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.

There are some good things about this movie that I like - notably Caroline Munro's outfits and John Barry's music. There are also plenty of bad things about this movie - but I like these too - pointless plot, awful scripting, poor direction, cheap sets, unconvincing special effects and amateurish stop-motion. Together these make for a really entertaining 90 minutes or so. However, the one thing about this movie that I don't like is that they replaced Caroline Munro's English voice with that of an American actress of considerably less acting talent. Negative comments about Miss Munro's acting are entirely due to this poor dubbing. Watch her with the sound off and she comes across entirely differently and we get a hint of what we are missing.

This film has to be seen to be (dis-)believed. I watched a lot of these EuroSF as a child in the 70s & a teen in the 80s, but not with rose-tinted glasses: they were a hoot (& still are)! Sadly/fortunately (delete as you feel applicable), I was unable to catch Starcrash when it made the rounds of the cinemas, although I did watch several others (The Humanoid, etc.) & many more on video (the UK at the time had 3 TV channels that had midnight-ish closedowns at best, the Atari 2600 had just come out, & satellite TV wasn't even up & running yet). The main reason that B-movies did so well on video was due to the fact that the major studios were unwilling to release their products to a medium that could be pirated with relative ease (or so they said...) - as a result of this 'policy' I ended up watching Luigi Cozzi's Contamination long before I ever had a chance to see the film that Cozzi was ripping-off I MEAN, "inspired by": Alien. If you like watching SF films where the SFX should be prefaced by the words Not Very, where familiar faces (Christopher Plummer in the case of Starcrash) seem to turn up, do the lines & then take the money & run, then give this a try - but be warned: this film makes Battle Beyond The Stars look like Avatar in comparison.