Starcrash (1978)

aka The Adventures of Stella Star

Intergalactic smuggler Stella Star (Caroline Munro) and her weird-ass partner Akton (Marjoe Gortner) have been giving the forces of Law and Order quite the run for their money. Finally caught and sentenced to a quintillion years of hard labour, Stella stages a daring escape which is rudely interrupted by a plea for help from the Emperor of the First Circle of the Galaxy (Christopher Plummer) – whatever that is - himself. Apparently, the evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell) - not Sa Tan, alright - has developed a planet sized secret weapon of horrifying destructive power.

All attempts at actually locating the planet where this weapon is hidden have come up empty and even resulted in the disappearance of the Emperor’s only son Simon (David Hasselhoff) while looking for it. Stella’s superior piloting and Akton’s excellent navigational skills are the only hope left to the forces of good. They are to be supported by one Chief Thor (Robert Tessier) and the law robot who caught them, one Elle (the voice of the fittingly named Howard Camp in the body of Judd Hamilton). Obviously, the bad guys aren’t going to make things easy for them.

Fortunately, Stella has more luck than a Corellian smuggler, and Akton gets a new superpower whenever the plot needs it.

Among the various attempts at ripping off Star Wars on the cheap, this US-Italian co-production directed by the great Luigi Cozzi is one of the most entertaining. Nobody’d ever confuse it with one of those boring “good” films, but it certainly is a great one, a triumph of crass commercialism somehow turning into a feast of childish/child-like imagination, barely suppressed horniness and a love for the joys of pulp science fiction.

The films production design often suggests Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off, full of shapes and constructions that look sort of like the real thing if you squint but never quite so much as to invite a law suit. Every space ship interior, space(!) cavern and mine looks cheaper, weirder and more improbable than in the movie’s guiding light, but little of it looks carelessly thrown together. This may be the tackier, cheaper version of what George Lucas did, but it is a tackiness and cheapness somebody has clearly worked hard at, so it feels personable, alive, and exciting in a deeply goofy yet undeniable way.

Also palpable, and very typical of Cozzi as well as Italian SF cinema as a whole, is a sense of enthusiasm when it comes to hands on special effects. The stop motion robots may be ill advised, what with them looking as if they come right out of a peplum, yet they are also lovely, silly and exciting. The same goes for miniature effects that hold up to little scrutiny while exuding a sense of sheer joy. I can’t help but imagine Cozzi (who is a genre movie nerd in the best meaning of the phrase) looking at what he has wrought grinning from ear to ear.

The script does its very best to hit all of the pulp science fiction tropes, not just those Star Wars used, so the plot evolves/devolves into a series of encounters with everything from evil space amazons to space cave men, environmental dangers our heroes survive via random magical space powers, and only from time to time touches base with more direct, usually preposterous moments trying to evoke light sabres and Jedi.

On the acting side, Starcrash is a series of inexplicable yet awesome casting and acting decisions. See Joe Spinell as the awkwardly overweight big bad from what I can only assume to be Space New York! Be astonished at the way Caroline Munro goes through most of the movie in what amounts to fetish gear (particularly the colour-changed Vampirella costume is quite the thing, what little there is of it) and makes the costumes look like clothes a woman would actually wear! Puzzle at whatever Marjoe Gortner is doing in his role as Han Skywalker Wan, and at whatever any of his facial expressions mean! Gaze in awe at Christopher Plummer’s heroic attempts at suppressing the giggles by speaking very, very softly, attempting to project great personal charisma and sleepiness at the same time (whose flow he can hold, by the way, because of course he can)!

There are glories to behold in Starcrash.

Pray for the Wildcats (1974)

Rich macho asshole and deeply unpleasant sleazebag Sam Farragut (Andy Griffith) is one of the richest, most lucrative and most important clients of an ad agency. He knows it too, and because he is that sort of man, he uses his position to belittle, manipulate and denigrate the poor guys who are in charge of his account. So the plan for a campaign using Baja California in Mexico as the backdrop for his campaign turns into him blackmailing his “favourite” ad executives into going on a dirt bike trip through the desert with him, or else. So off Warren Summerfield (William Shatner), his old colleague and work buddy Paul (Robert Reed) and young turk fancying himself an artist Terry Maxon (Marjoe Gortner) have to go with him, as if they didn’t have their own problems. Namely, Warren is in some sort of quantum state of being secretly half-fired, with Paul pegged as his replacement, while Warren is sleeping with Paul’s wife Nancy (Angie Dickinson) who clearly wants the also married Warren as a replacement for Paul in her life. Warren is also suicidal, and believes the trip might just be the way for him to kill himself and make it look like an accident, leaving a fat insurance policy for his family as some sort of ultimate, idiotic “I’m sorry I failed at being THE MAN SOCIETY TELLS ME I’M SUPPOSED TO BE!”. Terry for his part as problems admitting to himself that the work he is doing stands against all of his supposed values, and that he’s turning into a Yes Man for the worst kind of person possible, even though pretending Farragut isn’t the worst humanity has to offer is pretty much akin to talking oneself into a state of actual delusion.

Things don’t get better for anyone in Baja, not just because Farragut just loves to push everybody’s buttons, but because he’ll also turn out to be a murderer just waiting for an opportunity and a pretext.

I don’t generally fall into this jargon (it’s not really mine, philosophically), so when even I want to call Robert Michael Lewis’s TV movie about a trio of ad men, all broken in their own, distinct ways, and their horrible rich guy client a film about the destructive force of various 70s versions of toxic masculinity, it probably really is that. The script by Jack Turley isn’t exactly subtle about this either, doubling down on everything that’s dysfunctional about these men and how dangerous and oppressive this kind of dysfunctionality is for those around them; unlike a film made today would be, it’s not without compassion for these men (except for Farragut), though, so it will not only show them as the destructive forces they are, but also grief how they got there. It doesn’t show a terrible amount of hope for them ever getting better, alas.

Even the way the film side-lines the female characters after the first act for the main narrative thrust but never wants to quite lose sight of them seems to be a pointed, conscious choice, suggesting much about the divide between men and women the culture they live in will build, even when there’s love and an actual human connection between them.

Because that’s not quite enough for a little TV movie, apparently, Pray also adds an equally unsubtle yet effective criticism of a style of capitalism that seems to be build to create exactly this kind of behaviour in men, turning artists into yes-men, and middle-aged men bitter and self-destructive because they can’t quite keep up with the monsters.

Not surprisingly with this cast and the film’s themes, there’s quite a bit of scenery chewing going around, though it’s really Griffith (with the understandable relish of a guy who mostly played the aw-shucks Southerner in his career) and Reed who take the greatest bites, while Shatner, quite unexpectedly, turns in a comparatively nuanced (for his acting style, obviously) performance that makes quite a bit out of all the little hurts, betrayals and self-betrayals this character’s life has become, somehow making Warren more sympathetic than you’d believe.

With all of this going on, it’s not much of a surprise that the film’s actual thriller plot takes a bit of a backseat and is really just there to give characters the final push into the direction fate and the script need them to go; but then, that’s not so much a criticism than it is an observation.

Three Films Make A Post: A Western Classic in the tradition of 'Shane' and 'High Noon'.

Bite the Bullet (1975): This Western (not at all in the tradition of Shane and High Noon, whatever the taglines said) by Richard Brooks concerns an early 20th Century horse race across the Southwest of the USA. It’s a film certainly interested in the adventure, and the physical toll these adventures take, but at its core, the film does very much treat its race as a way to explore the nature of the USA, the divisions of class and race, the way crass commercialism can turn into acts of quiet heroism, the vagaries of love on an aging cowboy’s wages, and the way people of a certain age drag their pasts around with them. With Gene Hackman, James Coburn, Candice Bergen, Ben Johnson, Jan-Micheal Vincent and so on, it has a cast that helps Brooks turn something that could be a bit too didactic for its own good into something at once lively and epic.

Rancho Deluxe (1975): Frank Perry’s Rancho Deluxe, made in the same year, seems also very interested in the question of America. But unlike the Brooks film, it also has an anarchic quality to it and quite a few jokes, good, bad, and strange to make, so it never quite seems to come to an argument, and certainly no conclusion, except that sex and nudity are good (and pretty funny), rich people suck (in a very non-sexual manner), and that there’s something to be said for having a very peculiar sense of humour. And everything’s better with Jeff Bridges and Harry Dean Stanton, of course.

Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976): Keeping with the decade, this AIP production directed by Mark L. Lester does its best to transfer the kind of Bonnie and Clyde doomed gangster plot that’s more at home in the depression era US into then contemporary times, with mixed results. From time to time, the film really hits on a moment or two that manages to cast very different times in parallel; at other times, it just seems to go through the sub-genre motions and couldn’t afford the period dress. The performances by our titular characters, Marjoe Gortner (also getting to preach for a moment) and Lynda Carter (who also sings and is nude, providing for more than one kink, it that’s why you’re here), are a mixed bag too, both making at least half of their scenes more interesting through their presence and choice, the other half more awkward.

It’s never a less than interesting film, though – and even this early in his career, Lester knew how to shoot a great low budget action scene or three.

Three Films Make A Post: Sometimes love is a strange and wicked game.

Atomic Blonde (2017): This action-heavy spy movie is a pretty big disappointment, managing to waste the enormous talents of a great cast (though the usually great Charlize Theron is about as British as Donald Trump, but then, her character never feels British in any way either), and a seldom used setting on a series of empty gestures that suggests the film wants to be a smart, POP! version of the spy genre but only ever reaches the smug and the arbitrary. The setting of Berlin just before the fall of the Wall is neither authentic nor inauthentic in interesting ways, instead a series of lame clichés presented with the same self-congratulatory gestures the film uses for everything. Unfortunately, there’s really no substance here, no point, no philosophy, no interesting character arcs; and when it comes to the style and surface values, director David Leitch is clearly trying but it doesn’t come much of it.

The Constant Gardener (2005): This John le Carré adaptation by Fernando Meirelles on the other hand has substance, style and actual British people and combines an angry anti-colonialist subtext with deep and complex characterisation, excellent acting not just by leads Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, and the quiet desperation you often find in le Carré. It’s particularly admirable how elegantly Meirelles mixes two very different genres, the conspiracy thriller and the scenes of a marriage type drama in a way that suggests – but never actually states – commonality between private failings of trust and public corruption and lies that goes beyond the more simple game of betrayal.


Mausoleum (1983): If you’re making it through Michael Dugan’s very silly yet highly entertaining possession horror movie (made in a time when possession horror wasn’t necessarily about exorcisms and the possessed hanging out on the ceiling) you’ll become highly acquainted with the breasts of lead actress Bobbie Bresee, in their traditional state as well as dolled up with John Buechler devised demon mouth nipples (with teeth), you will believe that eyes glow green, as well as that cursed-based possession is best cured by elderly doctors putting a crown of thorns on the possessee’s head. You will also witness Marjoe Gortner’s hilarious death face, a bewildering twist ending, and all the latex and rubber Dugan could get out of Buechler. In between, there’s even more nudity, characters who all act as if they were in a porn movie, and some pretty damn funny 80s style deaths. Obviously, it’s not a good movie in a traditional sense (at least if you’re like me and expect mood, character or narrative of one) but it certainly never bores even for a second.