Purely Joyful Movie!

People are voting emotionally.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Starcrash holds fond memories for me, because I saw it on a double bill with tomorrow's film, Battle Beyond the Stars, at the Spotlite 88 Drive-In Theater. I vividly remember my dad laughing through most of the movie, but really liking the part where the rockets were fired into the Count's ship and men jumped out of them. For the next several months, I thought more about these two films than Star Wars - we still had another year to go before The Empire Strikes Back as this was in the days before constant Star Wars-related media.

I'm a connoisseur of bad movies, and there aren't many as entertainingly bad as this gem. The bad acting, nonsensical plot, cheap effects, and continuity problems make it worth watching several times.The two main characters are Han Solo - I mean Akton - and Stella Star (really?). Akton is a lovable rogue played by Marjoe Gortner, whose permed head is recognizable from a string of bit parts in the 70s. At some point, it comes out he has magic powers. That would be a spoiler, except that it's never explained and really has nothing to do with the plot. It's just that the writers were too lazy to think of other ways to get out of a couple corners they'd painted him into. Stella is primarily eye candy. Even with everything going on, she finds time to change costumes frequently - sometimes in the middle of scenes. Watch for the part where she goes into hyperspace wearing a skimpy costume and comes out of hyperspace wearing an even skimpier costume.The other two major characters are the good Emperor, played by Christopher Plummer, and the evil Count Zarth Arn, played Joe Spinell, who bracket a spectrum of bad acting styles. Spinell really hams it up, laughing and strutting like William Shatner on a cocaine binge. Plummer goes for serene, confident leadership, but comes across more like someone who's heavily medicated.There's also a robot Elle, who was put in for comic relief, but the less said about that, the better.David Hasseloff appears as the Emporer's son. That would also be a spoiler, except that it's obvious to everyone except Akton and Stella.The script, such as it is, appears to have been written as they went, and the plot drunkenly stumbles from scene to scene. There are some cave men, some karate-chopping Amazons, some evil robots. What do they have to do with anything? Seriously, it's not worth worrying about. Even the characters sometimes appear confused about where they are and what they're doing. The evil Count's evil plan changes a couple of times. He starts out with a super weapon that's definitely not a Death Star. It surrounds ships with lava lamp blobs that are sometimes fatal and sometimes merely annoying. As super weapons go, it's pretty lame. Later he just switches to explosives, which is probably a good move.When they felt the movie was long enough, they slapped a rather stupid ending on it, had Plummer make a rambling, anesthetized speech, and headed to the wrap party.Oh yeah, there's also a light saber, but only one, because I guess two is the threshold for copyright infringement.

I'm in a particularly masochistic mood tonight and I've been watching some ultra schlocky sci-fi films which came out in the late 70s and early 80s. "Starcrash" is not the worst of the films I've been watching...though by any objective standard, it's total crap. This Italian-made film was dubbed into English and stars some familiar faces--such as the beautiful Caroline Munro (a bond girl and star of other 70s schlock), Marjoe Gortner (who had a career rebirth in the 70s in made for TV movies), David Hasselhoff (before he was famous) and, inexplicably, Christopher Plummer--the only genuinely GOOD actor in this mess of a film! My guess is that the filmmakers were holding one of Plummer's family members hostage to get him to appear in this crap-fest!The film begins in outer space--and perhaps the ugliest and worst rendered version of outer space in any 1970s film. The colors are garish and might just provoke seizures in some viewers, so be careful! The story is about a couple idiotic space smugglers (Munro and Gortner) who are sent to prison but then offered a reprieve if they help the Emperor (Plummer) to locate his missing son and stop an intergalactic baddie, the Count. It's all VERY boring, the effects are god-awful and there isn't much to interest any viewer aside from Munro and a few other lovely and scantily-clad ladies. Amazingly dumb and really, really bad.

*Spoiler/plot- Female Space Invaders ('Starcrash') 1978, A pair of good looking space pirates get involved in a theft plot with the space emperor's son and a bad space nobleman.*Special Stars- Caroline Muro, David Hassleholf, Christopher Plummer, Marjoe Gortner, Joe Spinell.*Theme- Justice wins out every time.*Trivia/location/goofs- Italian, Had many titles. Caroline Munro is dubbed by Candy Clark. Caroline Munro's voice was dubbed for the U.S. version by actress Candy Clark, who was married to Marjoe Gortner (Akton) at the time. Only Marjoe Gortner, David Hasselhoff, Christopher Plummer and Joe Spinell have their own voices in the English-dubbed version of the film. Everyone else was dubbed by different people. The post-production funds for the movie were very tight, thus Caroline Munro and Judd Hamilton could not dub their own characters, as flying them in would be too expensive. Caroline Munro was originally going to wear a skimpy leather bikini outfit throughout the entire movie, but American studio executives insisted that writer/director Luigi Cozzi have Munro wear less provocative clothing in the second half because they thought the film would have problems being broadcast on network television. David Hasselhoff contracted food poisoning during the shooting of the movie; a production assistant had to fill in for Hasselhoff for a fair share of the scenes in which his character Simon's face is covered by a mask. Moreover, Hasselhoff did most of his own stunts and accidentally knocked out an Italian stuntman's tooth on his first day of doing stunts. The character of Akton was originally devised as a grotesque alien, but Marjoe Gortner refused to wear any heavy make-up.*Emotion- Lovely to see the homages to Ray Harryhausen and funny to see the low budget Italian Star Wars rip-off. Very hard to sit through because of the pedestrian plot and childish special effects. Real fun is the 'cheeziness' of seeing international stars doing their low-key performances in this schlock. Munro's role was toned down from bikini to some cover-up wardrobe near the film end. I think that was a bad move by production to get some TV airing.*Based on- Recently released Star Wars films.