by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The second film on the program, Galaxina, was so wretched it made Starcrash look like a neglected masterpiece by comparison!
This time the principal culprit was writer, producer and director William
Sachs, who made this movie for something called Marimark Productions (were his
parents named Mary and Mark, and did he conjure up this name as a mashup the
way Harvey and Bob Weinstein named Miramax after their parents, Miriam and Max?) in association with Crown
International Pictures — once again confirming my general theory of bad cinema
that especially awful movies come from studios with the word “International” in
their names. The main interest in Galaxina comes from the actress — if, to quote Dwight Macdonald about Haya
Harareet in Ben-Hur, I may use
the term for courtesy — who plays the title role, a blonde robot who’s part of
the crew of the space police patrol ship Infinity (which itself looks like a discarded dog bone). Her
name was Dorothy R. Stratten, and she is considerably more famous for her
tragic end than for anything she accomplished in her too-brief career. Born on
February 28, 1960 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Stratten blossomed as
a beauty in her teens and attracted the attention of a promoter named Paul
Snider, who determined to make her first a Playboy centerfold and then a movie star. He got her into Playboy, which named her Playmate of the Year for 1979, and
got her some parts in films like Americathon (1979) — a sadly underrated farce about a telethon
held to rescue the U.S. from being totally broke — and Skatetown,
U.S.A. as well as an episode of the TV
series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Snider also married her but things didn’t go well
between them: he came onto the set of Galaxina and harassed her.
Meanwhile, she had been cast by
director Peter Bogdanovich in a semi-major film called They All
Laughed, and she and Bogdanovich began an
affair, which sent Snider into a jealous hissy-fit; he lured her to his
apartment, tied her up, sexually assaulted her and killed her, then committed
suicide. This tragedy became the subject of a quite good and tremendously
underrated film by Bob Fosse, Star 80 (after the personalized license plate Snider had bought Stratten to
predict she’d become a star in 1980, the year he actually killed her), and as
with the few films made by Sharon Tate before she was butchered by Charles
Manson’s “Family,” the macabre end of Stratten’s career has produced a cult
around the few films she did live
to make. The best thing that can be said for Galaxina was that Sachs deliberately intended it as a spoof of both Star Wars and Star Trek — though, to quote Dwight Macdonald again, this is one of those films
that “in form and intent must be classified as comedies” even though, aside
from a few modestly amusing lines here and there, the film contains nothing
funny — at least nothing intentionally funny. From the moment we hear Avery Schreiber as starship commander
Cornelius Butt (a name that in itself sums up William Sachs’s non-sense of
humor!) intoning a “captain’s log” in the most sententious manner of William
Shatner in the original Star Trek,
we know what we’re in for: a film that’s way less funny than its creator clearly thought it was.
The rest of the crew of the starship Infinity (in one of the film’s few genuine bits of wit, the
crew members wear the infinity symbol as a patch on their uniforms) consists of
Sergeant Thor (Stephen Macht, top-billed) and slacker Buzz (James David
Hinton), and I must say these two guys did considerably more for me, uh, aesthetically than Marjoe Gortner and David Hasselhoff had in Starcrash. Two other crew members include Maurice (Lionel Mark
Smith), who seems to have been designed as a cross between Mr. Spock and the
Bat Boy from the Weekly World News;
and Sam Wo (Tad Horino), who looks like Ho Chi Minh, constantly smokes what we
presume to be an opium pipe, and delivers stupid-sounding aphorisms that just
annoy the other people present.
As for Galaxina herself, she’s dressed in a
white jumpsuit that does a good job of showing off the curves of Dorothy
Stratten’s body and sits in a white swivel chair in which she revolves herself
— that’s all she does for the first half of the film until she finally develops (or at least exhibits) the capacity to
speak in mid-movie. Thereupon she and Sgt. Thor fall in love, if you can call
it that — she throws herself at him but he’s disappointed because she doesn’t
have a vagina (referred to with a lot of cutesy-poo euphemisms aimed at
preserving the film’s PG rating and therefore its accessibility to the horny
teenage straight guys who were obviously its target audience), though she
explains that one can be added as an optional part for an extra fee, and when
he bemoans that they can’t have kids she says, “Those are an option, too.” The
big sequence is one in which our slacker heroes land on a planet that was
originally an Australia-style exile for particularly obnoxious criminals —
including the descendants of a motorcycle gang who congregate around the one
bike they have left over and solemnly intone the praises of their god, “Harley
David Son.” There’s also a gimmick in which the slacker heroes visit something
billed as a “Human Restaurant” whose alien clientele is an obvious ripoff of
the Cantina Bar scene in the original Star Wars — only they realize, almost too late, that humans aren’t the intended clientele but rather the bill of fare
(a gag done far more subtly and frighteningly in the “To Serve Man” episode of
the original Twilight Zone).
Needless to say, since this is supposed to be at least in part a Star
Wars spoof there has to be a Darth Vader
analogue — he’s called “Ordric” and the only visible difference between him and
the real deal is his costume is red instead of black (and like Darth Vader he’s
played by two different people, Ronald Knight physically and Percy Rodrigues
vocally).
The whole plot turns around the need of both the good and the bad
guys to find the “Blue Star,” a stone of infinite power whose possession will
make its owner the master of the universe (didn’t Wagner and Tolkien do that
already with a ring?), which the good guys recover from the bad guys, only the
rock-eating monster the Infinity
crew had previously arrested and then released when they needed his help after
the bad guys had imprisoned them
takes the Blue Star and eats it. About the only good thing about Galaxina is that, bereft of enough money to commission an
original score, Sachs decided to use pre-existing music, and for the first
two-thirds one gets to hear some great classical music on the soundtrack. Some of it was familiar from
previous (and far better!) science-fiction films, including Franz Liszt’s Les
Prèludes (the principal theme from the
third and last Universal Flash Gordon serial, Flash Gordon Conquers
the Universe, though Sachs used a lot more
of the piece than the makers of the Flash Gordon film did!) and the inevitable
opening of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (heard in a bizarre scene in which Commander Butt
approaches the rest of his crew on a moving platform). The film also includes
bits of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and
Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet,
and two excerpts from Rossini’s last opera, William Tell: not only the concluding “Lone Ranger” theme from
the opera’s overture but the aria “Selva opaca,” quite nicely sung on the
soundtrack but mimed to on screen incongruously by a male puppet as part of an
interstellar TV broadcast that also features clips from the 1962 film First
Spaceship on Venus, another Crown
International release (and it’s a tribute to the awfulness of Galaxina that compared to it, even First Spaceship
on Venus looks like a masterpiece!). The
best way to sum up Galaxina is to
say I came to it with low expectations — and it disappointed even those!
