Hot babes, awful script, lowball FX = great cheese!
When "Star Crash" appeared in the U.S., my local newspaper's film
critic noted: "...You have to be suspicious of a movie that literally sneaks into town...". That remark left me curious, but not curious enough; after just one week "Star Crash" had left town as quietly as it had come in. Why would any movie get so little push from its' distributor, I wondered? Could it really be that bad? It took me years to find out. Some dozen or so years later, a friend of mine told me he had a copy...well, I couldn't pass this up. After seeing it, I decided that the critics were right--and wrong. Such a hoot! Caroline Munro definitely set the mood in her almost-not-there "space-kini" and high-heeled boots, with Marjoe Gortner pulling backup as 2nd banana. Cheesy special FX, a painfully earnest performance by Christopher Plummer (you can practically see him wondering if his paycheck will clear the bank when he's finished), and a surprisingly good score ( hey, it's John Barry, what did you expect?)make this a pleasant surprise, as long as you're not expecting anything on par with E.E. "Doc" Smith, etc. A small note: I got to meet Ms. Munro at an SF convention back in '82, and I totally agree with Harlan Ellison...she was so gorgeous in person that "they had to ugly her down, so that the cameras wouldn't melt during filming!"....Though I forgot to ask her if it was true that only copy of the shooting script had been stolen by members of Italy's Red Brigade terrorists and held for ransom! Ah, rumors...anyway, try and catch it for free and you won't feel cheated.. 
Here is probably the only good review of STARCRASH
I've never seen a good review of this movie anywhere. Let me be the first
to write one. Here's why I feel STARCRASH is good; they did the very best they could with what they were given to work with. I saw this film at age 13, knowing full well it was a low-budget STAR WARS rip-off. It cost about one million dollars (compared to the $10 million spent on SW). It had an effects budget of about $30,000, compared to the $3 million spent on effects alone for SW. The effects were done by then 32 year old Armando Valcauda, who had never done effects for a motion picture before. Valcauda got fed up with the producers of STARCRASH and walked out and was replaced by Germani Natali, hence no credit for Valcauda. Before he left, he animated the stop-motion skeleton robots dueling against Marjoe Gortner and David Hasselhoff, another stop-motion giant robot and several miniature shots. He was later hired to do effects on THE HUMANOID (1980), which American International Pictures declined to distribute in the U.S. Although Valcauda did his best with the tiny budget and 3 month schedule, he has slipped into obscurity, which is a shame. I was entertained by this movie. It wasn't realistic but it was just plain fun. I loved every minute of it, unlike LOST IN SPACE (1998) which cost 100 times more than this, has even less convincing effects in a lot of scenes and was about as much fun as standing in line at the post office. STARCRASH is a stinker to most people because there wasn't a sufficient budget. Yet, it's still fun to watch 20 years after it was made. LOST IN SPACE on the otherhand, had all the money, technology and resources they could possibly want at their disposal and they still turned out one of the most unwatchable films ever. Wherever you are Armando Valcauda, I salute you.. |
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