How bad is Starcrash?
To paraphrase the Bard, let us count the ways. First, there’s the
discombobulated, idiotic storyline—an interstellar smuggler gets sent to the
monster-filled home world of an evil wizard in order to rescue the son of an
outer-space emperor, aided only by a band of outlaws and robots. Yep, it’s all
the main signifiers from the previous year’s blockbuster Star Wars, thrown into a blender and transmogrified into nonsense.
(Proving the makers of Starcrash have
no shame, the flick even features low-rent light sabers.) Then there’s the
garish production design, which blends Buck
Rogers-style camp (the heroine spends most of the movie in an outer-space
bikini) with sub-Star Wars
mechanization, resulting in an aesthetic jumble. Next come the godawful special
effects, ranging from chintzy stop-motion monsters to weak spaceship shots. And
finally, there’s the abysmal acting, which is exacerbated by sloppy dubbing:
B-movie stalwarts including Marjoe Gortner, David Hasselhoff, Caroline Munro,
and Joe Spinell hiss and preen through ridiculous performances. Throw all of
these elements together, and you’ve got junk so dreadful that even producer
Roger Corman, whose company released the picture in the U.S., should have been
embarrassed. Made in Italy, and variously titled in different international
territories as Scontri stellari oltre la
terza dimensione and The Adventures
of Stella Star, the picture is nominally a showcase for leading lady Munro,
a raven-haired beauty who first caught notice in Hammer horror flicks and a
kitschy Sinbad picture. She fills out her barely-there costume nicely, but her
bug-eyed acting diminishes her appeal considerably. Even more painful than
enduring Munro’s work, however, is watching Christopher Plummer’s stupid cameo
as the emperor—could he possibly have
been paid enough for this humiliation? And for that matter, how the hell did
the producers get A-list music composer John Barry, already a three-time
Academy Award winner at this point, to do the score? Mysteries, to be sure, but
not worth investigating.
Starcrash:
SQUARE
3 comments:
I've tried to sit through this as well as Kinji Fukasaku's similarly awful Message from Space (featuring a slumming Vic Morrow), and couldn't make it through either one -- in Message from Space's case, I tried on separate occasions to revisit it, but bailed.
However, something inside me says I should give Starcrash a second chance to trashily entertain me. I mean, it has Caroline Munro and the Hoff!
Trust me, it's worse than you might imagine. Only to be watched for masochistic purposes and/or MST3K-style heckling.
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