Starcrash

If you want to see how bad this is, spare yourself the whole thing and just watch the opening scene. Watching the horrible actors manage flub the timing of their three-word sentences is a sight to behold.

Funny? Absolutely! Watching the bad guy order his troops into combat with the stirring words of "Kill!" while they slide down the bat poles will bring a smile to the face of anyone. And that soundtrack, wow!

Forget the nonsensical plot, terrible special effects and poor acting, it's got Christopher Plumber and a bunch of excuses for Stella Star to get attacked by the worst stop-frame animated robots in history. What more could you ask for?

I've been a fan of this movie for many years,a friend who used to work in a video shop told me of it,he said it was just like Star Wars ! He was both right and wrong in the same breath.It is a Star Wars inspired movie,but also borrows heavily from Barbarella,Flash Gordon etc... As to it being as good as the original...no way ! It is however better than the 2 prequels and was probably the same price for the whole movie as their catering costs ! If you've not seen it...do so now !

When "Star Crash" appeared in the U.S., my local newspaper's film critic noted: "...You have to be suspicious of a movie that literally sneaks into town...". That remark left me curious, but not curious enough; after just one week "Star Crash" had left town as quietly as it had come in. Why would any movie get so little push from its' distributor, I wondered? Could it really be that bad? It took me years to find out. Some dozen or so years later, a friend of mine told me he had a copy...well, I couldn't pass this up. After seeing it, I decided that the critics were right--and wrong. Such a hoot! Caroline Munro definitely set the mood in her almost-not-there "space-kini" and high-heeled boots, with Marjoe Gortner pulling backup as 2nd banana. Cheesy special FX, a painfully earnest performance by Christopher Plummer (you can practically see him wondering if his paycheck will clear the bank when he's finished), and a surprisingly good score ( hey, it's John Barry, what did you expect?)make this a pleasant surprise, as long as you're not expecting anything on par with E.E. "Doc" Smith, etc. A small note: I got to meet Ms. Munro at an SF convention back in '82, and I totally agree with Harlan Ellison...she was so gorgeous in person that "they had to ugly her down, so that the cameras wouldn't melt during filming!"....Though I forgot to ask her if it was true that only copy of the shooting script had been stolen by members of Italy's Red Brigade terrorists and held for ransom! Ah, rumors...anyway, try and catch it for free and you won't feel cheated.

Sometimes i think i like this even more than i like Star Wars.

First it´s got a great soundtrack by John Barry. In fact this soundtrack is so good that he even riped-off from himself, and we can hear a slight diferent version in OUT OF AFRICA, but not much diferent as it is instantly recognizable as the music from STARCRASH, from everyone who loves this italian mega-low budget space opera thing.

Anyway, STARCRASH has something very special to me that i still can´t figure it out to this day.

Even with its cardboard sets, spaceship models ridiculous costumes and clothes, ultra bad dialogue and crapy special effects which in fact are not even effects,much less special, STARCRASH is still one of my all time favorites space movies.

Idiotic villains, half naked space babes, a robbot named HAL with the personality of C-3PO (!!!?), light sabres duels and lots space battles, this movie has it all !

It even has a giant battlestation, with glass windows, vitral style, which are shattered by the good guys when they invade the station inside missile capsules who break all the windows in the final battle. And even with the glass broken nothing happens, no decompression, no air being sucked out into space, nothing ! It´s hilarious. Classic moment in Bad movies no doubt.

Man! Even DAVID HASSELHOF is in this ! A long, long time ago in a galaxy very far away from BAYWATCH. Altough the character of STELLA STAR has everything to be in Baywatch.

I recomend this movie to everybody, who loves Bad movies and particulary if you love science fiction. This is more fun than Star Wars ! :-)

What´s great about STARCRASH is that it doesn´t try to be more than what actualy is, a great bad movie. Even the actors seem to be having fun in this ! Or maybe they´re just desperated to get out of it. :-)

But it works, and it works great.

It´s fun to watch, it has a good 30´s classical plot for space opera story, it is very atmospheric and the soundtrack is beautiful.

Even the sound effects are cool, with very strange eletronic blips and noises, that reminds me of those 50´s invasion movies sometimes.

I guess there is nothing more i can say.

STARCRASH is one of those movies that you either love or hate with all your guts !

I love it.

Just don´t look at this as a serious film, and you´ll have fun for sure watching it. Brilliant stuff !

When I saw stills of this movie back in 1979, I thought someone had finally made a film just for me. It had spaceships, and robots and something that Star Wars didn't have: Caroline Munro. I waited in vain for its appearance at the cinema. It turned up on TV one afternoon in the beginning of 1985. Well, it was nearly the film I had been waiting for. Overall, it's got everything a b-movie addict can want: ambitious, but not always successful visual effects, at least one Shakespearian actor forced to recite comic strip dialogue, plenty of continuity errors, and a number of very attractive young women, principally, the said Miss Munro, as Stella Star.

It was a shock to find that the very English tones of Caroline had been dubbed by an American voice artist, but that's the movie business. The French speaking version(even for non-French speakers, such as myself) is preferable. Stella's voice is light and playful, and the robot, instead of the 'amusing' cowboy voice in the English language version, talks in mournful, echoey tones, which, for me, works very well.

Caroline Munro, although playing the central character, gets rather sidelined throughout the proceedings; however, she has two scenes in the first part of the story in which the action revolves around her, and if these are the best parts of the whole movie. Her skirmish with a tribe of amazons makes for a very exciting sequence. Inexplicably, but stunningly clad in a shiny black bikini, and thigh length boots, she dominates this sequence. It's a shame that an important section of it, in which the amazons attach her to a mind-probe device, was deleted because of film exposure problems. The film does, unfortunately, contain several instances where a prop or effect has been abandoned at the last minute, and a build-up is all for nothing.

Seek out one of the early drafts on the script (tucked away on the DVD set, if you dig deep enough), to get some idea of what might have been, had not the production been plagued with misfortune.

There are several ways to enjoy this movie. Pick out the bits you like, and ignore the rest; look on it as a latter-day Flash Gordon Serial-style entertainment (it does rattle along at breakneck speed when it gets going), and forget all about logic, and literacy, and the rules of storytelling; or just shut your eyes and listen to John Barry's fabulous orchestral score.

I like Starcrash for two reasons. Caroline Munro is one of them. The other is the fact that Luigi Cozzi wanted to make the movie he'd always wanted to see. He'd written the script before Star Wars came out, and it was only pressure from the studio that forced him to imitate elements of that film. Conversely, it was budget restraints and studio disputes that hampered his efforts.

At the beginning of this review, I made what may seem like a disparaging remark about the visual effects. In a day when we're used to spectacular CGI extravaganzas produced by hundreds of artists and technicians, and costing millions, it's well to consider that most of the effects on this movie were created by one guy with little time, few facilities and a comparitively tiny budget. It's easy to guffaw at the occasional stray shadow on a sky background, but I think what Armando Valcauda achieved, under the circumstances, was, to quote Stella, 'incredible'.

Ultimately, one of the most appealing shots of Caroline Munro as Stella Star is near the end, when Stella Star is swimming through space, and we get a close-up of her very beautiful smile through the visor of her helmet. It kind of makes you feel better, just looking at her.