot cop who looks like Darth Vader but talks like a cartoon cowpoke. His name is Elle…like the women’s magazine. In the opening scene, Stella Star and Akton are fleeing Elle, in his cop car/spaceship, and go into hyperspace (followed by “normal space,” as they call it), and are almost drawn into the pull of a star until they jettison part of their spacecraft; the background stars look like Christmas lights, and the special effects look cheap, like a kid making home movies while playing with his toys. And then: the dialogue. “They found one damn survivor!” announces an officer to the villainous Count Zarth Arn, played by Joe Spinell of Maniac, and in his red cape and goatee looking pretty much exactly like Jon Lovitz as the Devil on Saturday Night Live. “But his brain seems to be thoroughly damaged,” the officer adds hopefully. The Count spreads his arms and moans, “Come to me golehhhhms,” and summons two stop-motion-animated robots who look like Mickey Mouse and carry scimitars, for some reason. I was in for a trip.

A spaceship swoops to the rescue behind a giant (and apparently female) robot.

David Hasselhoff is, in fact, in this film, but it takes a while before he puts in his now-classic appearance. In the meantime, we’re treated to an episodic narrative in which Stella Star, Akton, and gosh-shucks robot Elle investigate mysterious crashes on different planets, each of which presents a different monster and/or poorly-matted special effect and/or terrible makeup. Stella dresses in a revealing outfit which makes it seem that she’s playing Vampirella (if only!). On the first planet they reach, they encounter a tribe of Amazons just as scantily-clad, and during their escape encounter a towering, lumbering robot much like Talos in Jason and the Argonauts, although this one has tits and is crudely-animated. On another planet covered in snow, Stella and Elle are betrayed by their companion Thor (a green, bald man who looks like he stepped out of Bert I. Gordon’s The Magic Sword), and spend the night on the snowy plain, where the temperature dips “thousands of degrees.” After Akton comes to the rescue, he helps Elle carry Stella Star’s popsicle-body into the ship, where she’s safely thawed by a laser beam that Akton shoots out of his hand. In other words, he’s a Jedi; indeed, later he produces his own lightsaber to battle the two Mickey Mouse-looking robots with the scimitars.

Stella Star (Caroline Munro), Thor (Robert Tessier), and Akton (Marjoe Gortner)

But Akton’s powers are more vast than a mere Jedi’s. “So you see into the future!” Stella gasps at him after she’s been un-popsicled, and he reveals that he knew Thor would betray them all along. “All these years you never told me. Think of all the trouble I might have avoided!” “You would have tried to change the future,” Akton responds reasonably, “which is against the law. So therefore I can tell you nothing.” The subject is abruptly dropped and never raised again. Akton might seem increasingly god-like as the film wears on, but that’s nothing compared to the “Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe,” played by none other than Christopher Plummer from The Sound of Music. “You know something, my boy?” he tells David Hasselhoff. “I wouldn’t be Emperor if I didn’t have some powers at my command.” Then the golden-caped Plummer turns away dramatically and intones, “Imperial Battleship – halt the flow of time!” This is followed by a cheap-looking special effect.

The evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell) reclines amongst his alien harem.

All of this action is set to inappropriately gorgeous music. Any casual film score buff would instantly recognize it as the work of John Barry (1933-2011), best known for his scores to the James Bond films, and indeed he seems to be using this low-profile project to brainstorm ideas for Moonraker (1979). There’s a rumor that when director Luigi Cozzi delivered the footage to Barry, he lied and told him the special effects were just test animatics and the finished FX would be added later. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’d like to believe it. Starcrash has such a primitive look: on the one hand, it’s like a student film, experimenting with special effects without professional know-how. On the other hand – and this is partly why it has such a large cult following – the film has its own uniquely psychedelic feel. There’s something infinitely trippy to the way the sky of every planet is some other sky matted in, with time-lapse photography cloudscapes swooping over the heads of the actors who aren’t even lit to match that sky. Or the way that lava lamps figure so prominently in the backgrounds; if something doesn’t look science fictiony enough, Cozzi mattes in some bubbling lava lamp action. Roger Corman re-edited the film for release in America (Joe Dante edited the trailer); and Starcrash played at actual theaters. Wrap your head around that – unsuspecting audiences saw all this on the big screen.

Akton prepares for battle.

Luigi Cozzi would, in a few more years, direct the similarly deranged Hercules (1983), starring Lou Ferrigno. Now that one I saw at the drive-in. I would have been about seven years old, but I remember vividly the confusion that the film provoked. I’d been expecting Clash of the Titans (1981), but instead I got its evil doppelganger. When we got home, my father complained, “That movie was terrible.” I wondered over those words – I took in the simple critique as possibly invaluable information. Because when you’re a kid you don’t have the faculty to apply an ironic appreciation to a bad film. There aren’t any bad films, as such, just awesome ones and boring ones. Hercules and Starcrash couldn’t fit into those particular paradigms; they had been irresponsibly unloaded upon my consciousness, filling it with scantily-clad babes, silvery stop-motion toy robots, and nonsensical dialogue. For a brief while, the flow of time had halted, and it’s difficult for a young brain to not be marked forevermore.

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