Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 3: today we're going to be talking about the nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: eight space fantasy film Star Crash, directed by Luigi Kotzy,
Speaker 3: starring Carolyn Monroe, David Hasselhoff, Marjo Gortner, Christopher Plummer, and
Speaker 3: Joe Spinell. What a cast list really like an all
Speaker 3: star bill of different flavors of seventy screen personalities. You've
Speaker 3: got alumni of the Sound of Music, The Young and
Speaker 3: the Restless and The Godfather, and you've got hammer horror
Speaker 3: queens and tent revival maniacs all in the same movie.
Speaker 3: That is an assemblage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's some great representation from Italian schlock cinema here
Speaker 2: as well, and some exploitation cinema. So it really is
Speaker 2: like a sediment of seventies motion pictures where you can
Speaker 2: kind of like dig down and find little gritty bits
Speaker 2: of this and that.
Speaker 3: So the reason we're covering Star Crash on Star Wars
Speaker 3: Week here is that despite the protestations of some of
Speaker 3: the film's creators. This is widely viewed as one of
Speaker 3: the Star Wars knockoffs of the late seventies and early eighties.
Speaker 3: There were many of these. At the very least, this
Speaker 3: is thought of as an attempt to cash in on
Speaker 3: the revolutionary box office success of the original Star Wars,
Speaker 3: which came out one year before this was seventy eight.
Speaker 3: Star Wars was seventy seven.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we should be clear here for anyone
Speaker 2: who's new to weird House cinema when we talk about knockoffs,
Speaker 2: I don't think we've ever discussed a film for weird
Speaker 2: House Cinema that was, in some ways a knockoff that
Speaker 2: also didn't bring its own beauty and its own vision
Speaker 2: to the screen. So we say it with a lot
Speaker 2: more love than maybe some critics might say it.
Speaker 3: I will make the case that Star Crash is possibly
Speaker 3: the greatest of the Star Wars knockoffs, and we have
Speaker 3: sampled a lot of them. We watched Message from Space.
Speaker 3: You remember that one, the Humanoid. I think that's the
Speaker 3: one that had Richard Keel in it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we just re ran that one on Monday for
Speaker 2: newer viewers.
Speaker 3: Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars with Zibil Danning and
Speaker 3: a whole Yeah, that was a whole thing, And they
Speaker 3: all have their pleasures. I have enjoyed every one of
Speaker 3: those in its own way. I recall Message from Space
Speaker 3: in particular being a lot of fun. But I don't
Speaker 3: think that any other one of these achieves the luscious,
Speaker 3: insane weirdness of Star Crash. Star Crash, in my opinion,
Speaker 3: is in a class of its own.
Speaker 2: It really is. It's such a it's such a strange
Speaker 2: film to watch it. It's so bad and yet so irresistible.
Speaker 2: Like well, basically I was trying to think of a
Speaker 2: good elevator pitch for it, and the best good come
Speaker 2: up with is Star Wars on Acid, but in the
Speaker 2: bad way. Like there's there's something kind of delirious and
Speaker 2: overwhelming about everything about it, from its from its visuals
Speaker 2: to its just insane dialogue. Like I was having to
Speaker 2: like text you while I was rewatching it, because it's like,
Speaker 2: how is it that every line in the film is
Speaker 2: somehow like the worst line in the entire film and
Speaker 2: also at the same time, of course the greatest. It's
Speaker 2: It's one of these films where it feels like all
Speaker 2: of the dialogue was just created by by alien beings
Speaker 2: or something.
Speaker 3: This film has one particular dialogue exchange that I think
Speaker 3: about all the time. It comes into my brain at
Speaker 3: least once a week. It's the scene where the character
Speaker 3: Thor is shooting at Marjo Gordoner with his ray gun
Speaker 3: and they raise or not you know, harming him, and
Speaker 3: he says, what, no one can survive these deadly rays,
Speaker 3: and Marjo replies, these deadly rays will be your death. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I couldn't write something like that if I.
Speaker 2: Tried, absolutely uh, And then the visuals more than than
Speaker 2: match it.
Speaker 3: I was.
Speaker 2: I had to look it up in the Psychotronic Film Guide,
Speaker 2: and in it, Michael Weldon describes the film's effects as
Speaker 2: quote garishly attractive, especially to young people and people under
Speaker 2: the influence of controlled substances. And it really does have
Speaker 2: that vibe. It's just I mean, at times, it's it's
Speaker 2: very overt like space in this film is like a
Speaker 2: lava lamp. It is it is colorful, it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's it's it's we're getting every every flavor of the
Speaker 2: nebula here a very spell jammer in its sense of
Speaker 2: the cosmos, not the not just the dark, unforgiving void.
Speaker 3: What all dressed potato chips are to flavor, this movie
Speaker 3: is to visual texture. It is a bombardment of color
Speaker 3: and texture and just all kinds of visual weirdness on
Speaker 3: the eyes. It is not the most visually artful thing
Speaker 3: I've ever seen, but it's not gonna leave your eyes hungry.
Speaker 3: You know, you're not gonna go away being like, I
Speaker 3: don't know if I saw anything all that interesting. It
Speaker 3: is a it is an assault on the eyes.
Speaker 2: Weldon also pointed out that this is a film where,
Speaker 2: certainly for the time, they tried every sort of special
Speaker 2: effect and the results range, I think he said, from
Speaker 2: from bad to almost good. But there is kind of
Speaker 2: like it's a charming aspect of it as well. You love,
Speaker 2: there's something about a film that, yeah, it's it's making
Speaker 2: a lot of swings and it's also making it's a
Speaker 2: lot of misses involved here, But there's there. There's some
Speaker 2: lovingly cheesy effects in this movie.
Speaker 3: There are some pretty nasty looking video effects that they
Speaker 3: use for the hyperspace sequence.
Speaker 2: Oh god, that's an assault on the eyes.
Speaker 3: Yes exactly. But you know one that I really loved.
Speaker 3: I don't know, I'm just a sucker for stop motion anyway.
Speaker 3: But the stop motion robots, the two Golams that look
Speaker 3: like ducks.
Speaker 2: Actually they look like B one Battle droids. I thought
Speaker 2: it was that there are several ways that this film
Speaker 2: kind of prophesizes future Star Wars, actual Star Wars installments,
Speaker 2: and one way is that these two battle droid these
Speaker 2: two robots look kind of like B one Battle droids
Speaker 2: from from the the prequel films.
Speaker 3: They're not droids robed, they're golams. Golams, that's what they've called. Now.
Speaker 3: As for the originality debate, I mentioned that some of
Speaker 3: the film's creators have insisted that this is not a
Speaker 3: Star Wars ripoff. One example is the director of the film,
Speaker 3: Luigi Kotsi. He has said this is not a Star
Speaker 3: Wars clone. The idea and story concept for Starcrash predates
Speaker 3: the release of Star Wars. I can believe there may
Speaker 3: be some truth to this, but based on everything I've read,
Speaker 3: here's my best guess. It seems to me like Cotzy
Speaker 3: may have been wanting to develop a space fantasy or
Speaker 3: space opera movie before the release of Star Wars, and
Speaker 3: some of those ideas end up becoming Star Crash. But
Speaker 3: at the same time, you just cannot deny that Star
Speaker 3: Wars influence the ultimate form and execution of this movie.
Speaker 3: I mean, this movie has lightsabers in it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, most Star Wars stars shy away from that,
Speaker 2: but this one just straight up as a lightsaber.
Speaker 3: So some Star Wars is coming through. The signal is
Speaker 3: coming through here. Also, I think it would be hard
Speaker 3: to deny that the project's ability to receive funding and
Speaker 3: accelerated production timeline was driven by the success of Star Wars.
Speaker 3: So I can believe that this movie pre dated Star
Speaker 3: Wars in its inspiration, and in fact, you can see
Speaker 3: ways that that might even that might even not go
Speaker 3: to originality, like you can see ways that earlier movies
Speaker 3: than Star Wars also influenced Star Crash. I think a
Speaker 3: bunch of Star CRUSH's DNA can be sourced to Barbarella
Speaker 3: starring Jane Fonda, which came out in nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 3: But I think the business logic of this production and
Speaker 3: the final texture of the movie are quite obviously heavily
Speaker 3: influenced by Star Wars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think it's undeniable. But at the same time, yeah,
Speaker 2: the filmmakers here were likely inspired by some of the
Speaker 2: same things that inspired George Lucas.
Speaker 3: Right, but old cereals Yeah, old.
Speaker 2: Cereals, old Flash Gordon, old Harry Housen films. But yeah,
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, the bottom line is,
Speaker 2: like Star Wars, the original picture is just was too
Speaker 2: much of a financial hit and too much of a
Speaker 2: like a cultural phenomenon not to influence everything that came
Speaker 2: after and make it even a desirable influence. Like how
Speaker 2: many people had an idea and then they realized, Hey, producers,
Speaker 2: they know what's up. They have a feeling. This is
Speaker 2: what's going to sell. If I just lean into the
Speaker 2: Star warsiness of this concept I already had, I just
Speaker 2: might get this picture made.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, one big way I would say this
Speaker 3: movie differs from Star Wars esthetically is it does not
Speaker 3: have that core feeling of space being lived in that
Speaker 3: Star Wars does. You know? This movie does not have
Speaker 3: the grimy old couch cushions on the Millennium falcon. This
Speaker 3: is much more like the pristine Flash Gordon space environment. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're going for something shinier, even when it kind
Speaker 2: of strains the budget to make it. So, all right, Well,
Speaker 2: if you were wondering at this point, where can I
Speaker 2: watch Star Crash? Luckily for you, it is widely available.
Speaker 2: Roger Corman's New World Pictures picked this film up and
Speaker 2: distributed it. As I understand it, this was the same
Speaker 2: year they distributed Cronenberg's The Brewed by the Way. Shout
Speaker 2: Factory put out a nice blu ray of the film,
Speaker 2: and I think they may have put it there's I
Speaker 2: think likely a DVD version of that as well. And
Speaker 2: if you're an MST three K fan, this was riffed
Speaker 2: in I believe twenty seventeen by Jonah in the Bots.
Speaker 3: I've not seen the riff but I do have the
Speaker 3: two disc DVD edition, so the older version of the
Speaker 3: disc that's got all the special features.
Speaker 2: I think the time that i'd watched this previously, I
Speaker 2: watched it with my wife. We watched the MST three
Speaker 2: K version, and I remembered it being a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: But you know, but I was watching it in a
Speaker 2: social scenario and it was riff so I really didn't
Speaker 2: get to focus in on the authentic weirdness of Star Crash.
Speaker 2: So this time, yeah, I watched it straight up and
Speaker 2: it's yeah, it's still, this is a film. I love
Speaker 2: a great riff on a film like this, but this
Speaker 2: is a film that doesn't even need riffing. It is
Speaker 2: just the quality is already perfect.
Speaker 3: I think some of the space battle scenes could benefit
Speaker 3: from some some enlivening by by commentary. Those kind of
Speaker 3: dragged on for me a bit. But yeah, any scene,
Speaker 3: any scene with dialogue and costumes, I don't need anything else.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, let's talk a little bit about the
Speaker 2: folks involved here. We already mentioned Luigi Cootzi, the writer
Speaker 2: and director born nineteen forty seven, Italian director, probably best
Speaker 2: known for this film, his two Hercules films, one of
Speaker 2: which we covered on Weird House Cinema recently. That would
Speaker 2: be Luf Forigno as the Hulk, and also for his
Speaker 2: work with Dario Argento.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. I was going to compare this film's lighting
Speaker 3: and color palette to Argento.
Speaker 2: Well there you go. I mean there's aception. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: a little bit. It's tough though, I think in large
Speaker 2: part like this is just not the sort of cinematic
Speaker 2: world that Argento ever went after. You know, I don't
Speaker 2: think he ever did anything. He certainly never did a
Speaker 2: space opera. Missed opportunity there, but hey, maybe there's time.
Speaker 3: Well, I just mean the you know, the unrealistic but
Speaker 3: a stylish use of gel lights and the kind of
Speaker 3: rooms and walls that glow with an overwhelming color hue.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But I think where it becomes harder for me
Speaker 2: to see that is just because the sorts of things
Speaker 2: that are being lit here, Like everything is so artificial
Speaker 2: in this movie, and Argento was always lighting. I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess Argento use sets, but always lighting something that
Speaker 2: at least aspired to be a real world environment, you.
Speaker 3: Know, lighting an airport that way or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, Cosey's first film was a nineteen sixty nine
Speaker 2: low budget adaptation of Frederick Pohle's novella of a Tunnel
Speaker 2: under the World. This apparently got Argento's attention, and he
Speaker 2: subsequently worked subsequently worked on Argento's nineteen seventy one film
Speaker 2: Four Flies on Gray Velvet, earned a story credit, and
Speaker 2: he also worked on Argento's nineteen seventy three action comedy
Speaker 2: The Five Days, and he directed his own Ghallo film
Speaker 2: with nineteen seventy fives The Killer Must Kill Again. Great
Speaker 2: Shalla tie.
Speaker 4: Now remember if I've seen that one Not only did
Speaker 4: he direct today's epic Star Wars Star Wars cash In,
Speaker 4: he also helmed the notorious nineteen eighty alien cash In Contamination.
Speaker 2: I've seen part of that one and then I started
Speaker 2: falling asleep, But I do want to pick it up
Speaker 2: sometimes again.
Speaker 3: I've read that it has some really good exploding people
Speaker 3: in it. And there is one scene from this movie
Speaker 3: that is sampled in a very a way that I
Speaker 3: liked a lot in a Blood Incantation album.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, yes, oh yes, yes, I think I've heard that,
Speaker 2: all right, let's see. Other than that, he also worked
Speaker 2: in various roles on other Argento projects, and was second
Speaker 2: assistant director on the notorious Klaskinsky Nosferatu sequel Vampire in Venice.
Speaker 2: Pretty notorious because it was one of these projects where
Speaker 2: everybody hated making it and nothing came out as it
Speaker 2: was supposed to.
Speaker 3: But laus Kinsky movie that people didn't have fun.
Speaker 2: Now, well I don't think anyone ever really had. I
Speaker 2: don't want to get too much on m Kinski since
Speaker 2: he's not even in this film, but yeah, it's pretty
Speaker 2: it's pretty high up there in horror stories about about
Speaker 2: filming with him. But yeah, he had a hand in
Speaker 2: that as well. All right, let's get into the cast here,
Speaker 2: that that wonderful nineteen seventies cast that we alluded to earlier,
Speaker 2: starting with Marjo Gordoner, who plays Acton. He has our
Speaker 2: I don't know what Acton's last name is. I was
Speaker 2: thinking I was watching maybe it's Jackson, maybe he's acting
Speaker 2: Jackson or something.
Speaker 3: But very nice. It is funny that this is He's
Speaker 3: not the main character. He's not, but he gets top billing.
Speaker 2: But his name first, yeahs, as we're about to discuss.
Speaker 2: I think it's just he was. He was a pretty
Speaker 2: hot commodity at this point. So he was born in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four and just as a truly fascinating individual,
Speaker 2: certainly as far as like pop cultural figures go, because
Speaker 2: he was born into the world of Pinnecock hostile evangelism
Speaker 2: and began preaching at the age of four.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so a child prodigy, tent revival preacher.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which I've never seen anything like this in action
Speaker 2: and live or on video, so like, I can't even imagine.
Speaker 2: I feel like if I'm listening to a preacher, I
Speaker 2: like somebody with a little bit of world, real world experience,
Speaker 2: you know, it's kind of like a stand up comedian,
Speaker 2: you know, you want to connect with the with the like, well,
Speaker 2: what's a four year old going to say that really
Speaker 2: connects with an adult audience member. But I mean, I guess,
Speaker 2: I guess they found a way because there are other
Speaker 2: examples of this sort of thing as well. Yes, so, yeah,
Speaker 2: so he was, Yeah, he was a sensation, a child prodigy,
Speaker 2: a faith healer at least later on. I don't know
Speaker 2: if he was actually faith healing at age four. But
Speaker 2: then eventually he grows disillusion with the whole scene, and
Speaker 2: certainly by age sixteen, decides that he's thinking about getting
Speaker 2: out of it. And then he famously allowed a film
Speaker 2: crew to follow him around during his final year in evangelism,
Speaker 2: leading to the Oscar winning documentary Marjo in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 2: And we've actually had listeners right in. I think back
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty, we had a listener right in about
Speaker 2: this saying, hey, you've got to watch you got to
Speaker 2: check out this documentary. I've never seen it, but we
Speaker 2: heard from a listener by the name of Forrest who
Speaker 2: said that it's incredible and that it's you know, it
Speaker 2: gets into a lot of these elements of like you know,
Speaker 2: manipulation and so forth, like it's it's supposed to be
Speaker 2: really good. I've not seen it myself.
Speaker 3: He's like, here's how we scam people out of money.
Speaker 2: Here's where we get yeah, yeah, real really reveals the
Speaker 2: inner workings of the operation. Yeah. So after this he
Speaker 2: springboarded from evangelism and then you know, certainly the theme
Speaker 2: that came with this documentary, and he gets into music,
Speaker 2: he gets into acting. He did some TV work starting
Speaker 2: in seventy three, and appeared in his first theatrical film,
Speaker 2: Earthquake in seventy four Let's See and then subsequent credits
Speaker 2: include some starring vehicles and certainly he's the top build
Speaker 2: on this picture. But his starring vehicles include bert Eye
Speaker 2: Gordon's The Food of the Gods in seventy six.
Speaker 3: I've been wanting to watch that.
Speaker 2: Always up for Bertie Gordon, and his post Star Crash
Speaker 2: credits include eighty three's Mausoleum, eighty four's Jungle Warriors, eighty
Speaker 2: five's Hell Hole, and eighty nine's American Ninja. Three.
Speaker 3: Does that one have the guy from Empire of the
Speaker 3: Dark in it?
Speaker 2: Yes, it does. It certainly does I was noting that
Speaker 2: his last two films are also notable in different ways.
Speaker 2: On one level, ninety five's Wild Bill seems like the
Speaker 2: classy way to go out because he has a role
Speaker 2: as a preacher in that in a very stacked cast
Speaker 2: that includes Jeff Bridges as wild Bill Hiccock. I haven't
Speaker 2: seen it. Maybe it's not any good, but on paper
Speaker 2: it sounds really good. And then he's in nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: nine's The Debtors. This is a film directed by Evy Quaid,
Speaker 2: co starring or starring Randy Quaid, also also udo Kira
Speaker 2: is in it, and it's and then the top build
Speaker 2: actor in it is Michael Caine, and then the casting
Speaker 2: is gets weirder from there. There's some other notable mentions.
Speaker 2: Apparently this one was not released for a long time,
Speaker 2: and it's still kind of hard to get.
Speaker 3: I'm intrigued.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a film that I had to double check
Speaker 2: a couple of times to make sure it was real,
Speaker 2: because I'm like, am I being a Is this a scam?
Speaker 2: Is this somebody's joke? The student really exists? This sounds
Speaker 2: like a joke, but no, it is apparently quite real.
Speaker 3: It would be funny to make that up. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: oh man, I was gonna say, I'm always intrigued by
Speaker 3: the presence of Udo Kier, which is funny because I
Speaker 3: shouldn't be intrigued because he would do anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, He's definitely one of those actors that isn't
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter what the quality of the film is.
Speaker 2: He's he's going to show up and he's gonna be Mimoss.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, be in your movie. So I thought it
Speaker 3: was kind of interesting knowing all this stuff about Marjo
Speaker 3: Gordoner having a I don't know, this incredible history and
Speaker 3: being this skilled preacher also sort of a con artist
Speaker 3: manipulator at least in his early years, and then going
Speaker 3: through this, you know, like exposing at how everything works
Speaker 3: and all that, because I would have expected his screen
Speaker 3: presence to be more interesting and commanding and all that,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Like I feel like I really owe it to
Speaker 2: him to see another Marjoe film to glimpse this much
Speaker 2: touted charisma, because he's just stiff as a board in
Speaker 2: this picture, like just lifeless, Like, where where is this
Speaker 2: natural charisma I'm supposed to see here?
Speaker 3: Well, one way in which I could make the connection
Speaker 3: to the life story is if you know what I
Speaker 3: mean here, he often doesn't feel like he's playing a character.
Speaker 3: He feels more like he is saying his lines in
Speaker 3: the way an announcer or a master of ceremonies would say.
Speaker 3: He feels like a presenter type performer rather than a
Speaker 3: player of a character. Does that make any sense?
Speaker 2: Yes, And you know, I think that goes for just
Speaker 2: about everyone in the picture. Like pretty much every scene
Speaker 2: in Star Crash, you could interpret it not as drama,
Speaker 2: not as narrative, but his ritual, some sort of ritual
Speaker 2: that must be carried out in order to bring about
Speaker 2: some sort of event in this world or the next.
Speaker 3: Right, They're not playing characters, They're reciting a liturgy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is how it feels.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay, So even though he gets top billing, the
Speaker 3: real main character of this movie is obviously still a
Speaker 3: star played by Caroline Monroe.
Speaker 2: That's right. She is the structural protagonist as much as
Speaker 2: you can say anything has structure in this film.
Speaker 3: But yeah.
Speaker 2: Born nineteen forty nine, pin up model an actress who
Speaker 2: stole many of seventy's film nerds. Hearts with the genre
Speaker 2: appearances and the likes of The Spy Who Loved Me
Speaker 2: seventy seven, Maniac in nineteen eighty which we'll come back to,
Speaker 2: Slaughter High in eighty six. She's in Dracula eighty nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad seventy three, Captain
Speaker 2: Cronos Vampire Hunter seventy four, At the Earth's Core seventy six.
Speaker 2: She also coming back to other films we've discussed in
Speaker 2: the show before. She has a cameo as the dearly
Speaker 2: departed wife of Doctor Fibes, and seventy one's The Abominable
Speaker 2: Doctor Fibes, And I think we may sneak a peek
Speaker 2: at a snapshot of her in the sequel as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2: Her horror credits also include, in addition to The Slasher
Speaker 2: Maniac nineteen eighty eights, The Howl of the Devil starring
Speaker 2: Paul Nashy. So she's just all over the place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've talked about How of the Devil on the
Speaker 3: show before, haven't We didn't do an episode on it.
Speaker 2: It's come up just in reciting the list of the
Speaker 2: different Paul nashi Werewolf films.
Speaker 3: I think that one's a little sleazier than I would
Speaker 3: have fun doing on the show, but it is I
Speaker 3: don't know. If you've got a strong stomach, it's worth
Speaker 3: a watch, especially because it's one of these movies where
Speaker 3: you can feel different creative forces coming to a head.
Speaker 3: They're like clashing. Obviously, the pitch for this movie is
Speaker 3: it is a sleazy slasher movie. That's the business pitch.
Speaker 3: But then Paul Nashi is helming it and he's like, well,
Speaker 3: I want to do a movie where I get to
Speaker 3: play all of the universal monsters. Oh yes, yes, So
Speaker 3: he plays a character who is dead but was an
Speaker 3: actor and appears to a member of his family in
Speaker 3: the form of all the universal monsters in all of
Speaker 3: his appearances, just for no particular reason.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds like classic Nashi there where it's the
Speaker 2: Spanish horror world is moving on beyond the gothic horror film,
Speaker 2: but he's forcing its hand. It's like, we can get
Speaker 2: just a little more monster mash out of all this.
Speaker 2: Let's see worth noting here that Monroe was married to
Speaker 2: musician Judd Hamilton at the time, and it is Judd
Speaker 2: Hamilton that is apparently in the suit playing the law
Speaker 2: enforcement robot l not his voice, but he is in
Speaker 2: the suit. We should also mention that this is one
Speaker 2: of those films. This is often the case with European
Speaker 2: genre films from this time period. Everybody's dubbed. Some of
Speaker 2: the American or English speaking actors did their own dubbing,
Speaker 2: but some did not. And supposedly Candy Clark does the
Speaker 2: dubbing here for Monroe's character.
Speaker 3: That is bizarre. I came across that same claim, and
Speaker 3: I was just thinking, doesn't sound like Candy Clark to me,
Speaker 3: But I don't know. That's what I read.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so yea, that's what folks say. And as
Speaker 2: much as I understand it, I think it had to
Speaker 2: do with scheduling more than anything. Like it was a
Speaker 2: situation where they just couldn't necessarily get everybody to dub
Speaker 2: their own lines. All right, well, let's talk about Christopher
Speaker 2: Plumber here. He plays the emperor, but not that emperor.
Speaker 2: Even this is a rather different emperor. This is not Palpatine.
Speaker 2: This is a this is a good guy emperor. This
Speaker 2: is more of like a Holy Jesus Emperor, Holy Space
Speaker 2: Jesus Emperor.
Speaker 3: This is a Star Wars where the empire is good
Speaker 3: and the rebels are bad.
Speaker 2: It is, really it really is. But yes, this is
Speaker 2: This is Christopher Plumber, who lived nineteen twenty nine through
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one. Yeah, Oscar Winner reportedly only took this
Speaker 2: role in order to get a free trip to Rome.
Speaker 2: I think that's what he said in subsequent interviews.
Speaker 3: But he said he said, I would do Porno if
Speaker 3: I got to go to Rome to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I just loved Rome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not to be clearly, Also, he also was paid
Speaker 2: for this picture. It wasn't just the trip to Rome.
Speaker 2: And also, I'll say over the decades, decades and decades
Speaker 2: of work, he was very prolific. He did a lot
Speaker 2: of different sorts of films, good and bad, and I
Speaker 2: don't think he always got a trip to Rome out
Speaker 2: of the bad ones. So he might have been having
Speaker 2: a fair amount of fun with that statement as well.
Speaker 2: This is the first time I think we've covered a
Speaker 2: Christopher Plumber film, but we have covered films featuring his daughter,
Speaker 2: Amanda Plumber before.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, wasn't she in the Prophecy?
Speaker 2: She was in the Prophecy, she was in Free Jack.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I thought about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's one of my favorites. Let's see Christopher Plumber's
Speaker 2: credits include just to name a few, and really there's
Speaker 2: just they're way too many to even do justice to
Speaker 2: his full filmography. But he was in sixty five's The
Speaker 2: Sound of Music, sixty seven is The Night of the Generals,
Speaker 2: seventy three's The Picks. If I'm saying that correctly, p
Speaker 2: y X. This is a horror film of a sort
Speaker 2: that I haven't seen.
Speaker 3: I'll see.
Speaker 2: Seventy five's The Man Who Would Be King. I believe
Speaker 2: he plays Kipling in that. That used to be one
Speaker 2: of my favorites. I haven't seen it in a long time.
Speaker 2: Seventy nine's Murdered by Decree nineteen eighties, Somewhere in time.
Speaker 2: Eighty four's Dreamscape.
Speaker 3: Oh, I just had to look that one up to
Speaker 3: make sure that's the one I was thinking of. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I just recently watched that one within the past year
Speaker 3: with Dennis Quaid, and it's like, it's a dream Warriors
Speaker 3: type movie with Dennis Quaid and it's got Christopher Plumber.
Speaker 2: And yeah, the bad guy from the Warriors turns into
Speaker 2: a snake.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So let's see. Oh, he was a Plumber was
Speaker 2: in eighty eighth Vampire in Venice. He was in ninety
Speaker 2: one Star Trek the Undiscovered Country, ninety Four's Wolf, ninety
Speaker 2: five to Twelve Monkeys, Dracula two thousand, two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: Syriana two thousand and nine, s Up, twenty seventeen's All
Speaker 2: the Money in the World, in twenty nineteen's Knives Out.
Speaker 2: So yeah, one of the greats. He really brings a
Speaker 2: kind of supernatural grandeur to this role into this film,
Speaker 2: But at the same time, it's like it's it's almost
Speaker 2: a contradiction. He's at once the classiest thing in this movie,
Speaker 2: but he's also still absolutely giggle inducing.
Speaker 3: In it's inappropriate. The level of great that he brings
Speaker 3: this to this performance is inappropriate and thus goes full
Speaker 3: circle and becomes hilarious. It is.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's mesmerizing because you're like, man, what a pro.
Speaker 2: What a pro? He knew, he knows that he's delivering
Speaker 2: this monologue as a hologram standing in front of some
Speaker 2: shoddy wooden stairs that have been painted like they're part
Speaker 2: of his spaceship, but he's still giving it his absolute all.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like if Subway started offering like a
Speaker 3: caviar sandwich or something just like it doesn't fit, doesn't
Speaker 3: fit with the rest of the menu, and thus it
Speaker 3: seems absurd, even though I'm sure you know, caviar probably
Speaker 3: tastes good, but like people would be like, why is
Speaker 3: this here, what's the deal? What's going on? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we'll have more to say about his performance
Speaker 2: as we proceed. But let's see. The Emperor has a
Speaker 2: sign in this film. His name is Prince Simon, and
Speaker 2: as you would expect, the son of Christopher. Plummer's character
Speaker 2: is played by David Hasselhoff born nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 3: Future star of bay Watch and night Rider. He had
Speaker 3: done neither one at this point.
Speaker 2: Right right, those would those would come later? Yeah, night
Speaker 2: Rider was eighty two, three eighty six. Bay Watch was
Speaker 2: eighty nine three, two thousand and three. But also don't
Speaker 2: don't count out bay Watch nights ninety five through ninety seven.
Speaker 3: Oh, I don't know, don't know, bewatching.
Speaker 2: Oh that's when his character was like fighting mummies and
Speaker 2: serial killers and whatnot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, are you kidding? No?
Speaker 2: No, for real, I mean I don't know how supernatural
Speaker 2: it got. I think I only ever watched one episode,
Speaker 2: but it's like basically, yeah, bay Watch at night with
Speaker 2: like Kolchak the Nightstalker sort of sensibilities some degree. I
Speaker 2: don't want to oversell it and get people excited about
Speaker 2: something that's not going to deliver.
Speaker 3: You're getting me excited. I got to find out what
Speaker 3: to deal with this is. But yeah, so at this
Speaker 3: point I think he had mainly done He had done
Speaker 3: TV soap operas and stuff, like he'd been on The
Speaker 3: Young and the Restless.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was only his second film role, following seventy
Speaker 2: six is Revenge of the Cheerleaders, and it would be
Speaker 2: his last theatrical picture until eighty eight Strong Times and
Speaker 2: a movie called Witchberry that came out the same year.
Speaker 3: He has voluminous hair, and it is not not really
Speaker 3: projecting like he's in the scenes that he's in. He
Speaker 3: always comes off as like the smallest person in them,
Speaker 3: just in terms not physically, but in terms of presence,
Speaker 3: like everybody else is kind of taking up more dramatic
Speaker 3: space than he is. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I found him to just feel wooden and afraid, which
Speaker 2: is not what we come to expect from the Hoff.
Speaker 2: But again, this is very this is very early days.
Speaker 2: And again this this picture is nobody's finest outing from
Speaker 2: an acting standpoint, so I think all can.
Speaker 3: Be a forgiven.
Speaker 2: I also read that he apparently had food poisoning, and
Speaker 2: it's one of the reasons that when we first meet
Speaker 2: him he is wearing an enormous golden mask because he's
Speaker 2: not physically there on set or something.
Speaker 3: Oh, that would make sense, Yeah, the Zarda's mask.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right. We have a character by the name
Speaker 2: of Chief Thor, and it's going to be a real
Speaker 2: roller coaster of allegiances with the Chief Thor. But he
Speaker 2: is played by a character actor by the name of
Speaker 2: and I hope I'm saying it correctly, Robert to say,
Speaker 2: or Robert Tessier. I'm not sure which is preferred here,
Speaker 2: but Tessier Testia yea. He lived nineteen thirty four through
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety Menacing Tough Guy, a stumpman turned actor whose
Speaker 2: credits include a nice array of like bat biker films
Speaker 2: and action shlock titles include seventy ones The Velvet Vampire,
Speaker 2: seventy four is The Longest Yard, seventy seven's The Deep,
Speaker 2: eighty two is The Sword and the Sorcerer, and eighty
Speaker 2: nine's Future Force. And again there's some biker films mixed
Speaker 2: in there as well, Like you get the impression he's
Speaker 2: the sort of actor you might turn to when you
Speaker 2: just need some rugged guy to give you a bad
Speaker 2: look in a bar, Like he's who you call in.
Speaker 3: He naturally has Popeye's face, he does.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, rugged, muscular bad dude. I believe he was
Speaker 2: a vet from the Armed Forces.
Speaker 3: Always perpetual squinting, angry appearance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh man. And then let's talk about our villain.
Speaker 2: This is Count zarth Arn. Am I am I saying
Speaker 2: it correctly? That's a mouthful.
Speaker 3: Are you mocking the Count Count ar Arn?
Speaker 2: What does the stress? Is it zarth Ron or zarth Ron?
Speaker 3: You hear it both ways in the movie, Yeah, the
Speaker 3: different characters. Sometimes the same character says it different ways.
Speaker 3: Did you like how this guy says his own name
Speaker 3: a lot? He likes to shout his own name, either
Speaker 3: in victory or in defiance. He just says Zarthorn.
Speaker 2: Yes, there's a great deal of shouting from Count Zarthorn,
Speaker 2: played by the Great Joe Spinel of nineteen thirty six
Speaker 2: through nineteen eighty nine. A true legend of seventies cinema,
Speaker 2: from its glorious heights to its grimy middle depths. Spinell's
Speaker 2: credits include roles in the first two Godfather films, the
Speaker 2: first two Rocky films, and in all four of those
Speaker 2: pictures playing underworld figures.
Speaker 3: It's easy to forget that in the first couple of
Speaker 3: Rocky movies Rocky is a mob enforcer. There's like a
Speaker 3: loan shark played by Joe Spinell, and Rocky has to
Speaker 3: go out and threaten people or beat them up to
Speaker 3: get this guy's money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Spinell is, you know, great in these sorts
Speaker 2: of roles. But he didn't just play criminals. He also
Speaker 2: played cops in law enforcement figures, generally of the more
Speaker 2: like morally corrupt variety, and so he pops up in
Speaker 2: films like seventy six is Taxi Driver, nineteen eighties Cruising.
Speaker 2: He also pops up in such legendary weird fair as
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties The Ninth Configuration, which has a you know,
Speaker 2: an extended weird cast, and then also the Forbidden World.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sorry Forbidden Zone and not the for
Speaker 2: Benzone Forbidden Zone. And of course he's also a horror
Speaker 2: icon for his roles in eighty two's The Last Horror
Speaker 2: Film in nineteen eighties Maniac, both with Carolyn Monroe, and
Speaker 2: he also co wrote Maniac. I was looking deep into
Speaker 2: his filmography and I noted something that stirred something in
Speaker 2: my memory. He was in a TV movie adaptation of
Speaker 2: The Ransom of Red Chief, which co starred Harry Dean Stanton.
Speaker 2: And I think I actually watched this in school, like
Speaker 2: an elementary school at some point, maybe junior high, I
Speaker 2: don't know. At some point we were covering this short
Speaker 2: story and then you know, like you do, it's time
Speaker 2: to pull out the giant television on its cart and
Speaker 2: watch an adaptation. And given the time, it had to
Speaker 2: have been this one.
Speaker 3: Wonder how often people end up watching Maniac in elementary
Speaker 3: school gosh, I hope not educational value.
Speaker 2: So I have to say, like Spinel obviously a great
Speaker 2: character actor, certainly when it came to playing textured creeps
Speaker 2: and heavies, particularly when his native New York was the
Speaker 2: but really he's completely miscast here as a space tyrant.
Speaker 2: He just comes off as just completely ridiculous, like a
Speaker 2: like a vampire penguin the entire film, like a ponche Salvador.
Speaker 2: Dolly of Dolly was also a space pimp, But like
Speaker 2: everything else in the film, it's so bad that it
Speaker 2: just becomes glorious, Like you just want to see more
Speaker 2: and more of this guy as he goes around with
Speaker 2: this ridiculous cape that I think must have been on
Speaker 2: wires to make it like Flume out the way it
Speaker 2: does just beautiful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the red velvet cape. I mean, bravo to every
Speaker 3: moment he's in this movie. He's not acting, he's just
Speaker 3: kind of snarling and yelling. And as we've said, it's
Speaker 3: not his voice, whoever's or I don't know if it
Speaker 3: is his voice, but it's certainly not live sound for
Speaker 3: his scenes. Yeah, and just it's amazing. Every Czar Thorn
Speaker 3: scene is just delicious.
Speaker 2: Yeah, his outfits kind of form fitting in a weird way.
Speaker 2: And this is another case though, where it's interesting how
Speaker 2: his character does kind of forecast what we'd eventually get
Speaker 2: in Star Wars, particularly with Count Dooku. He's based Tyrant
Speaker 2: with Dracula esque flourishes, but of course Star Wars actually
Speaker 2: just cast Dracula himself Christopher Lee. It's hard to argue
Speaker 2: that Spinell is really ideal casting for this sort of character.
Speaker 2: But again, it's glorious to watch, so we can't really complain.
Speaker 3: Yes, many rounds of applause of Joe Spinell.
Speaker 2: Here, all right, Getting into some of the supporting cast.
Speaker 2: Here we have Nadia Cassini playing Queen Karelia. This is
Speaker 2: the Queen of the Amazons. We go to a few
Speaker 2: we go on a few different good planets here, you know,
Speaker 2: we go to an ice planet, we go to an
Speaker 2: Amazonian planet, we go to a caveman planet. You know,
Speaker 2: hit all the hits and at anyway. So Cassini here
Speaker 2: lived nineteen forty nine through twenty twenty five American Italian actress, singer,
Speaker 2: and show girl who made a name for herself in
Speaker 2: a lot of it's like seventies sexploitation and also sex
Speaker 2: comedy films. Her credits include nineteen seventies The Snake God,
Speaker 2: seventy two's Pulp. That one was actually a Mike Hodges
Speaker 2: film that starred Michael Caine. And then there's a nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy nine film titled I'm a Zombie. You're a Zombie,
Speaker 2: She's a Zombie. Don't know much about it beyond its title,
Speaker 2: but it's a pretty great title.
Speaker 3: You're a Lebowski I'm a Labowski.
Speaker 2: Let's see the other There's a whole group of Amazonian women,
Speaker 2: you know, scantily clad and as you would expect from
Speaker 2: this picture. And the actresses involved here include a number
Speaker 2: of actresses actresses who feature into various exploitation and erotic
Speaker 2: Italian films of the era. Just to mention a couple
Speaker 2: of them in passing, we have Cindy Ledbetter born nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty five, American models turned actress whose credits include eighty
Speaker 2: one's Absurd, which we talk about on the show before.
Speaker 3: You might remember she George eastman Halloween ripoff. Actually yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: very much so. She's the blonde.
Speaker 2: I think she's a babysitter and georgie'sman kills her with
Speaker 2: a pick axe through the top of the head.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, wait is okay? I recall her death scene?
Speaker 3: Taking a really long time? Am I thinking of the
Speaker 3: right person? Okay?
Speaker 2: I included a still in our outlines to remind you.
Speaker 3: Oh thank you?
Speaker 2: Yes, so yes, she was in that one. She was
Speaker 2: also in eighty five's The Adventures of Hercules, though I
Speaker 2: don't clearly remember her from that. She was one of
Speaker 2: the one of the other ladies in that film, and
Speaker 2: then she's also in eighty four's Rats Night of Terror.
Speaker 3: Ah, I got the blu ray of that. I haven't
Speaker 3: watched the whole thing yet, but I'm I'm excited to
Speaker 3: make it to that one.
Speaker 2: I hear great bad things about it. I did find
Speaker 2: it amusing that her first credited screen role is not
Speaker 2: an unnamed character. It is Cannibal Girl in Mental Institution
Speaker 2: from Joe Tomato's Immanuel and the Last Cannibals from nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy seven. She was active as an actress to around
Speaker 2: eighty five, and then popped up again in two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight. We also have another Amazonian woman played by
Speaker 2: dirtche Funari born nineteen fifty seven, a frequent Joe Tomato
Speaker 2: casting here whose films include multiple Emmanuel movies, nineteen eighties
Speaker 2: Erotic Knights of the Living Dead in nineteen seventy nine's
Speaker 2: Ring of.
Speaker 3: Darkness Erotic Knights of the Living Dead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so if your film viewing includes some very questionable choices,
Speaker 2: then you may have seen her before as well. We
Speaker 2: mentioned l the Robot, The Wonderful Robot. I can't waste
Speaker 2: Southern C three po that we have here. Hamilton Camp
Speaker 2: provides the voice. We've talked about Hamilton Camp before because
Speaker 2: he came up in our episode on the nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: nine alien boxing movie Arena. Okay, Yeah. So Camp lived
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty four through two thand and five British born
Speaker 2: actor folk musician, mostly famous as Bob Camp with Bob Gibson,
Speaker 2: and he was also a comedian and his credits include
Speaker 2: seventy eight's Heaven Can Wait, eighty two's Eating Rau, and
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties Dick Tracy. He also did a lot of
Speaker 2: voice acting, and a lot of it back from a
Speaker 2: day when they really didn't do a lot of work
Speaker 2: crediting the voice actors on cartoons. He played a Ferangi
Speaker 2: on Deep Space nine and Yeah. He also put out
Speaker 2: several folk albums throughout his life as Hamilton Camp. So
Speaker 2: if you look him up wherever you get your music,
Speaker 2: look up Hamilton Camp. Pull up some tracks. This guy
Speaker 2: had a truly beautiful singing voice. It might not seem
Speaker 2: as obvious hearing this this droid voice that he puts
Speaker 2: on in the show, but man, he had some pipes.
Speaker 3: Oh I'll have to check that out. You know. One
Speaker 3: thing I thought was interesting about the crediting here is
Speaker 3: that we actually get named like you get a named
Speaker 3: voice credit and a different named physical credit for the
Speaker 3: character El the Robot. But there are clearly lots of
Speaker 3: other characters who are voiced by someone dubbed by someone
Speaker 3: different than appears on screen, and we don't get that
Speaker 3: other person credited.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't know what makes the difference here. Maybe it's
Speaker 3: that Hamilton Camp. I don't know. Maybe the plan was
Speaker 3: to do that from the beginning.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm also not sure on the full production history here.
Speaker 2: I guess it's entirely likely that some of these dubs
Speaker 2: might have happened after it had been picked up for
Speaker 2: distribution in the US, and someone else may have been
Speaker 2: brought in this sort of thing. Yeah, I'll mention just
Speaker 2: in passing that Salvatore Baccaro, who lived nineteen thirty two
Speaker 2: through nineteen eighty four, pops up as one of our
Speaker 2: Neanderthal men on the Caveman Planet. He mentioned him in
Speaker 2: our episode on Argento's Deep Red. He often played heavies
Speaker 2: and beast men appearing, and a number of really grimy
Speaker 2: Italian exploitation films from the nineteen seventies, often uncredited and
Speaker 2: in one film. Seventy four is Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks.
Speaker 2: He is credited as Boris Lagosi. Classy, Yeah, And then
Speaker 2: I'll tell you something that is classy about this film.
Speaker 2: It's the score. The film score here is by John Barry,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen thirty three through twenty eleven. Seven time
Speaker 2: Oscar nominee and five time winner for his scores too.
Speaker 2: Let's He's sixty seven is Born Free along with this
Speaker 2: original song. Sixty nine is the Lion in Winter, eighty
Speaker 2: six is Out of Africa, ninety one Dances with Wolves,
Speaker 2: and of course he's best remembered for a quarter centuries
Speaker 2: worth of James Bond scores. He didn't write the original
Speaker 2: theme song, but even listening to the score for Star Crash,
Speaker 2: it feels completely out of place in many respects, in
Speaker 2: part because it's so good, but also it sounds like
Speaker 2: it should be a James Bond score and not a
Speaker 2: knockoff Star Wars score. It's legitimately really good stuff. One
Speaker 2: track the Ice Planet, which you can pull up wherever
Speaker 2: you get your music, you can find the score for
Speaker 2: this film. It very good and it even has like
Speaker 2: something that sounds like whale song in it, except it's
Speaker 2: not sampled whale song. It's something created via non electronic instrumentation,
Speaker 2: and it's very nice.
Speaker 3: I didn't listen to any of this in isolation, so
Speaker 3: I'm gonna have to look this up after we record.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really good stuff. And I read somewhere I
Speaker 2: don't know if this is true that there was legitimate
Speaker 2: concern that if Barry saw footage of the film that
Speaker 2: he was going to be scoring, he might quit and
Speaker 2: they might not get the score. Because I think they
Speaker 2: realized that, hey, we've landed, We've landed a great score
Speaker 2: for this, no matter how it turns out, we're really,
Speaker 2: you know, punching above our weight here.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I think one thing that they must
Speaker 3: have correctly deduced was how important the music is to
Speaker 3: the success of a film like this. I'm not going
Speaker 3: to say that Star Wars is no good without its
Speaker 3: John Williams score, but I think it would be hard
Speaker 3: to argue that the John Williams score is not a
Speaker 3: significant part of the effect and feeling created by the movie,
Speaker 3: like a big part of what makes it work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I would agree. I should also mention that
Speaker 2: we previously discussed John Barry because he did the score
Speaker 2: for Disney's The Black Hole, which is, of course, in
Speaker 2: its own way, an attempt to cash in on the
Speaker 2: popularity of Star Wars, to do it the Disney way,
Speaker 2: And of course, in time Star Wars would become the
Speaker 2: Disney way because Disney would purchase Star Wars.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 2: Everything is the Disney way now if.
Speaker 3: You can't beat them by them, Yeah, all right, are
Speaker 3: you ready to talk about the plot.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, let's get into the plot.
Speaker 3: Okay. Like so so many other movies of this type,
Speaker 3: this one opens on a starfield with this empty howling sound.
Speaker 3: One thing I like about the space imagery in this
Speaker 3: movie is that it is not just black space with
Speaker 3: white points of light. It's a very spicy, colorful galaxy
Speaker 3: with stars and all these different colors like blue, orange, yellow, pink,
Speaker 3: different shades. Later in this opening scene, we're going to
Speaker 3: see a full on hot pink planet partially eclipsed so
Speaker 3: that it shows up as this neon pink crescent or sickle.
Speaker 3: I like it. It's good. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I love how colorful space is in Star Crashing again,
Speaker 2: not the dark void of so many sci fi visions,
Speaker 2: but more of a psychedelic spell jammer sort of cosmos.
Speaker 2: You see a similar thing in the Guardians of the
Speaker 2: Galaxy movie. You know, they make a conscious effort to
Speaker 2: make space exciting and colorful and dynamic and not empty
Speaker 2: and dark.
Speaker 3: And I don't want to suggest that's the right choice
Speaker 3: for every movie. I mean, like an alien space should
Speaker 3: be empty and dark.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would be a weird and maybe ineffective alien
Speaker 2: movie if the cosmos was psychedelic. It needs to be.
Speaker 3: Dark, pretty and sparkling. And then after this we are
Speaker 3: treated to a low budget attempt to copy the iconic
Speaker 3: opening shot of Star Wars where Princess Leah's Blockade Runner
Speaker 3: flies overhead and then the Star Destroyer comes overhead close behind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no shame, everybody was doing it so a lot.
Speaker 3: We've seen other movies that did the same thing. Here
Speaker 3: we get a kind of combination. So it is a
Speaker 3: single ship which appears to be huge like the Star
Speaker 3: Destroyer and glides over the top of the camera lens
Speaker 3: like the Star Destroyer, but it is shaped more like
Speaker 3: the Blockade Runner, and as it goes by we get
Speaker 3: close ups of its many intricate greebowles and outer textures.
Speaker 3: I see all kinds of little consumer plastics glued to
Speaker 3: the outside of this thing and spray painted white. Rob.
Speaker 3: I know you Actually you build miniature sometimes, right.
Speaker 2: I do. I generally do little soldiers and like little people,
Speaker 2: but occasionally I'll do I have done some star wars,
Speaker 2: like tanks and vehicles.
Speaker 3: Before I bring this up because I wondered what you
Speaker 3: thought about this. I saw what I thought were a
Speaker 3: lot of I don't know what you call this, but
Speaker 3: the plastic stuff around the pieces of a little plastic
Speaker 3: miniature kit that you build. So if you're building a
Speaker 3: little airplane kit, you'll get a lot of different pieces
Speaker 3: held in place by these little plastic bars and you
Speaker 3: chose yeah, yeah, yeah, So I don't know what you
Speaker 3: call that, You know, that plastic lattice or square that
Speaker 3: everything comes in. I saw a lot of stuff that
Speaker 3: was looked like that on the outside of these ships.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be the spruce and and yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean that otherwise those things just go in the garbage.
Speaker 2: Make a spaceship out of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly looks like pipes if you put it on that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to say the ships. There are a
Speaker 2: lot of caveats to the statement but the ships look
Speaker 2: pretty good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, medium good, I think, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, considering this is low budget, we've seen worse. We've
Speaker 2: seen better, but we've seen worse.
Speaker 3: There's a name on this ship, which it's It's called
Speaker 3: the Murray Leinster. That never comes up again.
Speaker 2: Yeah. When I saw that, I was like, are we
Speaker 2: in the credits again? Are they adding inventive? Are they
Speaker 2: ahead of their time with how they're they're name dropping
Speaker 2: an executive producer or something?
Speaker 3: But are we later going to hear Christopher Plummer saying
Speaker 3: we have lost contact with the Leinster?
Speaker 2: Never comes up?
Speaker 3: Never?
Speaker 2: Never, that's the name of the Maybe it's the name
Speaker 2: of the guy who built the ship. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Good model work, but yeah, I'll say the ships look
Speaker 2: pretty good. However, I think their exact form is often
Speaker 2: a bit too convoluted for me to really form an impression.
Speaker 2: Like I just it's just kind of confusing, and I
Speaker 2: certainly have a hard time telling one from the other.
Speaker 2: And then when they start moving around, all the space
Speaker 2: action in this film is just aggressively disorienting, Just loops
Speaker 2: and loops of ships soaring loudly sonically and visually through space.
Speaker 2: Just an alarming overbearing sense of you took too much.
Speaker 3: Yes. Yeah, as I said earlier, I think the space
Speaker 3: battles there, there are problems with them, and one of
Speaker 3: them is a lack of differentiation, a lack of focus.
Speaker 3: It's just stuff happening. Yeah. So anyway, we cut inside
Speaker 3: the Murray Leinster now where crew members are waddling around
Speaker 3: in maroon leather uniforms of these shoulder pads and cod pieces,
Speaker 3: wearing these ridiculous gold helmets. Not sure why, but almost
Speaker 3: all of the soldiers in this movie, whether for the
Speaker 3: Empire or working for zarth Arn, they all have similar
Speaker 3: shaped helmets. And all of these guys remind me of
Speaker 3: the Mom's robot oil suns. Do you see what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, there's the head shape combined with the helmet
Speaker 2: shape for sure. And you know, I don't know if
Speaker 2: there's a direct connection here. It would not surprise me
Speaker 2: if the Futurama folks were Starcrash fans. But I'm also
Speaker 2: glad that you brought up the cod pieces. This movie
Speaker 2: really really loves a good cod piece. Pretty Much every
Speaker 2: costume in the film is some sort of a cod
Speaker 2: piece on the outside, thong on the outside or chastity
Speaker 2: belt on the outside of the garment. Yes, it's just everywhere.
Speaker 3: I feel bad for everybody on screen because almost all
Speaker 3: of them have like some kind of rigid thong tight
Speaker 3: thong over their pants. It's the galay, you know, the
Speaker 3: denizens of the wedgy galaxy. It looks like not fun,
Speaker 3: not fully aware anyway. So there there is one practical
Speaker 3: effect I like in this early scene on the spaceship,
Speaker 3: which is that instead of getting in and out of
Speaker 3: elevators like kirkans Bach are always doing, this ship has
Speaker 3: a transportation infrastructure that's like a little elevator compartment. So
Speaker 3: you go down a hall, go through a door, and
Speaker 3: then you stand in a room and close the door.
Speaker 3: But instead of going up and down to different floors,
Speaker 3: it is a circular room that rotates around to point
Speaker 3: you out into a different hallway. And I was thinking
Speaker 3: about this and I was like, how is that better
Speaker 3: than having an intersection of hallways?
Speaker 2: It is really impressive visually, but it's it's also kind
Speaker 2: of a it's kind of like a first date thing
Speaker 2: in this film, Like, are we going to be treated
Speaker 2: with this level of class and sophistication in every scene? No, no,
Speaker 2: not really, but it's pretty cool here.
Speaker 3: So anyway, on the bridge, we got a couple of
Speaker 3: these robot oil suns chatting. One of them says, and
Speaker 3: nearly all of these line deliveries are pretty weird in
Speaker 3: one way or another. One of them says, what is
Speaker 3: it like the planet we're approaching? The other one says,
Speaker 3: nothing but ice and snow, a barren desert of whiteness.
Speaker 3: And then another one says, scan it with our computer waves.
Speaker 3: The enemy's weapons may be hidden beneath its surface. And
Speaker 3: then now we see outside and the rockade Blunner here
Speaker 3: is flying through space. And suddenly nearby something starts happening.
Speaker 3: We get some red lava lamp wax that starts undulating
Speaker 3: in the cosmos. That doesn't seem good.
Speaker 2: Are you talking about the red monsters? Yeah, because they
Speaker 2: will keep referring back to this as the red monsters,
Speaker 2: And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa what redds. Oh,
Speaker 2: they're talking about the globs. They're talking about the lava
Speaker 2: lamp globs.
Speaker 3: Okay, At some point I was thinking, we're going to
Speaker 3: see monts. We'll see what they see, We'll see the monster.
Speaker 3: We never do. It's some kind of psychic attack. All
Speaker 3: of the helmet dudes, the robot oil sons grab their
Speaker 3: helmets and they start groaning, while the interior cabins fill
Speaker 3: up with these red spots of light that zip around
Speaker 3: in the air. They look like red lens flares.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is highly variable depending on who you are
Speaker 2: and what your character is, depending on how this will
Speaker 2: affect you, Like when Carolyn Monroe's character is hit by
Speaker 2: it later, it's almost like an orgasm. Migraine seems to
Speaker 2: be the overall effect.
Speaker 3: She goes, ah, my head. And so anyway, the soldiers
Speaker 3: here they collapse, presumably they die, and then we watch
Speaker 3: the ship's escape pods, which looks slightly like paper airplanes.
Speaker 3: They fire off one by one. Then the ship explodes,
Speaker 3: and then we cut to the credits where Marjo gets
Speaker 3: top billing before Carolyn Monroe. Again, I call foul on
Speaker 3: that that doesn't make sense to me that we get
Speaker 3: the title. I like the title styling. It's really good.
Speaker 2: I wanted to see more of it, but they just
Speaker 2: rush it off the screen. They're like, we haven't got
Speaker 2: time for this. This is star Crash. You read the
Speaker 2: title on the poster, did.
Speaker 3: You notice how after the credits. The credits and music
Speaker 3: cut off very abruptly. We're getting it's like the music
Speaker 3: doesn't finish the phrase it's in. It's in the middle
Speaker 3: of something happening in the song, and then it's just
Speaker 3: enough of that, you know, trying to watch some triangles
Speaker 3: zooming around. Yeah, so we fall in with a second spaceship.
Speaker 3: This one is shaped like a tortilla chip. It's a
Speaker 3: big flat triangle, and inside at the helm we meet
Speaker 3: Marjo Gordoner is acton and Carolyn Monroe as still a star.
Speaker 3: I would say they in a way both look like
Speaker 3: they're in advertisements for different kinds of hair care products.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the hair game in this film is it
Speaker 2: is pretty intense. Everybody's hair is a definite choice, whether
Speaker 2: it's slicked back with grease or poofed out to almost
Speaker 2: supernatural levels of poofiness.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So Marjo is this handsome, kind of sun baked
Speaker 3: guy in his thirties. He got this big crown of
Speaker 3: curly blonde hair, and like I said earlier, he has
Speaker 3: a very stagy, live showbiz delivery style. Again, not really
Speaker 3: playing a character so much as projecting his lines like
Speaker 3: a somebody who's giving announcements or owning a stage, maybe
Speaker 3: like a magician. And Carolyn Monroe is very sparkly hammer glamour.
Speaker 3: And let's see, I had some notes here about the
Speaker 3: Candy Clark thing, but I guess we already addressed that question. Marks,
Speaker 3: is this really Candy Clark's voice in the dubbing? If so,
Speaker 3: that is interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again this was common practice. Like we were
Speaker 2: talking about Hercules and the Haunted World, like they had
Speaker 2: Christopher Lee of all people in that, and they just
Speaker 2: use somebody else to dub his voice for the English version.
Speaker 2: They're like, we already paid for Christopher Lee once. We're
Speaker 2: not going to pay for ripped twice just so he
Speaker 2: can use his voice.
Speaker 3: Crazy, Yeah, I remember Christopher Lely seemed very underused in that. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 3: so we got Stella and Acton. They're flying through space
Speaker 3: and they find themselves being pursued by space cops. Acton
Speaker 3: pulls them up on the view screen and then they
Speaker 3: see the bald green head of Robert Tessier and this
Speaker 3: guy says, as Thor, chief of the Imperial Police, I
Speaker 3: order you to surrender at once. Oh, since he's asking
Speaker 3: as Thor, I guess we've got to get it. And
Speaker 3: then we get a second head on the TV. This
Speaker 3: time it's a shiny black robot that looks like Darth
Speaker 3: Vader's helmet. This character is named L like the name
Speaker 3: E L E, not the letter. And I think the
Speaker 3: design of this character is interesting because he is essentially
Speaker 3: going to turn out to be a comic relief loyal
Speaker 3: droid sidekick like C three, but with a Southern accent
Speaker 3: like Sheriff J. W. Pepper and Live and Let Die.
Speaker 3: And then given all that, I think it is weird
Speaker 3: that they decide to make him look evil like Darth Vader.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Like it's almost like they had this robot design
Speaker 2: and they were gonna use it for a villain and
Speaker 2: they're like, now, let's just use it for the good guy.
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter. And yeah, so he looks like you
Speaker 2: should be more of a force to be reckoned with
Speaker 2: than he actually is, at least in the black hole.
Speaker 2: The robot with the Southern voice. I think Slim Dickens
Speaker 2: did the voice of the Southern robot in that at
Speaker 2: least he looks like comic relief.
Speaker 3: Yeah. L. So this robot comes on the TV and
Speaker 3: says Stella you cheap smuggler and police robot l you
Speaker 3: have the right to remain silent some kind of southern sheriff.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's great, but so much of his dialogue
Speaker 2: specifically is like, like, Stella, we have to go over
Speaker 2: here and push this button now so we can still
Speaker 2: up the bad guys. Like there's a lot of like
Speaker 2: almost overt narration about what is going on and why,
Speaker 2: but it it becomes transcendent and becomes to feel it
Speaker 2: to feel like like ritual.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know, we so the cops come on
Speaker 3: the TV and then Stella says, in a sudden and
Speaker 3: jarringly rough bit of dubbing, go for hyperspace, So you know,
Speaker 3: the tortilla chip whips around and then it squirts them
Speaker 3: out into some kind of grainy crimson video. Realm, this
Speaker 3: is what happens with hyperspace in the movie. It it
Speaker 3: suddenly cuts to something happening on video with like huge pixel.
Speaker 2: Textah, just hard to watch, legitimately hard to stare at.
Speaker 3: Stella says. Then, in a strangely folksy voice, she says,
Speaker 3: let's hope this Starbuggy stays together. What's our chances? Acton
Speaker 3: says forty percent total disintegration, thirty percent molecular ignition, twenty
Speaker 3: percent gamma contamination. Now you mention earlier Rob the idea
Speaker 3: that even though this was in some sense derived from
Speaker 3: Star Wars, you could see other ways that it would
Speaker 3: prophesy future developments in Star Wars. I thought this one
Speaker 3: was interesting because see three Po talks like this in
Speaker 3: later Star Wars movies. But I think he does not
Speaker 3: talk like this in the Star Wars movie that had
Speaker 3: come out at this point.
Speaker 2: That's an interesting observation. So he hadn't he in the
Speaker 2: original Star Wars. He's less of a doomsayer in Negative Nelly.
Speaker 3: Well, he's Negative Nelly, But I don't recall him citing
Speaker 3: the odds of surviving a dangerous situation like he does
Speaker 3: repeatedly and Empire strikes back. That's an Empire innovation from
Speaker 3: at least from what I recall. So you know, it
Speaker 3: feels like an element stolen from Star Wars. But actually
Speaker 3: I think it's just coincidence Star Wars started doing something
Speaker 3: like this years later. Yeah, so they fiddle with some
Speaker 3: knobs and then they squirt back out of hyperspace. But oh,
Speaker 3: they say, look, it's a Neutron Star. If it gets
Speaker 3: hold of us, it will crush us. Fortunately it does
Speaker 3: not get hold of them. Instead, they cruise past it
Speaker 3: and then right up to the edge of a place
Speaker 3: that Acton calls the Haunted Stars. What is that place?
Speaker 3: And they don't really say, it's just the Haunted Stars.
Speaker 3: And then they stumble across something that's floating out in
Speaker 3: the dark, and we see it is one of the
Speaker 3: escape pods that launched from the rockade Blunner earlier. When
Speaker 3: Stella sees it, she says, what in the universe is that?
Speaker 3: And then she gasped and says, it's a spaceship. What
Speaker 3: else would it be?
Speaker 2: Yeah, everything in this film so far has been a spaceship.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what do you normally see floating in space? So
Speaker 3: Stella puts on a space suit that consists of a
Speaker 3: body shaped dry leaning bag and then a helmet that
Speaker 3: looks like a transparent plastic toilet, and space walks out
Speaker 3: to the derelict ship and finds an unconscious guy on board.
Speaker 3: They bring the survivor back to their ship, where Acton
Speaker 3: tells Stella he keeps talking about monsters, red monsters, and
Speaker 3: they're both just standing there beside him. I guess Acton
Speaker 3: is translating for her or something. Maybe he's a protocol droid.
Speaker 3: I don't know a question, sorry, actually pause? Is act
Speaker 3: On organic or a droid? Is he human or an alien?
Speaker 2: What is he? Do not know? They never bother to
Speaker 2: really establish it, but we see a lot of evidence
Speaker 2: later to support the idea that he's maybe some sort
Speaker 2: of an energy being. But yeah, you'd think that if
Speaker 2: that were the case, they would actually tell us what
Speaker 2: and why, And we never get that. Because you can
Speaker 2: manipulate light, he eventually turns into light. I don't know
Speaker 2: what he is.
Speaker 3: So Acton tells her that the man wants them to
Speaker 3: alert someone immediately. He wants them to call the emperor
Speaker 3: of the first circle of the universe. How many circles
Speaker 3: are there?
Speaker 2: Three? Four?
Speaker 3: Oh? Okay, but yeah, how do you alert the emperors?
Speaker 3: You have like a one eight hundred number you can call?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean weird that you can go right to
Speaker 2: the top. It seems like you have. There would be
Speaker 2: at least a go between for the random space jumpers
Speaker 2: to connect with instead of just speaking correctly to the emperor.
Speaker 3: So before they can figure out what to do, they
Speaker 3: are hailed once again on the viewscreen by Thor and l.
Speaker 3: So they've been caught again, and this time they're surrounded.
Speaker 3: Acton tells Stella, don't worry, we'll get out of this. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: elsewhere in the galaxy, it is time to meet our villains.
Speaker 3: So we pan over a giant spaceship that is shaped
Speaker 3: like a hand with a big boxy palm, four fingers
Speaker 3: and a thumb, each with pointed triangle claws at the
Speaker 3: end of the finger. It's hard to imagine this design
Speaker 3: is for functional reasons, like you end up with a
Speaker 3: spaceship like this, I think because the dark Lord insists
Speaker 3: that the spaceship must look like a huge hand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if this were not too much already, we'll
Speaker 2: see later that it can form a fist or a
Speaker 2: rough fist like those fingers mooth. Clearly the dark Lord
Speaker 2: insisted that this be part of it, right.
Speaker 3: It clinches when the ship's about to do something really mean.
Speaker 3: So inside the ship we get a view of the bridge.
Speaker 3: Rob how would you describe this bridge?
Speaker 2: Well, it literally has a bridge. It has like a catwalk.
Speaker 2: Catwalk of course, always a great addition to any sort
Speaker 2: of sci fi action set, especially if you have some
Speaker 2: dedicated stump men that are willing to take a dive
Speaker 2: over the edge of set railing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would call this kind of spike chic. There
Speaker 3: are just spikes everywhere. Why so many spikes? And people
Speaker 3: here are absolutely worring Planet of the Vampire's costumes but
Speaker 3: dopey versions. Yeah. They look like a cross between Planet
Speaker 3: of the Vampires and people from House Frey.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it is. It is also a film like
Speaker 2: this is a great way to remind ourselves just how
Speaker 2: good Planet the Vampires is, at least how great it
Speaker 2: looks and sounds when you see it done. You know,
Speaker 2: not at the same level.
Speaker 3: So one of these officers on the bridge comes up
Speaker 3: to the Boss and says, they found one damned survivor.
Speaker 3: This guy is el Rick. He is a tooth grinding
Speaker 3: little toady.
Speaker 2: Elmric spicy. He's a little spicy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he looks he looks mad all the time. He's
Speaker 3: like But the Boss is again, just the wonderful, extraordinary
Speaker 3: villain of this film, Count zarth Arn obviously our Darth Vader.
Speaker 3: You know, Zarreth Darth. It's not hard to see. But
Speaker 3: since they decided to use the Darth Vader helmet already
Speaker 3: on a goofy cop droid from Alabama. They have to
Speaker 3: we got to do something else for the actual Darth
Speaker 3: Vader character, so they just leave his head uncovered. So
Speaker 3: instead we get a sith Lord served open faced in
Speaker 3: a black vinyl suit with a utility belt and this
Speaker 3: burgundy velvet cape. Like he is some kind of mystical
Speaker 3: vampire chocolateer. You know, he's part Darth Vader, part Batman,
Speaker 3: part Willie Wonka, part Louis the Fourteenth.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, I mean, on one level, it makes sense
Speaker 2: you've cast Joe Spinel in this role. Why wouldn't you
Speaker 2: want to look at him? Like he's very captivating face,
Speaker 2: a very expressive face. As is he the right casting?
Speaker 2: I would argu know, But if you've cast him, you've
Speaker 2: already committed to it. Don't put a mask over him. Yeah,
Speaker 2: let's absolutely see him.
Speaker 3: Agree. So Elrick says that the Imperial Navy has located
Speaker 3: one of the escape pods and that there is a
Speaker 3: but quote, his brain seems thoroughly damaged, so you know,
Speaker 3: they think there's little risk of the stolen ship being found.
Speaker 3: And Zarthorn reacts to this news by walking a few
Speaker 3: paces over and saying in a growley voice, come to me, golams. Ah, so, golams.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting mythology edition. Here is this gonna be
Speaker 3: like the golam of progue? Not at all. These golams
Speaker 3: are droids. They're just they're droids with angry duck faces
Speaker 3: holding machetes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and these are absolutely the ones that look a
Speaker 2: bit like what we would eventually see whether our b
Speaker 2: One battle droids in the Phantom Menace.
Speaker 3: They do look like that. But you know what they
Speaker 3: also look like is the mad scientist from the Nightmare
Speaker 3: before Christmas.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, little the duck lips and the big head. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Zarthorne says, I have a simple task for you. You
Speaker 3: must not fail me. We're gonna find out later what
Speaker 3: the task is. So next we cut to a trial.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to mention this. A Stella Star and
Speaker 3: Acton are tried for their crimes, which are smuggling. I
Speaker 3: think we don't learn a lot about their crimes. They're
Speaker 3: being tried in this green disco space court where the
Speaker 3: judge is a huge green and gold head with tentacles
Speaker 3: inside a dome, and this seems to me to be
Speaker 3: a pretty obvious visual reference to the Martian controller head
Speaker 3: in an earlier movie, William Cameron Menzi's Invaders from Mars
Speaker 3: from nineteen fifty three. Rob, I've got a picture of
Speaker 3: this for you to look at in the outline here.
Speaker 3: I think, like that is so close it could not
Speaker 3: but be an homage or a nod or whatever you
Speaker 3: want to call it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think there's some things similar
Speaker 2: to this elsewhere in like comic books and all. But
Speaker 2: I have a feeling you're dead on here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, the colors are so similar, and the
Speaker 3: tentacles on the head and all that.
Speaker 2: Anyway, it's amazing how weird this character is, to the
Speaker 2: extent we can call it character. This moment is in
Speaker 2: the film, but you almost completely forget about it in
Speaker 2: the wake of everything that's to come and all. Just
Speaker 2: like again, the absurd dialogue choices.
Speaker 3: Goes through the shredder of the mind within minutes after
Speaker 3: you've seen it. So Acton and Stella get assigned life
Speaker 3: sentences of you know, they're sentto forced labor on different planets,
Speaker 3: and it sounds it sounds like he says Stella is
Speaker 3: going to have to go to Pino colony on Nocturne
Speaker 3: the second, like Pino noir Gratio.
Speaker 2: I think she also misunderstood them because she is not
Speaker 2: dressed for a penal colony, not at all.
Speaker 3: So we cut straight to Stella star already at her
Speaker 3: prison camp. The vibe at this place, you know, it's
Speaker 3: your standard dilithium minds of Ruapenthe and the prisoners have
Speaker 3: to carry big translucent beach balls that the warden identifies
Speaker 3: as radium up onto a platform and then they dump
Speaker 3: the balls into a steamy hole. And so Stella has
Speaker 3: changed into her radioactive prison labor outfit here, which is
Speaker 3: a black leather bikini with high heeled boots, like thigh
Speaker 3: high high heeled black leather boots. All of the other
Speaker 3: prisoners are wearing rags with long sleeves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but she's dressed up here and it's weird. She
Speaker 2: will actually find ways to dress down further and wear
Speaker 2: less clothes later in the film without actually being naked.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the guards call for a brief rest here,
Speaker 3: Stella starts complaining to her fellow prisoners. She says, I've
Speaker 3: been at this twelve hours. The radiation will burn my
Speaker 3: skin off, and it's like, yeah, they know, dude, Like,
Speaker 3: I think they've been here longer than you have. Why
Speaker 3: are you complaining at them? But so one of the
Speaker 3: other guys, he doesn't react like that. He just says,
Speaker 3: you'd better work if you don't want to taste the
Speaker 3: burning of their energy whips too. So Stella, she begins
Speaker 3: planning an escape with the other prisoners, something about over
Speaker 3: feeding the furnace with a gun ray. But they get
Speaker 3: caught by a guard. A fight breaks out, Stella beats
Speaker 3: the crap out of the guard. One of the other
Speaker 3: prisoners takes the guard's blaster, and then all hell breaks loose.
Speaker 3: The prisoners and the guards start fighting. I thought, here,
Speaker 3: maybe Stella was going to lead a prison break, you know,
Speaker 3: she's like, oh, okay, yeah, we'll all rebel and we'll
Speaker 3: get out of here. Instead, it just seems like she
Speaker 3: sneaks out the back while Yeah, she.
Speaker 2: Just takes a beat line for the exit, and it's like,
Speaker 2: it's every humanoid for themselves here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then the prison explodes I think something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or the plant. I don't know how. Yeah, the
Speaker 2: scale of this explosion is uncertain.
Speaker 3: That's not the planet yet, because she goes she's out
Speaker 3: in a wheat field.
Speaker 2: That's right, she gets into the wheat field.
Speaker 3: So we soon learned that this prison break was absolutely
Speaker 3: pointless because while Stella is out running around in some
Speaker 3: fields with tall grass, a ship lands. I think maybe
Speaker 3: it's her old spaceship. Maybe I'm not.
Speaker 2: Possibly again, hard to tell. The spaceship's apart in this film.
Speaker 3: It lands, she goes inside. There's a nice looking shot
Speaker 3: here with some of that jallo lighting where she comes
Speaker 3: down a long hall holding a holding a rifle with
Speaker 3: this hot pink background.
Speaker 2: Oh are you talking about the rifle ray, the rifle ray.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, the rifle ray. And she goes into the
Speaker 3: ship and then meets none other than the two space
Speaker 3: cops who caught her in the first place. So again
Speaker 3: you've got Thor, the bald snarling man with the green skin,
Speaker 3: and l the country fried robot cop. So they revealed
Speaker 3: that she has been granted a pardon the way Elle
Speaker 3: says it is quote, your sentence has been canceled. Then
Speaker 3: Stella says, have you both gone? Mad Elle says, I
Speaker 3: only have logic and emotion circuits, no room for craziness. Well,
Speaker 3: I've been assigned a top secret imperial mission. We must
Speaker 3: leave now and set Acton free. So I was thinking, oh, well,
Speaker 3: is there going to be a scene where they have
Speaker 3: to break him out of prison? But no Elle hasn't
Speaker 3: even finished talking when it just cuts a way to
Speaker 3: Acton being thrust up out of a hole in the
Speaker 3: floor on a spaceship somewhere, and there's a bearded guy
Speaker 3: sitting on a throne next to the hole and he says,
Speaker 3: there he's yours, my gift to you.
Speaker 2: Wow. So everything we've seen from these two thus far
Speaker 2: is just completely unnecessary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the whole gang's back together now, so and it's
Speaker 3: the four of them. It is stell Star, Acton L
Speaker 3: and Thor and they have to go rendezvous with the
Speaker 3: Imperial flagship to get their orders. The Imperial flagship looks
Speaker 3: kind of like a giant gold turtle with a lot
Speaker 3: of spikes on its back. And when they're approaching, El says, Acton,
Speaker 3: you are ready to You are going to meet some
Speaker 3: real royalty. So that makes me think we're going inside
Speaker 3: the Imperial flagship, right, No, the Emperor is instead going
Speaker 3: to project a hologram into the room with them on
Speaker 3: their own ship. So I was kind of wondering, do
Speaker 3: they really need to come all this way? Maybe it's
Speaker 3: a limited range hologram.
Speaker 2: It must be, And this is going to be the
Speaker 2: scene where the Emperor's hologram manifests in front of some
Speaker 2: terrible looking stairs, Like of all the things you could
Speaker 2: have shot him against or had the hologram up here
Speaker 2: in front of. Why, there's a lot of stuff that
Speaker 2: looks better on the sets. The sets of this film
Speaker 2: are generally pretty interesting. Why these stairs, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Why is it a hologram at all? I wonder if
Speaker 3: it's trying to do the help me Obi wan Kenobi,
Speaker 3: You're my only hope thing with the hologram there, But
Speaker 3: I don't know. So this is the Emperor, the good Emperor.
Speaker 3: He suddenly appears and then el points behind all the
Speaker 3: crew and he says, he's here. It's his hole, low
Speaker 3: graphic image.
Speaker 2: There he is, and he is dressed and again what
Speaker 2: just looks like a full body golden chastity belt.
Speaker 3: God. Yeah, yeah, words fail me. So I'm just going
Speaker 3: to read the Emperor's monologue here. This is where he
Speaker 3: gives them their assignment. Emperor says, I come to you,
Speaker 3: because because my faithful robot l has told me that
Speaker 3: you are the only one who could save us. You know,
Speaker 3: you must be the best pilot in the whole galaxy.
Speaker 3: And then I was thinking, oh, she's a pilot.
Speaker 2: Yes, have we seen anything about it? I mean, they
Speaker 2: were both tweaking knobs, so I didn't know. I thought
Speaker 2: they were both the pilot.
Speaker 3: It seemed like Acton was flying the ship earlier. I
Speaker 3: don't know. But he says, you're the best pilot in
Speaker 3: the galaxy, and you act on the best navigator Stella.
Speaker 3: Our galaxy is split into two warring factions, our own
Speaker 3: and the one ruled by the evil Count zarth Arn
Speaker 3: from the League of the Dark Worlds. Then I thought,
Speaker 3: which faction was it that sentenced her to the prison planet.
Speaker 3: I think it was his faction, the good Guys. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 3: the good Guys. Okay, Then he and then he goes
Speaker 3: on to say there's something wrong here. There's a sentence
Speaker 3: missing a subject. He says, recently begun to receive troublesome
Speaker 3: reports from our spy among the League. They've informed us
Speaker 3: that the Count has created a weapon, a new limitless weapon,
Speaker 3: a weapon so vast, so huge that it would almost
Speaker 3: be called a death star, that it would take a
Speaker 3: whole planet to conceal it.
Speaker 2: Star Wars would eventually kind of get back to this idea,
Speaker 2: wouldn't they in the sequel trilogy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you need it, that's right, You need a whole
Speaker 3: planet to conceal the weapon. So yeah, So this is
Speaker 3: the backstory the ship that got attacked in the prologue
Speaker 3: by the red Lava Lamp, which again that's what everybody
Speaker 3: keeps calling it the red monsters, but we just see
Speaker 3: the red lights floating around and people of course clutching
Speaker 3: their heads and going, oh. So that ship was sent
Speaker 3: by the Emperor to find Zarthorne's death planet, and it came,
Speaker 3: in Christopher Plumber's words, so close, so close to discovering
Speaker 3: the Count's secret when it was suddenly attacked by a
Speaker 3: horde of unknown monsters. But he knows that the ship
Speaker 3: sent out some escape pods like we saw earlier. So
Speaker 3: now with the utmost secrecy, they have to sail to
Speaker 3: the Haunted Stars, find the escape pods, discover the location
Speaker 3: of the Count's secret planet, and destroy it. And then
Speaker 3: the hole logram Emperor turns around and starts to slowly
Speaker 3: wander away. Why is he walking away if it's a
Speaker 3: hologram yeaheah, you'd think he'd turn it off instead of
Speaker 3: walking away. But then he stops and he looks back
Speaker 3: over his shoulder, and it's a one more thing. My
Speaker 3: son is David Hasseloff, and you know he was the
Speaker 3: commander of the ship. You've got to find him. And
Speaker 3: then wistful music plays as we watch the Imperial flagship
Speaker 3: drift away. So after this they talk about the different
Speaker 3: planets they can go to. Acton says we could go
Speaker 3: to the Origa system, also known as the World's Asleep,
Speaker 3: but the problem is they can't find this system. And
Speaker 3: then he says, we could also go to the White
Speaker 3: Sun of Ozone, but the problem is, once again we
Speaker 3: don't know where it is. So there's only one more
Speaker 3: place we can look. Quote the heart of the Haunt
Speaker 3: stars an unknown planet named Eurefus. So that's where they're
Speaker 3: gonna go. So there's some funny chatter about hyperspace while
Speaker 3: they travel. L tells us every time I go to hyperspace,
Speaker 3: I get nervous. This will become a theme.
Speaker 2: That I was programmed to feel nervous during hyperspace. I
Speaker 2: don't know. It seems like a program in error to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly. What's the point of that? He just
Speaker 3: gets nervous about a lot of things, and then later
Speaker 3: denies getting nervous about other things. And so they go
Speaker 3: to the planet Eurefus Stella and L take the shuttle
Speaker 3: down to the surface while Acton and Thor stay aboard
Speaker 3: the main ship. While flying down over the ocean to
Speaker 3: the landing area, L keeps complaining again full of anxieties.
Speaker 3: He says, don't you think we're flying a little too low?
Speaker 3: I haven't been programmed to walk on water. Ooh me,
Speaker 3: water makes me nervous. So they go down and they
Speaker 3: investigate the crash remains of the escape pod on the beach.
Speaker 3: It looks like there are no survivors. And then while
Speaker 3: they're checking out the surroundings, they are approached by some
Speaker 3: local life forms. It is barbarian women riding horses painted
Speaker 3: red with these big red horse monster masks. They're kind
Speaker 3: of horse lobsters, and L says, look, amazon's on horseback.
Speaker 3: Seems to be a known type of person to approach you.
Speaker 2: I to have to add real quick here that this
Speaker 2: is one of the many we were not all just
Speaker 2: we don't spend all of our time in spaceships, we
Speaker 2: of course do have these wonderful locations. They make some
Speaker 2: great use of Italian locations for the film as well,
Speaker 2: including these beachside cliffs.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the Amazons take Stella and l back to
Speaker 3: their layer, which just looks the same as all the
Speaker 3: other spaceship interiors. For some reason, while they're walking to
Speaker 3: meet the queen, they whip out laser guns. They say,
Speaker 3: die robot, and they blast l Why did they do that?
Speaker 2: They don't like robots, I guess. Okay, Amazonians and robots.
Speaker 2: It's a very old feud that you can wrap up anytime.
Speaker 3: Soon, Taylor's oldest time. So yeah, Stella tries to fight them,
Speaker 3: but she's surrounded at gunpoint and they overpower her, and
Speaker 3: then they take her to the Amazon Queen Corelia. When
Speaker 3: they go to meet the queen, it turns out Queen
Speaker 3: Karelia uh Oh is loyal to Count Zartharn. That's a mistake,
Speaker 3: so she accuses Stella of being a spy and then
Speaker 3: taunts her, saying, even if you're a very talented spy,
Speaker 3: you will never discover the Count's hidden planet. Two packs
Speaker 3: of murdering guardians are there to watch and protect it
Speaker 3: from intruders, and now put her into the mind probe. Oh,
Speaker 3: mind probe. I want to see what that is. Obviously,
Speaker 3: Stella knows what that is and fears it greatly, because
Speaker 3: she drops her normally cool and unemotional facade and just
Speaker 3: starts screaming.
Speaker 2: Like no, not the mind probe, but.
Speaker 3: No minds will be probed. We don't get to find
Speaker 3: out what that is because before we can get there,
Speaker 3: l the robot appears again, points a ray gun at
Speaker 3: the Amazon queen and forces them to hand over Stella.
Speaker 3: So it turns out he was not dead. He says
Speaker 3: to Karelia, give me any trouble, and I'm going to
Speaker 3: clean out your sinus. Is real, good, lady. Strangely evocative
Speaker 3: threat and not really in keeping with the tone of
Speaker 3: the rest of the script.
Speaker 2: But also the weird threat like no, not my cloud sinuses.
Speaker 3: Together, Elle and Stella escape the palace. This requires a
Speaker 3: very dramatic blasting of a door that won't open, and
Speaker 3: then they make it back out on the beach where
Speaker 3: they landed. But now they have to contend with a
Speaker 3: new threat. Queen Corelia talks to a TV screen and says, Guardian,
Speaker 3: take my revenge, kill them. The Guardian here is a giant,
Speaker 3: silver stop motion automaton clearly inspired by the Tallows monster
Speaker 3: created by Ray Harryhausen for the nineteen sixty three Jason
Speaker 3: and the Argonauts. Even the staging at the beach is similar,
Speaker 3: but the Guardian here is somewhat different in design from
Speaker 3: the Tallos. It has elements of maybe kind of a
Speaker 3: Hindu goddess appearance like Lakshmi, other elements of a more
Speaker 3: classic robot or metal man like the tin Man and
Speaker 3: the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 2: It does have brass and nipples.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so got lot of different things going on.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure exactly what the main inspiration is here,
Speaker 3: but like the forearms in the hands are more just
Speaker 3: Wizard of Oz tin Man. Anyway, Stella and Elle have
Speaker 3: to hide from and hold off the giant Guardian until
Speaker 3: Acton arrives in the ship and blasts it with a laser.
Speaker 3: That solves a problem.
Speaker 2: I have to say this stop motion Guardian so hilarious
Speaker 2: because it is this effect is barely working. I mean,
Speaker 2: I love even bad stop motion is great stop motion.
Speaker 2: I still love it.
Speaker 3: But I like the Golams later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the Gollams look better later. But this thing
Speaker 2: looks like it's just about to fall over at any moment.
Speaker 2: It feels so ineffective.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I think a big problem with this
Speaker 3: scene is it felt to me like they did not
Speaker 3: have the space or the ability to record the full
Speaker 3: range of motions that would be required to stage out
Speaker 3: the scene. So you just get kind of close ups
Speaker 3: of a moving hand suggesting that it is swiping at
Speaker 3: the characters on the ground or something like. You don't
Speaker 3: see it all interacting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean again, it's another case where we can
Speaker 2: look at it done less effectively and realize just how
Speaker 2: great Harry Housen was at what he did, not only
Speaker 2: in bringing this full range of movement to stop motion creatures,
Speaker 2: but integrating that with human action and making it feel
Speaker 2: like everything's part of the same world. It's hard to
Speaker 2: do and so you're not going to see it done
Speaker 2: that effectively all the time.
Speaker 3: So everybody leaves in the ship, and then there is
Speaker 3: a brief space battle where they have to fight off
Speaker 3: some of the Amazon space fighters. As I've said earlier,
Speaker 3: you know, I love Star Crash. But I think the
Speaker 3: space battles are just not where it's at in this movie.
Speaker 3: They are consistently the most boring part of the film.
Speaker 3: A lot of close ups of people saying fire go
Speaker 3: to max power, and then you have these model spaceships
Speaker 3: whizzing around randomly and shooting lasers. It's like they're not
Speaker 3: good enough to be dramatically interesting. They don't look especially cool,
Speaker 3: but they also don't look bad enough to be really funny.
Speaker 3: They just look good enough, so I kind of tune
Speaker 3: it out.
Speaker 2: And they're also really jarring. So yeah, so it's actually
Speaker 2: I found it difficult to tune them out, like I'm
Speaker 2: not invested, and I also cannot think of anything else
Speaker 2: what that's happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fair enough, Yeah, all right, so our heroes move on.
Speaker 3: They win the space battle, of course, you know, they win,
Speaker 3: and they go onto the cold planet. So they're gonna
Speaker 3: have to check out the escape pod on a planet
Speaker 3: covered with ice and snow where the temperature drops were
Speaker 3: told by thousands of degrees at night. That's that's for real.
Speaker 3: So once again, Stella and l the Robot have to
Speaker 3: go check out the crash site while Acton and thor
Speaker 3: stay aboard the ship. They get to the crash site,
Speaker 3: everybody's dead, and then Stella begins to get fatalistic. She says,
Speaker 3: there's no hope of ever finding the other escape pod
Speaker 3: or the count secret planet. It's lost out in the stars.
Speaker 3: I noticed this happens a lot in the movie. Our
Speaker 3: heroin is really fond of complaining, of declaring a task
Speaker 3: impossible and assessing there is no hope. Not what you
Speaker 3: normally get with a plucky space adventurer. Carry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also, I guess the rest of the film
Speaker 2: is like it doesn't really feel that bad either, Like
Speaker 2: it doesn't feel that hopeless, Like the film is not
Speaker 2: really creating that sense of doom and gloom. We're just
Speaker 2: being told that it is the case.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Meanwhile, back on the ship, Acton amuses himself with
Speaker 3: these little laser lassos in his hands. Know what that was?
Speaker 2: No, But again, this is a great example of like,
Speaker 2: I guess he has power over light or laser energy,
Speaker 2: or is made out of light or laser energy. I
Speaker 2: don't know. It's just goofy and weird but kind of
Speaker 2: cool to watch. I just have no idea what it's
Speaker 2: supposed to mean.
Speaker 3: We're about to reveal a double agent. So while Acton
Speaker 3: is talking to the ship's computer, I don't think this
Speaker 3: comes up really after this part of the movie. Again,
Speaker 3: do they talk to the ship's computer later in the film.
Speaker 2: It's no, but it's like a big brain. It's like
Speaker 2: a big glowing brain. I like, gotcha, yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 2: almost looks organic.
Speaker 3: So he's talking to the ship while this is happening, Thor,
Speaker 3: the space cop this sneaks up behind Acton and knocks
Speaker 3: him unconscious, then places a video call to his boss,
Speaker 3: counts ar Thorn. So Thor tells Arthorn that he has
Speaker 3: killed the alien pathfinder. And then I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: Acton's an alien? Or from whose point of view? I
Speaker 3: guess maybe everybody's an alien.
Speaker 2: I feel like they should have established him as an
Speaker 2: alien pathfinder earlier on. You would have been more interesting
Speaker 2: from the get go.
Speaker 3: Count Zarthorn is very pleased, and so the plan from
Speaker 3: here is they're gonna lock Stella Star outside and let
Speaker 3: the cold kill her. But Thor tries to take off
Speaker 3: and leave without Stella and l and the ship announces
Speaker 3: a malfunction so it can't leave. And then when Ella
Speaker 3: not Ella, when Ell and Stella find out what happened that.
Speaker 3: Elle says thor a trader, I cannot believe it. I
Speaker 3: cannot trust my own logic circuits anymore. But anyway, Elle
Speaker 3: has an idea that might save Stella from freezing to death.
Speaker 3: He's like, I know what to do. He wants her
Speaker 3: to lay down in the snow and hold his hand,
Speaker 3: and this is going to put her in a state
Speaker 3: of suspended animation. And then I don't know. The vibe
Speaker 3: of this scene is weird. While she's dozing off, she
Speaker 3: starts getting all lovey dovey with L, like I don't
Speaker 3: like they're in love now or something. She says L
Speaker 3: as an opponent. I always knew you were programmed to
Speaker 3: never give up, which was infuriating, But now that quality
Speaker 3: must be best. You're the most faithful companion a woman
Speaker 3: ever had. Oh oh, could we workshop that? Man?
Speaker 2: I you know, the answer may be out there somewhere.
Speaker 2: But I kind of wondered if Christopher Plummer did a
Speaker 2: rewrite of his own lines, because I feel like his little.
Speaker 3: Monologues they're not great either.
Speaker 2: They're not great, but they feel a little more cohesive
Speaker 2: and a little less stupid than everything else in the picture.
Speaker 3: He doesn't talk about that quality must be best. Yes,
Speaker 3: uh so anyway, oh El also says in the scene,
Speaker 3: I like this. He says, now, maybe is a good
Speaker 3: time to use your ancient system of prayer and hope
Speaker 3: it works for robots as well. So I don't know
Speaker 3: whether she prays or not, but she freezes solid and
Speaker 3: turns into an ice crusted mannequin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, real Monroe sickle here.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, back on the ship, Thor is busy getting chewed
Speaker 3: out from Zarthorn, or chewed out by Zarthorn for having
Speaker 3: not arrived yet, and Acton wakes up so he was
Speaker 3: not dead after all. This goes into a fight scene.
Speaker 3: You know, they tangle and tray blows. At one point,
Speaker 3: Thor is trying to crush Acton inside this big sculpture
Speaker 3: that has some sort of retracting drawer. I don't even
Speaker 3: know what this is. But Acton uses his eye sparkle powers.
Speaker 3: Yeah I get those, I guess, Yeah, like flashes his eyes,
Speaker 3: like light comes out of them and this knocks Thor back.
Speaker 3: Thor gets a hold of his gun and then here
Speaker 3: we get to my favorite line in the movie that
Speaker 3: I was talking about earlier. You know, Thor shoots Acton.
Speaker 3: Acton is unharmed, and Thor says, what, no one can
Speaker 3: survive these deadly rays. These deadly rays will be your death.
Speaker 3: So he holds up his hand. The deadly rays bounce
Speaker 3: off of it, reflect back and kill Thor.
Speaker 2: Quick thought about deadly rays when we were talking about
Speaker 2: the prison break sequence earlier, and there's a lot of
Speaker 2: gun fire, a lot of laser fire in that. I
Speaker 2: did really like the practical effects of the laser beams
Speaker 2: hitting people in tremendous sparks flying off of the person.
Speaker 2: It made the Sometimes in films like this, the ray
Speaker 2: guns can feel very neutered and fake, but this film
Speaker 2: at least succeeds in making them feel dangerous.
Speaker 3: Other times, though, people get shot with them and they
Speaker 3: just kind of disappear or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess it depends on your setting, right, are
Speaker 2: you set to disintegrate or mangle or sparkle?
Speaker 3: What are Acton's powers and where do they come from?
Speaker 3: What is the source of his power? Yeah?
Speaker 2: They never tell us, but I assent like, Okay, he's
Speaker 2: some sort of an alien. He is a pathfinder. He's
Speaker 2: got to be an energy being. He's some sort of
Speaker 2: energy being, and they just feel like this is one
Speaker 2: of the rare things that they're going to show rather
Speaker 2: than tell everything else, They're happy to keep telling us
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 3: So there's this whole sequence where they bring the frozen
Speaker 3: Stella Star the mannequin back on board and they warm
Speaker 3: her up. We learn that she may survive if you
Speaker 3: warn her, warm her slowly, else.
Speaker 2: Give her the reverse werewolf warming. Yeah, it's what they do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And then Acton he shoots rainbow beams out of
Speaker 3: his hands and this warms her up. And then after
Speaker 3: Stella wakes up, there is what I thought was a
Speaker 3: really weird development. Acton reveals that the ship doesn't actually
Speaker 3: have a malfunction at all. The reason Thor couldn't get
Speaker 3: it to take off is because Acton removed a key
Speaker 3: component from the engine. Stella deduces from this that Acton
Speaker 3: knew about Thor's treachery in advance. But then instead of asking, like,
Speaker 3: what gave it away? You know, how did you know
Speaker 3: he was going to betray us, she just jumps right
Speaker 3: to the conclusion you can see into the future, and
Speaker 3: she's right. Acton can see into the future. He has
Speaker 3: previously undisclosed esp that allows him to know the future
Speaker 3: in advance. And then Stella says, all these years you
Speaker 3: never told me. Think of all the trouble I might
Speaker 3: have avoided, but act on counters, you would have tried
Speaker 3: to change the future, which is against the law. So
Speaker 3: therefore I can tell you nothing.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 3: I love the last we hear about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this. They've set it up like this
Speaker 2: is some huge revelation that's going to really play into
Speaker 2: the rest of the plot, and it doesn't. It's just like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: by the way, he can see the future. He just
Speaker 2: didn't tell you because it would be wrong for you
Speaker 2: to act on it. It would be against the law,
Speaker 2: be illegal, like.
Speaker 3: They might send us to a prison planet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, suddenly these smugglers are very concerned with breaking the law.
Speaker 2: I don't know. You don't want the Time cops on
Speaker 2: your back. It's different when the Time cops come after you.
Speaker 3: That's a good point. So but Stella really takes this
Speaker 3: in stride. She just kind of shakes it off. They
Speaker 3: go onto the next thing. So they're going to go
Speaker 3: to the third escape pod planet, this time on a
Speaker 3: barren waste land called de Mundia. So while approaching d Mundia,
Speaker 3: everything starts malfunctioning. We see red monsters. Remember again that's
Speaker 3: the lava lamp and the red lights everywhere. Elle says,
Speaker 3: my circuits are failing. I'm out of control. I'm out
Speaker 3: of control. Meanwhile, Stella says, ah, my head, and somehow
Speaker 3: Acton pilots them through it. And then when everything is
Speaker 3: back to normal, Acton says, we've just survived an attack
Speaker 3: of the most powerful weapon in the entire galaxy. I
Speaker 3: don't know, I mean, we just saw them go through it,
Speaker 3: and we've seen the same weapon used on other people.
Speaker 3: Lots of people surprised. It seems like explosives are probably
Speaker 3: more powerful.
Speaker 2: I would think, so.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So they go down to the planet's surface and
Speaker 3: they find the ship down to the bottom of a
Speaker 3: big crater. This is where we start seeing somebody in
Speaker 3: a gold Zardas mask following them, and Stella says she's
Speaker 3: going to go investigate the crater. L goes instead, and
Speaker 3: then there is a troglodyte ambush. So yeah, they're attacked
Speaker 3: by cave men.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's really kind of hilarious the visions for
Speaker 2: these different planets and granted their budget constraints in place.
Speaker 2: But let's see we have amazonium planet, snow planet, and
Speaker 2: now caveman planet. Right makes sense?
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. Yeah. So the cavemen have big stone axes
Speaker 3: other paleolithic tools they smash el to pieces like see
Speaker 3: three po in the Tuscan Raiders. So these are you know,
Speaker 3: I think they're Tuscan Raiders or yeah, And they carry
Speaker 3: Stella back to their cave. I think the planet is
Speaker 3: they're going to eat her. That this camp suggests cannibalism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they have her hanging from the ceiling in a
Speaker 2: way that suggests she's meat now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, so they're going to eat her later and
Speaker 3: then they just I guess it's time now, so they're
Speaker 3: going to come cut her throat and drain her blood.
Speaker 3: But Stella is rescued at the last second by the
Speaker 3: stranger in the Zarda's mask. So the mask shoots lasers
Speaker 3: out of its eyes and drives the trogolodites away. When
Speaker 3: Stella and the stranger get to safety, the stranger takes
Speaker 3: off the mask and reveals it's David Hasselhoff. There he is,
Speaker 3: and when I wanted to note when he takes this
Speaker 3: helmet off. He does not have helmet hair. His hair
Speaker 3: is voluminous. It is not matted down at all. Continuity error.
Speaker 2: I mean it's a big helmet. I think there's a
Speaker 2: lot of room in there that allows the hair to
Speaker 2: be free.
Speaker 3: So we learn that this is Simon, the only survivor
Speaker 3: of the wreck of the Imperial mission ship, the one
Speaker 3: sent to search for Zarthorne's weapon planet. They share information
Speaker 3: about what they've been through and then they try to
Speaker 3: leave the cave, but they get jumped by cavemen. They
Speaker 3: put up a good fight, but they're outnumbered, and then
Speaker 3: rescue comes in the form of who is he going
Speaker 3: to be? Who's going to rescue them? Who keeps rescuing it?
Speaker 3: But everybody every time it's Acton. But this time he
Speaker 3: is armed with a new weapon. It is some kind
Speaker 3: of energy based sword, like a sword where the blade
Speaker 3: is made out of a laser. Could you imagine it? Oh? Yes,
Speaker 3: they did it, folks. So the cavemen surround Stella like
Speaker 3: they're they're really like, they get her down on the
Speaker 3: ground like they're going to do a Kernel Rhodes from
Speaker 3: Day of the Dead. You get all the guts out. Yeah,
Speaker 3: But it doesn't happen because Acton comes in swinging the
Speaker 3: lightsaber and he drives them away.
Speaker 2: It is It is an interesting experience having watched so
Speaker 2: many grimy Italian and Spanish films from this era that
Speaker 2: you keep expecting things to take grimier turns than they do.
Speaker 2: But at the end of the day, like, this is
Speaker 2: a very PG film, This is for the child.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is less nasty than some of the other
Speaker 3: movies that have this kind of flavor, but take it
Speaker 3: in a more X rated direction.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, so she's not ripped in half, but
Speaker 2: man does Acton ever rip into some cavemen with this
Speaker 2: lightsaber like they doesn't get graphic, but man is just
Speaker 2: he has just slicing bellies left and right here with
Speaker 2: this thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Acton explains that he has reached a conclusion. He
Speaker 3: says they can stop looking for Zarthorn's weapon planet because
Speaker 3: it's this one. This is the one. Okay, we're done.
Speaker 3: He explains why. He says, you know, the Amazon Queen
Speaker 3: told you in a scene that I wasn't present for
Speaker 3: that there are two guardians of the weapon Planet. Well,
Speaker 3: here you've got the red monsters we went through and
Speaker 3: the Troglodides.
Speaker 2: I mean that settles it, really, So that's also the
Speaker 2: two big guardians of this super space weapon are red
Speaker 2: blobs and cavemen.
Speaker 3: That's right. Yes, So they walk through the cave to
Speaker 3: a door that leads to the secret weapon. It is
Speaker 3: that simple. And you know while they're going there, Acton
Speaker 3: explains it is from this facility that Zarthorn will control
Speaker 3: the entire universe. So they go into another room with
Speaker 3: all these little bubble dome stations lining the walls, and
Speaker 3: Acton says, here's the nerve center of the entire operation.
Speaker 3: Stella says, this is unbelievable, fantastic pre programmed computers. They
Speaker 3: could run forever.
Speaker 2: That's great, and I mean I've said it once, I've
Speaker 2: said it a thousand times. The worst thing about getting
Speaker 2: a new computer is having to program it from just
Speaker 2: starting from ground zero on it. Wish we could get
Speaker 2: a pre program one for once.
Speaker 3: So they learned that this room generates the red monsters,
Speaker 3: but that the red monsters are not real. They are
Speaker 3: only mental projections in our brains. So they're going to
Speaker 3: head for the control panel. This is a scene that
Speaker 3: really highlights you start noticing all of the characters have
Speaker 3: these rigid thongs giving them wedgies. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially when things get action oriented, You're like, oh wow,
Speaker 2: that is a lot of thongs.
Speaker 3: And then there's an exchange I didn't understand. Acton says
Speaker 3: destiny must take its course, but then Stella says, no,
Speaker 3: we can't allow this to happen, and then Simon says
Speaker 3: we must destroy it. At once, I was like, what
Speaker 3: are they arguing about? Is Acton saying they should let
Speaker 3: Zarthorn keep the weapon and not do anything about it?
Speaker 2: Nay? I guess he sees something in the future that
Speaker 2: is impacting his decision making here, but is not bothering
Speaker 2: to tell us the viewer about what's up.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Zarthorn ambushes them. He comes in with a bunch
Speaker 3: of his henchmen, do dopey looking henchman again, Robot oil
Speaker 3: Soun's kind of henchman.
Speaker 2: But the cape looks amazing, Cape looks.
Speaker 3: Great, and his two stop motion robot duckman with the machetes,
Speaker 3: and Zarthorn tells them that, you know, he keeps trying
Speaker 3: to kill them, but they survive every trap he lays
Speaker 3: for them. But now he's got him because in less
Speaker 3: than an hour quote, all that will be left of
Speaker 3: this planet will be ashes and cosmic dust forever. Then
Speaker 3: you will be among the dead. Also the Emperor Christopher Plummer,
Speaker 3: he's going to be killed in the explosion too, because
Speaker 3: Count Zarthorn has lured him here on the promise that
Speaker 3: his son David Hasselhoff would be handed over to him.
Speaker 3: So the Emperor will be here any minute, and Zarthurne
Speaker 3: says he will be here just in time to join
Speaker 3: in the fireworks. And then so Zarthorn leaves, but leaves
Speaker 3: the two golums to keep the heroes in the room
Speaker 3: at any cost. He says, kill them if you have to,
Speaker 3: And this turns into a lightsaber versus duck machete robot
Speaker 3: duck machete battle, and Acton fights the two droids. I
Speaker 3: think he kills one of them, but then Acton is
Speaker 3: wounded and then Simon has to pick up the lightsaber
Speaker 3: and take over the fight. Any description of this fight here?
Speaker 3: I thought, this one's pretty fun. I think this is
Speaker 3: the best action scene in the film.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, obviously we can compare this to you know,
Speaker 2: Harry Holsan's you know, the scenes with the Skeleton men
Speaker 2: let's see which one was that from that.
Speaker 3: Was Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, from the Tiger. So we definitely can compare it
Speaker 2: to that. Not as good as that, but but not
Speaker 2: bad either. Like this is this in this scene, the
Speaker 2: stop motion in the live action is pretty well integrated
Speaker 2: enough that you know it's telling a story. You can
Speaker 2: get into the action.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know that. So Simon defeats the other robot.
Speaker 3: But then Acton is dying. Oh no, and they go
Speaker 3: talk to him and Acton says, don't worry you and
Speaker 3: the Prince will live and Stella is like, no, Acton,
Speaker 3: you can't die, get up, and then he has a
Speaker 3: great line what I think he wrote this.
Speaker 2: I had to note both of these because this is
Speaker 2: just this is absurd. This is it's so absurd as beautiful.
Speaker 2: Acton says, I'm no longer useful at this time. What
Speaker 2: who would say it like that?
Speaker 3: Nobody?
Speaker 2: But then Stella comes in with I can't leave you.
Speaker 2: You're the only human like friend I've ever had. I
Speaker 2: don't understand you never die, you never die. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: I mean, you're the only human like friend I've ever had.
Speaker 3: What But he's so they're saying he's not human. I
Speaker 3: think they're saying, oh, he's an alien.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but she's had never had she has no other friend.
Speaker 2: I don't know. It just seems very unbelievable.
Speaker 3: So acton he fades into a screen from an oscillator,
Speaker 3: like yeah, and then the Emperor arrives again, wearing this
Speaker 3: hilarious outfit with the metal of the full body chastity
Speaker 3: belt as you called it, and they don't leave the room.
Speaker 3: They're still in the same weapon control room. But the
Speaker 3: Emperor comes in with all of his troops and now
Speaker 3: they've got a problem. They're like, oh, father, you're here.
Speaker 3: The planet will explode in forty eight seconds. And then
Speaker 3: the Emperor says, you know, my son, I wouldn't be
Speaker 3: Emperor of the galaxy if I didn't have some powers
Speaker 3: at my disposal Imperial battleship halt the flow of time. Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this film is big on suddenly revealing just absurd
Speaker 2: cosmic powers for characters and then but then not doing
Speaker 2: anything else with those powers, Like everybody's superability is a
Speaker 2: complete one shot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Oh, you didn't know I had the Green Lantern ring. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I never mentioned that, So that like a green rays
Speaker 3: apps the planet. Everything turns green, and then the Emperor explains, quote,
Speaker 3: for the space of three minutes, every molecule on this
Speaker 3: planet will be immobilized. But after the third minute, the
Speaker 3: green ray loses its power, time will flow once more
Speaker 3: and everything will explode. And Simon says, okay, three minutes
Speaker 3: is enough. They leave and then everything explodes. So now
Speaker 3: we are barreling toward the conclusion. The Emperor comes up
Speaker 3: with the plan. All of his legions are going to
Speaker 3: launch a surprise attack on Count Zarthorn's headquarters before he
Speaker 3: can prepare for them. This will save billions of lives.
Speaker 3: But at this point I was thinking, I've seen this
Speaker 3: movie multiple times. What are they saving the lives? Like,
Speaker 3: what are the stakes here? What's going to happen if
Speaker 3: Zartharn wins?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And then the way that he is going to
Speaker 2: save billions of lives he quickly reveals is they are
Speaker 2: going to crash an enormous floating space city a city, yeah,
Speaker 2: into Zartharn's headquarters or whatever. It seems awfully destructive. I'm
Speaker 2: assuming they're going to evacuate everyone first from the space city,
Speaker 2: but they don't really flesh that out.
Speaker 3: No, you would hope they evacuate, but they don't talk
Speaker 3: about that. That's the backup plan. The first thing is, well,
Speaker 3: first of all, we check in with Count Zartharn who's
Speaker 3: giving a speech to his troops, and he says, by sunset,
Speaker 3: I'll be the new emperor and I will be master
Speaker 3: of the whole universe. Yeah, it's sunset and they're not
Speaker 3: on a planet, Master of the whole universe. But so
Speaker 3: this leads into the space battle. So the Emperor is
Speaker 3: going to attack zarthorne ship before they get to the
Speaker 3: city crash. Again, this battle has almost no dramatic interest
Speaker 3: early on, at least, it's just you know, the gold
Speaker 3: space ship zipping around shooting lasers at the clawhand ship.
Speaker 3: Now the battle, I think it's very funny once it
Speaker 3: goes to the boarding parties, when they shoot these torpedoes
Speaker 3: full of soldiers through the windows. We learned that Zarthorne's
Speaker 3: ship has windows, not like a space ship windows, it
Speaker 3: has windows like a house.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you shoot these torpedoes through which then
Speaker 2: open up like caskets and the troops climb out, which
Speaker 2: you know, I don't know, you could certainly, you know,
Speaker 2: argue about how sensible. This is, but it looks really cool.
Speaker 2: I like this. I was like I was I. I
Speaker 2: dug it every time it happened and kept hoping it
Speaker 2: would happen again, and luckily it kept happening.
Speaker 3: But it's so funny. Zarthorn is walking around while his
Speaker 3: troops are shooting at the Emperor's troops, and Zarthorn just
Speaker 3: keeps saying kill, kill over there, kill.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's really micromanaging here. You know, you don't
Speaker 2: have to tell us about which enemy troop we need
Speaker 2: to kill. We need to kill that one and that one.
Speaker 2: Just trust us to do our killing, sir.
Speaker 3: Yeah, kill over there. Yeah. So ultimately the attack fails
Speaker 3: as Zarthorn retains control of his ship, and Zarthurn says,
Speaker 3: you know, we got to use the doom Machine. We're
Speaker 3: going to send it toward the Emperor's capital world and
Speaker 3: destroy the imperial planet. And then at this point he
Speaker 3: just shouts his own name. He screams Zarthorn.
Speaker 2: I was thinking during all this it would be a
Speaker 2: pretty great name for a band, Zarthorn and the Doom Machine.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that would be great. If not Alorg he's taken,
Speaker 3: we should should we cut this part out, so we
Speaker 3: reserve that for ourselves.
Speaker 2: I mean, if someone were to really do it up,
Speaker 2: if someone could dress up as Zarthorn and then the
Speaker 2: band members could be dressed like the the Goons and
Speaker 2: the and the Gollumns here, that would be pretty cool.
Speaker 3: It's a beautiful thing. So it looks like, you know,
Speaker 3: are the heroes defeated? Stella Star thinks, so, as usual,
Speaker 3: she counsels despair. She says, there's no way to win.
Speaker 3: Zarthorne has defeated us. But the Emperor says, no, there
Speaker 3: is a way. There's one way left if we're forced
Speaker 3: to use it, we can use star Crash and Simon.
Speaker 3: Simon realizes what his father is saying. He says, a
Speaker 3: fourth dimensional attack. So that's what they're gonna do. This
Speaker 3: is what you were talking about earlier. The only way
Speaker 3: for them to win is for the greatest pilot in
Speaker 3: the universe, stell A Star, to pilot the floating city,
Speaker 3: which is something in a fourth dimensional attack against the Count,
Speaker 3: and so that you know, they get everything ready, they
Speaker 3: put her in the pilot seat and then Hasselhoff reveals, oh,
Speaker 3: by the way, your robot friend l that got smashed
Speaker 3: to pieces he's okay, and they bring him out and
Speaker 3: he's like, hey, there feels good to be turned on again.
Speaker 2: I have to say this movie has less foreshadowing than
Speaker 2: I think any film I've ever seriously thought about. You know, like,
Speaker 2: there are all these major twists, and there's nothing to
Speaker 2: tease them out earlier on, even just a little bit.
Speaker 3: So you can guess what happens from here. They're basically
Speaker 3: they're gonna ram Zarthorn with a floating city, and then
Speaker 3: Stella and the robot l they jump out a window
Speaker 3: into space before it hits and they do that and
Speaker 3: it works.
Speaker 2: Different space suit this time. This one's a little bit
Speaker 2: more traditional. I think I liked the toilet headed one
Speaker 2: from earlier more I thought that one was weirder looking.
Speaker 3: The clear toilet was better, I agree. And then Zarthorn
Speaker 3: is like, his troops are telling him they're gonna ram us.
Speaker 3: We have to escape, and he's like, come back, you fools,
Speaker 3: you cowards. And then the last thing Zarthorne says is
Speaker 3: zaar Thor.
Speaker 2: I was really hoping that he would get a Wrath
Speaker 2: of Khan moment where he's like, you know, busted up
Speaker 2: and you know, from the heart of Hell I stab
Speaker 2: at the but yeah, he didn't get that option.
Speaker 3: And then the last thing we get, oh so uh,
Speaker 3: we get the reunion of Stella and Stella Star and
Speaker 3: David Hasselhoff. Now they're in love and they stand there
Speaker 3: like looking at each other. And then the robot is like, oh, oh,
Speaker 3: I guess he's figuring out what's happening.
Speaker 2: And nobody remembers poor Acton completely Dick.
Speaker 3: He's nobody cares about him anymore. And then we cut
Speaker 3: away to the Emperor. The Emperor is gonna play us
Speaker 3: out here. So the Emperor has the last line of
Speaker 3: the film. He said, this is this is his monologue.
Speaker 3: I wrote it down. Well. By the way, he's sitting
Speaker 3: on a throne that looks like the super U logo
Speaker 3: like the car company.
Speaker 2: Does kind of. I mean, it's it's it's looks really cool,
Speaker 2: but that's looking superlego super logo.
Speaker 3: He says, well, it's done. It's happened. The stars are clear,
Speaker 3: the planets shine, weave won. Oh some dark force, no doubt,
Speaker 3: will show its face once more. The wheel will always turn.
Speaker 3: But for now it's calm, and for a little time
Speaker 3: at least we can rest.
Speaker 2: It's like a lullabus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Star Crash we can rest? Does the tagline of
Speaker 3: the movie should be now for a little time, we
Speaker 3: can rest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or they could have gone with it happened. It
Speaker 2: definitely happened, Star Crash.
Speaker 3: It's done. It happened. Well. That that I think is
Speaker 3: the greatest of the Star Wars knockoff films and a
Speaker 3: really beautiful experience.
Speaker 2: In my opinion, it is a beautiful experience. Yeah, if
Speaker 2: you were looking for a film with ludicrous dialogue but
Speaker 2: also some very interesting visuals, like you really you really
Speaker 2: have to see Star Crash, Star Crashes is absolutely must see.
Speaker 2: And like I say, if you if you dig watching
Speaker 2: rift content that m S T three K episode believe
Speaker 2: that was I think I said earlier Jonah episode very good.
Speaker 2: Check it out. But also, this is a film that
Speaker 2: absolutely stands on its own.
Speaker 3: Yeah it is.
Speaker 2: It is quite an experience, but it also might break
Speaker 2: something inside of you. Just so be aware, know your
Speaker 2: own limits, know your own strengths when when it comes
Speaker 2: to films like this.
Speaker 3: Absolutely Okay, I think that does it.
Speaker 2: For me, all right, Yeah yeah, and hey, maybe we'll
Speaker 2: have to come back to contamination in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all right, so we love to hear from everyone out there.
Speaker 2: Do you have personal experience with Star Crash? You write in,
Speaker 2: let us know about it. Where'd you first see it?
Speaker 2: What do you what do you think about it? I'd
Speaker 2: love to hear from anyone who saw it, like in
Speaker 2: the wake of the original Star Wars. You know, what
Speaker 2: was that like to have this film injected into into
Speaker 2: the immediate cinematic environment. But you know, any any kind
Speaker 2: of connections you have with the film? Yeah, yeah, write
Speaker 2: in let's talk about it. Just a reminder that Stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture
Speaker 2: podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But in
Speaker 2: the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed wherever you
Speaker 2: get it, wherever you get your audio podcasts, or if
Speaker 2: you watch the video version on Netflix on Fridays, that
Speaker 2: is when we do a little weird house cinema. That's
Speaker 2: our time to set aside most serious concerns and just
Speaker 2: talk about a weird film.
Speaker 3: Here's thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say Hello.
Speaker 3: You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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