Star Crystal

In the year 2032, a mysterious, oddly-shaped rock is retrieved from just underneath the Mars surface. It turns out to contain a crystal and a pile of slime that slowly evolves into a predatory life form (named Gar!). Gar causes lots of damage before eventually terrorizing the five astronauts adrift in a shuttlecraft, a long ways from civilization.

If it weren't for the final act, which this viewer wasn't expecting, he would have been prepared to just write this one off. It's amateurish on almost every level (especially in terms of acting and writing), and director Lance Lindsay isn't capable of producing a sufficient amount of tension from the familiar, tired plot. (This, despite the fact that all the rooms on this ship are connected by long, winding, dark tunnels which the astronauts have to CRAWL through.). Ultimately, the story gets just a little too cute, which flies in the face of the nastiness that came before.

The characters are by and large inane, although the last two astronauts standing finally become a little more tolerable as they face off against Gar. The performances are absolutely nothing special, and in fact can be pretty abrasive. That said, the obligatory "first victim" in this is a hoot in her crankiness. Gar itself is a reasonably amusing creation; the creature effects (and especially the gore on the victims) is actually not all that bad. The electronic score adds a bit of atmosphere.

This isn't a B genre flick that this viewer would really recommend, although he couldn't bring himself to completely hate it.

Four out of 10.

Oh this wasn't good. Far from it! The problem here is that isn't entertaining and it seems to get worse as it goes along, but 'Star Crystal' is a hard one to get your head around. Everything looks bare bones… and it is. But what does it in, is that it just lounging about… aimlessly. It was completely dull and uneventfully drawn out. Wooden performances, drably second-rate sets and vapid dialogues in the mould of 'Alien (1979)'. Truly routine, but a z-grade rehash! We get some tentacle action as the meagre crew are quickly picked off when they encounter the threat. So it's the survival of the fittest, with some minor hopeless diversions. Then it spontaneously changes course in the last 10 minutes (you'll see), and I don't know what the film-makers were thinking. It was so unhinged and ridiculous; you could be mistaken in asking "Was it the same movie?" However talk about cheese… super cheesy and laughable! 'can we just get along?' And wait for the sweetly weeping closing song about crystal… Oh why? Saying it was goofy is an understatement, but hey you can't see this one coming.

The special effects must have received top-billing, (no it did, but scrap the meteor shower sequence) with few icky inclusions and dashes of blood, but it's still a spotty display. The creature is mixture of a slug and fluorescent E.T., as we watch it morph from a puddle that dripped off some outerspace crystal. The score has that dreamy, soft edge that seems to meld in quite well.

You get a warning pretty early on into this film that it has the budget that could probably buy you a bag of crisps and maybe a Coke at a cheap convenience store, and you don't even have to get past the credits.

The actors are literally no-names, none of them having starred in anything before. The director and editor both pulled multiple duties by writing, directing, editing, producing, and working on the SFX.

The plot is standard "we found a strange evil thing somewhere".

None of this is necessarily a bad thing. Alien used the same plot to explore very dark themes. John Carpenter made the brilliant Dark Star with almost no money.

Unfortunately, the difference is that those films were made by people with talent. Star Crystal, sadly, isn't.

We have tons of the bad movie staples, from shots holding too long on certain things and not enough on others, to abysmal acting. The opening scenes alone have about five establishing shots of the same darn spaceship. I get it guys, we're on the same ship, since no one moved anywhere, I don't see why you have to keep telling me about it.

I will say that some of the special effects are decent (for the time), but this would have worked better as a short film to generate a budget for something better. The alien has a cool icky feeling to it, all creepy flesh and slime.

It's mildly diverting for the occasional funny badness on display and ridiculously over-the-top school play acting.

Watch it if you can get it free.

Ah, the 80's...They brought us such wonders as Power Ballads and the Rubix cube. However, one thing from the 80's didn't survive the changes between decades, and that was SCi-fi horror (aliens not included).

Star Crystal seemed to start as a typical sci-fi, but quickly provided an initial plot twist. Not to say the story was confusing, because it was blatently obvious. In fact, the thin plot allowed you to take wagers on who'd get hacked next. The bets were up on the second placer, but the house appeared to win.

The cast of this movie was like a convention of people trying (and failing) to get into movies. Not that the poorly written dialog could ever enable them to lift off the pad.

While B-movie fans (such as myself) will enjoy the exceptionally bloody and gooey deaths, and the bucketfuls of slime everywhere, the movie does lack any kind of female scream (which is a necessity in B-movies).

The movie was a half decent horror flick until the morals took a severe 180 that nearly broke my neck. The change in the tide was the nail in the coffin that ruined something that was nearly a waste of time to begin with.

Being a connoseur of B-movies, I recommend this for B-movie-athons. (an excellent performance by someone named "The Gling")

Trying to explain this thing would probably take me longer than what it took the genius behind its script to write it, so I'll just say you have to watch it to believe it. Probably the most expensive thing they spent their self-evident tiny budget was to buy the model toy of the Millenium Falcon that they shamelessly show in various scenes of the movie (I'm not lying, they really do!). What begins as an Alien rip-off ends up becoming in some sort of E. T. parody. As I said, all too weird and bad. Very bad. I recommend its viewing, but only if you manage to get a copy for free.

My final rating: 3 Stars (1 star for the awesome cover, 1 star for some cool effects. The extra Star because of the Millenium Falcon). Zero Crystals.