Saturday, September 26, 2015

Galaxy Girls (Falcon Films, 1997)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that the Mars movie showing went on to a film alternately called Galaxy Girls and Alien Escape, produced for a considerably bigger budget than Oversexed Rugsucker from Mars ($1,000,000 as opposed to $4,000 — when I posted the budget figure from Oversexed Rugsucker to imdb.com I got back an error message reading, “The budget figure appears to be too low” — which undoubtedly Michael Paul Girard agreed with!) and aimed by its makers, Falcon Films (in the business of soft-core porn for straight guys rather than namesake Falcon Studios, which made hard-core porn for Gay guys), at an audience of straight men desperately to see reasonably attractive women going topless. Oh, there’s a plot of sorts — a spaceship has landed and buried itself near a women-only ranch where the three heroines, Cindy (Gail Harris), Becky (Heather Ford) and Shauna (Yvette McClendon), were planning to stay, only when they get there the proprietess, Janet (Monique Parent), has mysteriously disappeared and her place has been taken by Laticia (Leslie Kaye), whom we first see adorning her nude body with sunscreen. Laticia is a hard-bitten mystery woman without a clue how to cook — she prepares an elaborate lamb stew that turns out to be a mix of unchopped vegetables and overly spiced broth; she got the recipe from a cookbook but totally misunderstood the instructions — and she may or may not be a space alien impersonating a human. There are at least two aliens from the spaceship — which isn’t identified as being from Mars anywhere in the film’s actual dialogue, though the theme song, “Martians at the Window” by Kaliedoscope (so spelled on the imdb.com page and probably deliberately misspelled to avoid confusion and lawsuits from the members of the real 1960’s psychedelic band Kaleidoscope), does use the M-word — who are running around killing people, including Brad (Christopher Leman), asshole prosecutor who’s both the employer and the boyfriend of one of Our Heroines, and the woman hitchhiker he picks up (in both senses of the word) on his way down the mountain — and at one point they take possession of one of the big-bosomed girls in this movie (as I’ve joked about other films like this before, it doesn’t feature women, it features girls) and one of the other girls has to shoot her. Galaxy Girls has a few genuinely funny lines — when two of the girls are about to walk into the buried spaceship and one of them warns the entrance might be “the Gates of Hell … like a hole in the ground that leads right to Satan,” another jokes, “You’re thinking about a singles bar” — but the movie pretty much drones on and on and on, and about the only interesting character is Matt (Bernie Van De Yacht, which I was sure was a pseudonym but turns out to be the actor’s real name — he was the last of 12 kids from a German-American family in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and he’s worked mostly as a casting director but has nine credits as an actor, though only three are for feature-length films and one of them, Married People, Single Sex II: For Better or Worse, has a title that virtually guarantees Charles would hate it), the genuinely attractive man who comes in on the action in mid-movie, has a hot soft-core porn sex scene with one of the bimbos and turns out to be a secret agent from the aliens’ home planet sent to capture them before they kill too many more earthlings. Galaxy Girls isn’t much as a movie — one suspects the audience most likely to like it would be guys who’d been either on a desert island or a chain gang for decades and had forgotten what women look like — yet at least the character of Matt gave straight women and Gay men a reason to see this!