by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday afternoon there
was a special screening at the Golden Hill site of the monthly Mars movie
nights (http://marsmovieguide.com/) and
the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings (http://sdvsf.org/)
the third Friday and Saturday of each month, respectively: the proprietor
decided to do a third one in a row and scheduled a matinee of two films
proclaimed in advance as “Bad Movies.” They certainly lived up to that
designation! The first was a 1978 Star Wars ripoff called … well, it’s uncertain whether the
title is Star Crash (two
words) or Starcrash (one
word): Starcrash is what appears on the
opening credits and how the film is listed on imdb.com, but the poster art says
Star Crash and that’s how the
proprietor of the Golden Hill screening promoted it. It’s another movie
directed by Luigi Cozzi under the Anglo pseudonym “Lewis Coates,” and like Contamination, the 1980 “Coates” film shown last Friday, it’s a
cheap ripoff of an American hit (Contamination was an obvious knock-off of Alien). Cozzi not only directed but also wrote the
script with his co-producer, Nat Wachsberger (the other producer was Nat’s
brother Patrick), whom I’d heard of only as the producer with whom Jerry Lewis
famously butted heads on his 1982 production The Day the Clown Cried, whose plot premise — a famous clown incarcerated
in Auschwitz during the Holocaust vainly tries to keep his fellow inmates
amused until the Nazis knock them all off — anticipates the later hit Life
Is Beautiful.
The film features mostly a
“C”-list cast of the era, including Marjoe Gortner (one of the odder
celebrities thrown up by the 1970’s; his parents were traveling evangelists and
they not only gave him an evangelical name — “Marjoe” is a mashup of “Mary” and
“Joseph” — they trotted him out in front of revivals at age four and billed him
as the world’s youngest evangelist, a career her pursued until the 1960’s, when
he was sufficiently impressed by the youth culture in general and the hippies
in particular that he shifted his message from fire-and-brimstone Christianity
to peace-and-love Christianity, much to the disgust of his audiences — so he
determined to do one last tour as a fire-and-brimstoner, have it filmed for a
documentary, and then go for a secular career as an actor), Caroline Munro (though
in the English dubbed version her voice was replaced by Candy Clark), David
Hasselhoff and one genuinely important star, Christopher Plummer. The film
opens in a spaceship being piloted by an android named Akton (Marjoe Gortner)
and his human co-commander, Stella Star (Caroline Munro in some surprisingly
skimpy outfits that show off her bod quite nicely), along with your usual
tin-can robot whom I assumed was called “L” or “El” but is listed in the cast
as “Elle” even though there’s nothing remotely feminine about him — neither in
Judd Hamilton’s posture as he walks around in the black tin-can suit on screen
or Hamilton Camp’s intonations as he supplies the voice on the soundtrack.
The
not-particularly-dynamic trio visit various planets and ultimately get
embroiled in attempting to foil a plot by Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell) — as
with the movie’s title, there’s confusion as to whether his last name is one
word or two (it’s “Zarth Arn” in the opening credits and “Zartharn” in the
closing ones) — who’s made up to look like a cross between Princess Leia and
Shakespeare and who seems to have modeled his acting style on Vincent Price at
his campiest. Zarth Arn is attempting to depose and kill the rightful Emperor
(Christopher Plummer — one wonders how, just 13 years after The Sound of
Music, his fortunes had fallen
so low he had to take a job like this!) and also get rid of the Emperor’s son Simon (David Hasselhoff, who
goes through most of the movie looking like he wished that talking car would
come along and rescue him from it). In the end Elle gets disintegrated but is
able to pull his parts back together, Akton also gets killed but isn’t so lucky
as to be able to reassemble himself, the Count’s dastardly plot is defeated and
the Emperor is restored to his rightful throne, while his son Simon and Stella
Star are paired off. One other major name was associated with this film,
composer John Barry, whose most famous piece is the “James Bond Theme” that’s
been used in virtually all the Bond movies, and who wrote complete scores for
most of the early Bonds. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the
filmmakers carefully kept Barry from being able to watch any of the movie, lest
he decide he didn’t want to be associated with something that dreadful and walk
out of the project.
Starcrash is one of those movies that starts out looking like it’s going to be a
derivative but at least entertaining riff on someone else’s major film, but as
it progresses (like a disease) it just gets sillier and sillier, and I got into
an argument with one of the other audience members as to whether the dialogue
by Cozzi (“Coates”), Wachsberger and R. A. Dillon was really as bad as it
sounds or whether what made the film really awful was the porn-star style delivery of it by
Gortner, Clark and Hasselhoff. Another imdb.com “Trivia” poster claims that in
the later stages of the film they put more clothes on Caroline Munro to
preserve the film’s PG rating — though there’s one later shot of her in an
outfit that’s just a series of leather bands wrapped strategically around her,
a scene that no doubt delighted the teenage straight boys that are the core
audience for science-fiction films then and now!
