Star Crash

[Gilberto]

The Emperor of Space sends a ship on a mission to a dark region of space called the Haunted Stars to destroy the home planet of the evil Count Zarth Arn. As they approach the planet, the ship is attacked by "red monsters" that look suspiciously like the inside of a lava lamp.

They recruit Stella Star (played by B-Queen Caroline Munro) to locate the crashed ship, which had the Emperor's son on board. Most of the movie takes place in various cardboard cutout garage sets that are smaller than my living room, cut apart by spectacularly boring space battles that make no sense at all. The search for the crashed ship does take our heroes to a series of different locales that pass for alien planets. The first is a beach where they are immediately captured by amazons on horseback and attacked by a giant tin statue.

Next they travel to a snow planet where the temperature drops "thousands of degrees" after sundown, so Stella is forced to cover herself with spandex. The final stop is the Phantom Planet of Count Zarth, where Stella is beset upon by vicious cavemen who destroy her cowboy robot companion and capture her. She is rescued from the troglodytes by a mysterious stranger in a ridiculous helmet who blasts them with laser eye beams until they run away. He unmasks to reveal himself as David Hasselhof, and we come to learn that he is of course the Emperor's missing son.

They make their way to the secret generators of the lava lamp space monsters only to be captured by Zarth and his men. Zarth's plan is to draw the Emperor to the Phantom Planet with the promise of returning his son, then blow it up with everyone on it. Zarth leaves them to be guarded by duck-billed robots with pirate cutlasses, and a clunky awkward stop-motion matte on live action footage laser swordfight ensues.

The Emperor arrives with only a moment before the countdown concludes, and, in the movie's finest moment, commands his battleship to "halt the flow of time" to secure their escape.

After that there's an unbelievably long and repetitive space battle where they essentially fire torpedoes full of soldiers through the windows of Zarth's space fortress (his fortress in space, folks) to invade it.

The Emperor (have I mentioned he's played by Christopher Plummer?) takes a moment to render a final monologue to the camera about how evil has been temporarily defeated, and the curtain falls on what's probably the most ambitiously terrible piece of crap I've ever seen.

[lynn]

I tried to watch this; but it's really difficult when the actors do not seem to care one whit about what they're doing. The main girl just seems to be too happy to be there all the time. Look Woman, you've just been sentenced to life in prison, don't grin at me.

[Gilberto]

You don't like Star Crash but you love Vampire Girl Meets Frankenstein Girl?

I don't think any of the actors in this movie knew what was going on. All of the lines sound like a first read by someone who doesn't understand English. Stella's best line is when they're talking about the danger and she says "but you know what I say: I don't care!" like that's her big catch phrase. She sounds like Julie Brown from Earth Girls Are Easy.

Somewhere in this Christopher Plummer is doing his best to act like the performance matters. He's trying, but he's the only one.

[lynn]

I think it's got a lot to do with context. I watched Vamp g v Frank g with some friends and there was much hilarity. Also, frankly G, you're known to not like the crazy Asian goodies. I'm a little younger; I grew up with pokemon, I get the funny. Maybe I'll crack out Star Crash again at a party and see how I like it.

[Gilberto]

You may be right on this. I grew up with cheesy scifi so it's a comfort zone for me, but this asian craziness is a little weird to me. If you grew up with that kind of stuff then it's a cheesy comfort zone for you.

We ran into this before when I recommended the Black Hole as a cool scifi, but you weren't really into it.