Best Friends (1975)

If you ever make the mistake of watching multiple ’70s movies from Crown International Pictures in succession, you will quickly discover why Crown is a poor cousin to its famous competitor in the exploitation-movie market, American International Pictures. Whereas AIP’s movies are, generally speaking, brisk and lurid, Crown’s flicks are often slow and tedious. As a case in point, consider this interminable road movie about two Vietnam vets who hit the open road in a mobile home with their girlfriends. Jesse (Richard Hatch) is a salt-of-the-earth type who’s ready to settle down with Kathy (Susanne Benton), but Pat (Doug Chapin) is an unhinged sociopath who takes his long-suffering gal, Jo Ella (Ann Noland), for granted. As the quartet drives across the Southwest, Pat tries to convince Jesse to ditch the girls so they can buy motorcycles and travel the country together, Easy Rider-style. At one point, Pat even goes so far as to lead Kathy toward a rattlesnake in the hopes she’ll get bitten and die. Later, Pat pushes Jesse and Jo Ella together, hoping their infidelity will ruin Jesse’s plans for marriage. Alas, the story seems much more interesting in synopsis form than it does as an actual movie, because writer Arnold Somkin and director Noel Nosseck lack the imagination and subtlety that would have been required to make this particular narrative believable. This storytelling problem is exacerbated by the vacuous acting one finds in most Crown releases. Hatch, best known for his work in soaps and in the original Battlestar Galactica series, is miles ahead of his costars in terms of craft—and, with all due respect, if Richard Hatch defines the upper echelon of an acting ensemble, that’s a problem. As a result of the iffy filmmaking and shoddy performances, Best Friends is dull and repetitive, comprising long scenes of actors “behaving” because they haven’t anything else to do; worse, when the movie finally generates events, which doesn’t happen nearly often enough, character motivations feel contrived instead of credible. The picture eventually winds its way toward the requisite ’70s bummer ending, but even that underwhelms, taking far too much screen time to deliver far too little content.

Best Friends: LAME

Battlestar Galactica (1979) & Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)

          Writer-producer Glen A. Larson started developing the TV series that became Battlestar Galactica in the late ’60s, but didn’t get a green light until the success of Star Wars (1977) made space opera fashionable. To help recoup costs (reportedly $1 million per episode), Universal assembled chunks of early episodes into a theatrical feature, which was exhibited internationally beginning a few months prior to the series’ small-screen debut, then released in the U.S. less than a month after the series was cancelled. The feature is more than enough vintage Galactica for anyone but a hardcore fan, and devotees of the 2003-2009 Galactica reboot will find none of that series’ provocative psychodrama or topicality in the straightforward original. A pleasant overdose of goofy genre tropes, the 125-minute Galactica feature is filled with wooden actors playing stock characters amidst gaudy production design and Star Wars-lite battle scenes. 
          The story follows military commander Adama (Lorne Greene) as he leads a group of spaceships in flight from their devastated home worlds after a sneak attack by nasty aliens called Cylons. (The term “Cylon” refers to both robotic soldiers and their lizard-like overlords.) Various human characters struggle with food shortages, wartime trauma, and a host of other melodramatic crises, all while wearing action-figure-ready costumes. Enlivened by a fairly imaginative plot and the presence of polished guest stars including Ray Milland and Jane Seymour, Galactica moves along briskly, and some of the outer-space imagery is quite memorable, such as energetic scenes in which heroes launch their “Viper” spaceships out of tubes housed inside the titular warship. As for the stars, Greene and leading man Richard Hatch are painfully earnest, so Dirk Benedict fares much better as a swaggering pilot in the Han Solo mode, while John Colicos, who plays the main human baddie, chews scenery like a termite let loose in a lumberyard, making his performance a guilty pleasure. Although most of the scripting is clumsy and predictable, Battlestar Galactica never wants for spectacle.
          After Galactica was cancelled, Larson took another stab at televised sci-fi with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a retread of the old pulp/serial character. This time, Universal released a feature version of the pilot episode in the U.S. several months before the series debuted, generating a minor box-office hit in the process. Alas, the Buck Rogers movie is as tiresome as the Galactica movie is diverting. Gil Gerard plays the title character, a modern-day spaceman who falls into suspended animation until the 25th century, when he joins futuristic earth denizens in a galactic battle against a psychotic space princess and her various minions. As the princess, Pamela Hensley is all kinds of sexy, but the movie gets derailed by dopey flourishes including a campy dance sequence, horrible jokes, pervy costumes (must everything be skin-tight?), and a cutesy robot voiced by Mel Blanc. Whereas Battlestar aimed for the all-ages appeal of Star Wars by balancing cartoonish aliens and laser fights with grown-up sociopolitical themes (even if they were handled simplistically), Buck Rogers targets infantile viewers with incessant silliness. More than a few scenes make the viewer feel embarrassed for those responsible.

Battlestar Galactica: FUNKY
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: LAME