Made cheaply in Italy to cash in on the success of 'Star Wars', 'Starcrash' is pretty awful. It's hard to overstate how cheap it looks, comparing it to the 'New Hope' of the previous year it looks about a decade older. A silly, non sensical, derivative story, poorly conceived and executed. Yet somehow they got John Barry to do the score and Christopher Plummer to appear, playing the Emporer of the Galaxy, who in this case is one of the good guys. Predictably the movie was distributed within the United States by Roger Cormen's New World Pictures.
Caroline Munro, a Hammer Horror regular who the previous year had been a Bond girl in 'The Spy Who Loved Me', is a space pilot and adventurer. Her navigator is played by Marjoe Gortner, a former Pentecostal preacher and subject of the Oscar winning 1972 documentary 'Marjoe'. The two are caught and briefly imprisoned for various crimes, allowing Munro to be minimally cloathed in bikini style prison attire (which she retains through much of the film), before being freed by the Emporer to hunt for his son and heir, whose ship crashed "starcrashed" while on a reconicense mission against an evil duke. The galaxy is in civil war you see.
There is a robot who talks with a Texas accent, and a green skined Telly Savalias type, and Amazon women, and Marjoe develops force powers and even fights some stop motion robots with a light sword. Also David Hasselhoff is in this. It's all pretty rediculus, yet because and not in spite, of its many faults remains watchable. Yet I can't bring myslef to call this anything other than what it is, which is a bad movie. *
No comments:
Post a Comment