Outlaw smugglers Stella Star and Akton manage to pick up a castaway while running from the authorities, who turns out to be the only survivor from a secret mission to destroy a mysterious superweapon designed by the evil Count Zarth Arn. The smugglers are soon recruited by the Emperor of the Galaxy to complete the mission, as well as to rescue the Emperor's son, who has gone missing. An outlaw smuggler and her alien companion are recruited by the Emperor of the Galaxy to rescue his son and destroy a secret weapon by the evil Count Zarth Arn. I'm never quite sure about "Star Wars", whether it really deserves its status as a classic film or whether it's actually not all that good once you cut through the above-average design, effects and musical score. But when I watch something like "Starcrash" one of the copycat movies rush-produced in its wake, I'm forced to conclude that "Star Wars" had a lot more going for it than its surface gloss. However much "Starcrash" may try and emulate its more famous predecessor, it falls desperately short in every respect.<br/><br/>There are a few token ingredients which "Starcrash" shares with "Star Wars", such as shoot-outs with hand-held laser weapons, dogfights in space, a laser sword or two, a robot sidekick with a human personality, a quest to find/rescue a person of noble origin whom the main protagonist subsequently falls in love with, and an evil empire bent on subjugating all other races, the leader of whom is in a space station ready to put his sinister new super-weapon into action.<br/><br/>But there the similarity to "Star Wars" ends and "Starcrash" goes off on its own tangent of banality. The plot casts a pair of space smugglers in the hero roles: Stella Star (Caroline Munro), described as the best pilot in the galaxy, and her alien (but human-looking) companion Akton (Marjoe Gortner) who, likewise, is supposedly the galaxy's best navigator. Despite their combined skills, the pair get caught by patrols and are sentenced to hard labour on a penal colony. Feisty Stella soon contrives an escape (running away, no less, while her fellow up-risers get slaughtered) only to then find she would have been freed anyway for the Emperor has need of her services – he wants Stella and Akton to find his missing son who was on a top secret mission to stop the evil Count Zarth Arn from using a deadly new weapon to take control of the universe.<br/><br/>That is the catalyst for Stella to be propelled from one deadly situation to the next as she travels from planet to planet encountering a race of unfriendly Amazon warriors and their giant robot (which itself sports a pair of female breasts), nearly freezing to death on an ice planet, being trussed up by a band of babbling troglodytes (who either want to eat her or sacrifice her, it's not clear which) and so on. She ultimately locates the missing son who of course is a heart-throb even if he does wear the same amount of eye-liner as she does, and they return to the Emperor who launches an all-out attack on the Count's base, which proves unsuccessful. The one last hope for the galaxy is for Stella to wipe out the Count's fortress by engaging in a desperate kamikaze mission – the 'star crash' of the film's title.<br/><br/>If that all sounds like exciting stuff, then don't raise your hopes: writer-director Luigi Cozzi completely wastes whatever potential this storyline may have had. The action sequences are perfunctory but lack impact because the whole film is devoid of soul. The characters are so bland and one-dimensional that the viewer never feels any real involvement with them. Worst in this regard is Count Zarth Arn, a snarling pantomime villain prone to frequent bouts of maniacal laughter. He even has the standard goatee beard to prove he's the baddie… He's so camp you have to wonder how anybody takes him seriously, let alone how he rose to such a position of power. And his ambition? Well, to conquer the universe, of course! Equally bad, and yet by some degree entertaining because of how lame it is, is the dialogue. Some choice lines include "I don't tolerate malfunctions!", "No one can survive these deadly rays!", "What in the universe is that?", "I'll fix you!", "Soon I will join you as your prince of darkness!" and, "Imperial Battleship: Halt the flow of time!" The script is also riddled with far too many token utterances such as "What's that?", "Hey, look out!", "Let me go!" and "Come on!" which demonstrate just how little effort was put into it.<br/><br/>As the main character, Stella may certainly look the part thanks to Munro's stunning physique, garbed in a series of outfits that Barbarella probably discarded on the grounds that they were too kinky, and she may be gutsy, but… Well, she doesn't actually do very much except blunder into a series of perils in the best traditions of Pearl White and get saved by one of her colleagues, often via a hitherto unmentioned special ability. These abilities know no bounds of credibility, such as freezing an entire planet in one moment of time, or being able to foresee the future whenever the situation calls for it! The special effects are variable, with nothing reaching the standards of even "2001: A Space Odyssey" which was produced a decade earlier. The spaceship models look decidedly chunky, almost like they're made from Lego. At one point in the movie Stella has been frozen and when she thaws out, the effect is achieved via a rather poor series of cross fades reminiscent of the the effect used for the transformations of Lon Chaney Jr's Wolf Man in the Universal films of over thirty years earlier.<br/><br/>Did I mention the acting? That's bad too, almost without exception, although it's difficult to blame the actors when they're equipped with such a bad script. Also, many of the cast have been overdubbed in the English language version, including Caroline Munro, so it's not actually her voice we hear.<br/><br/>Even John Barry, one of cinema's best composers, is operating below par on this one. He probably realised when he saw the rushes that it just wasn't worth the effort. If so, he was right. 'Starcrash' is beyond redemption. At first I thought this screenplay was written by third graders for a class project, and then on IMDb I saw it is Italian. How could a country that produced Galileo, Michelangelo, and DaVinci turn out this dreck? The only redeeming entity in it for males is Caroline Munro portraying Stella Star. Not that I'm complaining, but in scenes where other characters are fully dressed, she wears some sort of bikini apparently without feeling any embarrassment at all. One is hard pressed to describe the plot, because there really isn't any in the formal sense of the word. As I wrote, it seems to have been concocted by third graders who tried to extrapolate on some scientific principle they saw in a Saturday-morning cartoon. Or maybe, being written in Italian, it was "translated" by someone having only a phrase-book knowledge of the language.
Yuriacarl replied
295 weeks ago