Wonderful character development!

Let's be realistic.

Absolutely brilliant

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

I love watching bad 80s science-fiction and this fits the bill. The special effects are shoddy, even for the time; the actors all take turns at chewing the scenery, apart from Robert Englund who has a natural charm throughout the film.The story is that a ship with a crew entirely chosen by the Master (whose head glows bright red for no accountable reason), have been sent to rescue the crew from another ship that has crashed on a remote planet. Each one is introduced with a sketchy characterisation which is pretty much all the background you get; there's the weirdly manic, driven captain (with terrible ageing make-up), the commander who is obviously "too old for this s**t", the sullen leader who hates the jovial moustache man, the pretty psychic the moustache loves, the buxom blonde, the cook with secrets, the semi-mute who carries some plastic throwing stars, the coward, the cheery tech guy.The moment they land and investigate the crashed ship, things start to go wrong. They also do odd things, like incinerating the bodies in the crashed ship or splitting up for no good reason which leads to the death of the coward. The ones left behind in the ship fare no better; the Captain begins to hallucinate she is facing an old enemy from a previous disaster where she was the only survivor. After firing the ships weaponry, she picks up an enormous gun and dies in a completely unexplained way.At this point, the plot and the character motivations go out of the window and everybody turns their acting up to 11; the mute is killed by his own plastic stars and the poor blonde is raped to death by a giant slimy maggot, in a scene that is as uncomfortable to watch as it must have been to act.After killing almost everyone else, the plot then takes a metaphysical left turn which would have been a masterstroke had it not been setup so badly at the beginning and rushed at the end.Try this film as a basis for a drinking game (a shot every time someone does something really stupid or a character dies or the dialogue makes you cringe) and you'll have a great, if rather drunk, time.

I had never heard about this until I came across it on Netflix. I saw that Sid Haig was in it and couldn't wait to check it out and see what it had to offer. However, it didn't offer very much.Galaxy of Terror is fun movie to watch ironically. Its an odd mix of Alien and Event Horizon. The film takes place on a strange planet where your worst fear can come to life! Each member of the crew aboard the Quest is in fight for their life!Fear is the driving force behind this eighties b-movie. Every member of the crew that dies has one thing in common. The deaths are all based on the person's fear. This makes for some pretty neat kills, albeit weird and strange. But that is what I love about these movies. Even though this movie was trash, it had some really creative death scenes and with Roger Corman behind it, there was some really decent sleaze. Case in point is the maggot rape scene. Just let that sink in for a bit. The movie is chock full of cheesy effects and schlock. Girls, Guts, and Ghosts are what you should be expecting when your going into this. Just try not to judge them so harshly.This movie has great timing and a pretty decent cast. Robert Englund, Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Taaffe O'Connell, Zalman King, Grace Zabriskie, and of course Sid Haig. The problem is with the story and practicality. I know as well as anyone that you have to kind of throw those two things out the window. However, it's really hard in this case. This movie has way too many holes. It feels like it left a ton of stuff out. Characters were badly introduced or explained and because of that they never really rounded out. The story starts to lag towards the end. However, luckily it only has an 88 minute run time.

Well judging by the poster for this Corman gem you can expect to see lots of huge freaky monsters attacking scantily clad ladies on some kind of prehistoric looking alien planet. I really don't understand how this poster even exists as the film is completely and utterly the opposite to everything that poster stands for! it looks like a Doug McClure movie poster.Anywho I had never seen this film until now so I was unaware of what to expect, again judging by that movie poster I was kinda thinking it was an 'Aliens' type affair...oh well. The film certainly looks and feels like 'Aliens' though that's for sure, holy sputum! the visuals virtually throughout the entire film are near identical! This may well be down to the fact James Cameron was the Production Designer and Second Unit Director on this and he clearly took these ideas and recreated them for his now famous Alien sequel masterpiece. Indeed this film does look very Cameron-ish in some scenes especially at the start where we see the crew leave the mother ship and search the alien surroundings in their very smart yet workman-like looking space suits complete with light generating backpacks. Hell even the alien planet is a cold dark misty wind swept barren land with mountainous jagged rocks that looks like an early 'LV-426'. Then you have the huge alien pyramid type structure that kinda looks like a concept pinched for 'AvP'. So the more I watched the more I found myself comparing this early Corman sci-fi to Cameron's future work, on top of that much visual style has been borrowed from Ridley Scott's 'Alien' with the blue-collar space crew on board their slick yet heavily metallic industrial interior designed craft and its long twisting corridors. Not quite the oil rig in space scenario, there is more of a dark Battlestar Galactica feel to it in my opinion, and lets not forget the character of 'kore' the cook who is similar in plot development to 'Ash'.So off the crew go into the unknown looking for survivors of a ship that crashed on this mysterious planet. The setup was certainly looking good for a last man standing type thriller and you do get that to a degree. What disappointed me was the fact the plot doesn't revolve around alien creatures killing off the crew but monsters created by the crew themselves, their own worst fears made flesh like some cheesy Red Dwarf episode. What was a little intriguing was the notion that this huge pyramid where everything takes place is some kind of adventure playground for children of an extinct race of beings. Apparently they would test their ability to control fear within the pyramid...for some reason. Notice the 'AvP' similarities here also huh huh!So this all leads to various creatures and bizarre scenarios that kill off the crew one by one, some being quite cool effects wise and some not so. The silliest and most controversial (at the time) being a scene where a massive maggot rapes one of the female crew to death...yet she kinda enjoys it in the end. Totally stupid and uber cheesy to watch, makes you wonder what the fuss was all about, but there is some nice use of stop motion and a big rubber slime covered puppet. Most of the time you don't fully see the things killing people, you merely get glimpses, which does work but I fear that may be because most of them looked pretty hokey. The main talking point of the film (apart from the horny oversized maggot) must be the gruesome gory effects you get sporadically. Some lovely use of good old fashioned hands on effects with dummies, fake blood and exploding body parts, again it all looks pretty dubious now of course but back in the day it would have been horrific. I did start out enjoying the film with its 'Aliens' look and feel but as time went on I grew more and more bored with the ever growing 'Hellraiser/Event Horizon-esque' route it took. What I didn't get on with (and still don't really get) is what was the Master character all about exactly?...who? why? how? etc...and how about some more info on this extinct race and their big pyramid playground of death huh. Plus I never really got behind any of the characters either, didn't really bother me if they lived or died and didn't really like any of them. You never find out what happens to Englund's character and what was all that crystal star throwing malarkey with Haig's character? why was he so obsessed with his precious crystal ninja stars?Everything is a tad rehashed from Ridley Scott's space opus...especially with the discount Nostromo crew and I didn't really like the question raising ending or plot progression (how exactly did 'Cabren' kill the Master??! what was all that lighting stuff? beats me). But yeah on the other hand I did kinda like it mainly for its visual artistry and glorious hands on effects, on that front its brilliant.6.5/10

Until the release of the DVD, this was an almost mysterious film, much remarked upon and controversial, but seldom seen, until it received its DVD release from Shout Factory. Story has a spaceship crew being sent on a rescue mission after receiving an S.O.S., only to discover a weird, fog shrouded planet where there lies a vast pyramid, and after they enter, things really start to happen...Film has good production values(for its budget) and a memorable atmosphere and set design(James Cameron worked on this!) It also has some big ideas at work, but it is a shame that it comes in such a violent and exploitive film as this. Infamous scene involving a female crewman and a worm is still disturbing, though it should be remembered in what form the crewmen are being tested.It's a short film, almost too short, since it barely gives you an introductory sequence before it heads off into space. Not much character development either, but film isn't that bad...but with more restraint, it could have been a great deal better.