Star Odyssey (Alpha Video Rewind Series)

This 1979 movie is fairly awful, but at least I guess I can say that they "tried".They apparently tried to make a half-way decent space adventure, but they must have suffered from a rock-bottom budget. And i mean ROCK-BOTTOM. For example, one of the space warriors actually uses a photo-flash attachment from a camera as his "Ray Gun". No really, it's a flash bulb that he is using to "fight" the aliens. Aye carumbah.Anyway, this movie is somewhat colorful, occasionally humorous, slightly ambitious, and very sparkly.And now for the problems, and there are MANY: First of all, the film is WAY TOO LONG; it's over an hour and forty minutes, and therefore it's badly padded, slow, and has many dull moments. Frankly, it should have been just an hour and twenty minutes, tops. Second, the props are TERRIBLE; the "light sabers" are actually slabs of clear acrylic with flashlights attached to them, so they "light up". No, I am NOT kidding. Third, one of the robots is an OIL DRUM, with buttons and lights glued to it. Yes, you read that right. Fourth, the music is simply dreadful; it's this silly happy-go-lucky synthesizer music, which they play over and over and over -- it's what I like to call "Felix The Cat" music.... dumb and goofy. Fifth, the acting is truly crappy; SOME of the lead actors are fairly good, but there are several other leads who simply CAN'T ACT -- they just stand there with their mouths open, staring. They can't emote, react, or speak their lines with any conviction whatsoever; they just mumble in a monotone. Sixth, the so-called "special effects" are anything BUT special; the alien saucers look to me like they are metal hubcaps from a small car, the robots are just latex and tinfoil, and the "laboratory" is a kitchen counter-top with glass test tubes filled with food coloring.Need I go on??Oh, and by the way, and as you might expect, this film shamelessly rips off from Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Battlestar Galactica (the original), and even from Space: 1999. It steals themes, images, prop designs, dialog, you name it.Anyway, you might get a bunch of laffs out of this, in a MST3k kind of way. I could imagine that if a person first drank a six-pack of malt liquor, he or she might even laugh their socks off watching this scrambled, badly-dubbed, stinky mess of a movie. In fact, that's why I gave it three stars instead of merely one; it's the potential "malt liquor factor", where the film might actually morph into something hilarious.However you play it, I hope you get some amusement out of this so-called "space adventure", in spite of its utterly low-budget crud factor.

I’ve got one word to sum up this less than spectacular sci-fi “spectacle”: S L O W. It takes its time to go really not very far at all, like a snail trying to lap a slug. What I remember most about this is that there is a ragtag misfit group of characters gathered together to save something from someone who uses robot men with bleached blonde wigs (I think these robots were featured in another movie, maybe “The War of the Robots”?). There’s a super smart dude who’s telepathic, and bald (an early Prof. X!?!), some acrobatic fighting guy who’s always bounding about and bouncing off walls (ADHD works for him), some sharp shooter and a woman dressed oddly and showing a lot of leg who helps some other smart dude who’s got hair, and two robots whose only wish is to die because their love for each other hurts very much and they have the ability to become transparent….you know, now that I think about it this team may just have had some influence on the creation of Marvel’s X-Men….but I digress. Even if these characters sound interesting to you in the slightest it’s best to avoid this turkey. It’s tedious, at best.

Not worth it no matter how you look at it. I've seen scifi from the 50's more advanced than this!

Italian genre films rarely lead the way. They react to whatever is trending and thus the Bibical epics of the 1950s led to ”Hercules” and the pepla films (all those leftover Hollywood sets couldn’t go to waste) and the Hammer and Mexican horror films prompted the likes of “I Vampiri” and “La maschera del demonio” (aka “Black Sunday”). That said the Italian filmmakers take a novel approach to their subjects – the dreamlike, very grim fairytale approach of “La maschera… “ is more Cocteau than Hammer, for instance. With the possible exception of Mario Bava’s “Terrore nello spazio” (aka “Planet of the Vampires”) – with its prefiguring of Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris” in having a planet affect the astronauts who land there – Italian science fiction is pretty bad… and there was a slew of it after the success of “Star Wars”. This effort (which combines the title of the Lucas film with that of Kubrick’s epic) may be one of the worst. From the awful electronic score to special effects that could have come from a high schooler with a used Kodak 8mm wind-up camera this is one bleak production. To be fair the special effects in most Neopolitan genre is pretty lacking but what’s on display here, along with some particularly impoverished set design reeks of a lack of money. Normally Italian genre films at least look good (with rare exceptions the directors of that country are more interested in the visuals than the content) but here only the frequently odd costumes show any imagination. The plot has something to do with an alien invasion by some chap who seems to have got his face caught in a waffle maker and his harvesting earthlings for an intergalactic slave market. His ship is made of some incredibly rare material that’s impervious to earth’s weaponry (our planet greets him by firing on his ship, which pretty much kills off any possibility of good fellowship). Earth’s most brilliant scientist (garbed in an outrageous caftan) is tasked with defeating the alien menace and has his cohorts steal some of the unobtanium to determine how to create a counter-weapon (given he’s been handed this assignment you’d think he’d be given the dang stuff, but no). Maybe the Italian cut is better than this dubbed import but many scenes are long non sequiteurs that go on and on then end without having gotten anywhere. The only “Star Wars” steals are light sabers and a male and female robot whose banter is, I suppose, meant as comic relief. Fans of bad flicks need look no further. This makes “Stella Starcarsh” look like high art.

War ok.!