Sgt. Michael Ransom (Reb Brown, who was both Yor Hunter from the Futureand Captain America) and his team of Strike Commandos are decimating a Vietnamese base, ready to blow it up real good. But one of the team is killed and alarms go off, scuttling the mission. Instead of allowing the team to come back and fight another day, the mission’s commander Colonel Radek (Christopher Connelly) orders that the explosives be set off while the Strike Commandos are on the retreat. One of Ransom’s men is killed and he’s knocked into a river.
So begins Strike Commando, a post-Rambo: First Blood Part II film directed by Bruno Mattei and written by Claudio Fragasso that lives up to everything I dreamed that it could be.
Ransom is rescued by a young boy named Laoh and brought to a village to recover. There, he makes friends with a retired soldier named Le Due (Luciano Pigozzi, making this an unoffical Pag and Yor reunion!) and tells the children of the village just how amazing America — mostly Disneyland — can be.
Of course, everyone in that village is soon killed by Russians, so our hero goes back to Vietnam again, this time motivated by the need for horrible revenge. He sees his little Vietnamese friend Lao one more time, talking him into the next life with more stories of Disneyland before unleashing absolute hell on the Russians until they threaten to kill civilians unless he surrenders.
Let me just share this dialogue with you, as Lao dies…
Lao: American… tell me… tell me about Disneyland.
Ransom: (choking back tears of rage) They got tons of popcorn there. All you gotta do is go climb a tree to go eat it. And there’s cotton candy. Mountains of it. And chocolate milk, and malts. And there’s a genie. A magic genie. And he can’t wait to grant your wishes.
Much like all post-John Rambo military films, that means it’s time to torture our hero, which includes making him stay inside a cell for months with a rotting corpse and forcing him to record a message renouncing America. Of course, it’s just words, not deeds, because in seconds Ransom is killing Russkies all over again before getting his revenge on Radek, which involves a gigantic machine gun and a grenade, all before a final battle with his nemesis Jakoda. They’ve already battled on a waterfall, Holmes and Moriarty be damned, but this time, the big bad and brutal Bolshevik has metal teeth after losing all of his molars in their last battle.
This is the very same Jakoda who made sure to tell our hero, “Hey, hero. Remember that Vietnamese village? With that boy called Lao? Nice boy, wasn’t he. That’s why I decided to save him for last. He had such fragile bones.”
Oh Vincent Dawn and Clyde Anderson! Oh Bruno and Claudio! You never cease to thrill me with the madness that you throw at the screen, filling this movie with explosions, machine gun fire and Reb Brown screaming every single line of dialogue with the blazing intensity of a thousand Republican wet dreams.
If you’re wondering, “Did Bruno steal any footage to make this?” the answer is, “This is a Bruno Mattei movie.” Look for the helicopter scenes from The Last Hunter. Why pay for something when someone else has already shot it? Bruno would pay himself back by reusing footage of this movie in Cop Game.
There’s a reason why Severin is my favorite label. They keep releasing movies like this and putting them out in way better quality than anyone ever thought that they’d deserve. Beyond a 2K remaster of the film — looking better than it probably did when it was originally screened — you also get interviews with Fragasso and Rossella Drudi. You can get this movie from Severin now.
Image banner design courtesy of Mike Delbusso/Splatt Gallery.**
Well, so goes another theme week blow out on movies set in outer space, so let’s round ’em, up, space cowboy. No, we didn’t review that mainstream movie, nor Armageddon or Deep Impact or Geostorm. Don’t you know the B&S About Movies’ jam, by now? And, why yes, we did go overboard, again. See, you do know our jams.
Phew! And we still haven’t reviewed them all. You know the B&S motto: Never Say Never. We’ll do it again.
** From the Facebook pages of Splatt Gallery, Southeast Michigan’s largest public collection of concert posters, gig posters, lowbrow and street art, about their theme/banner posting:
1978 was the year of the spaceship. The Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue tour used a stage construction that had the band performing inside a giant spaceship, a prop so massive that the set-up time required ELO to only use it every other show for most of the tour. The band Boston released their second album, again, as with the first, with their signature spaceship illustration by artist Roger Huyssen — the same artist that illustrated the cover for Sky King’s 1975 Secret Sauce album.
The cover art for the Live in London album by Andrae Crouch featured a keyboard transformed into a space craft, and drummer Lenny White released a concept album titled The Adventures Of Astral Pirates. A band from France called Space, who had a disco hit with the song “Magic Fly,” performed in spacesuits.
George Clinton, who had landed a mothership on stage for nearly two and a half years, temporarily parked his spaceship in a hanger and embarked on an “Anti-Tour.” Parliament-Funkadelic’s mothership now resides in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, but it is a smaller replica built in the mid 1990s. The story of the strange fate of the original mothership can be read in an archived post at the Washington Post.
About the Authors: Sam Panico is the founder, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, and editor-in-chief of B&S About Movies. You can visit him on Lettebox’d. R.D Francis is the grease bit scrubber, dumpster pad technician, and staff writer at B&S About Movies. You canvisit him on Facebook.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: When Frederick Burdsall isn’t at work or watching movies while covered in cats, you can find Fred in the front seat of Knoebels’ Phoenix.
Way back when in the time of the dinosaurs there were these places called Drive-Ins. You can pretty much count on both hands how many still exist today but they were magical and I consider myself fortunate to grow up in a time when they were prolific. The one near me was the Tacony-Palmyra and it boasted 2 huge screens with 3 films every night. One side was your standard movie fare but the other….oh, the other screen was heaven to a guy like me. 3 horror movies every weekend and for 10 straight weeks my friend and I would get some beer and head over to see Maniac, Zombie and whatever third feature had been added for that weekend. Most were forgettable but one in particular remained in my memory and that was the Bruno Mattei film Hell of the Living Dead.
Under the pseudonym Vincent Dawn and assisted by Claudio Fragassi ( who gave us the sensationally awful Troll 2) we start in New Guinea at a chemical research facility named Hope Center 1 where they are working on a project called Operation Sweet Death, a gas which will turn those it comes into contact with into zombies. Unfortunately, a rat in the works has created a leak and now the lab techs are turning on each other.
After the 4 commandos are introduced in a hostage rescue scene (which would have surely resulted in dead hostages in real life) we jump to New Guinea where they are investigating why contact with Hope1 has ceased. Believing it to be just another eco-terrorist takeover they set out in their jeep and cross paths with Rousseau and Max, a journalist and her cameraman already being stalked by the dead.
The group suffers several more attacks, one in a nearby village and another in a seemingly abandoned plantation that is anything BUT abandoned before finally reaching the river and their raft, with the dead hot on their heels. Once across, they finally reach the facility where they discover the grisly truth. Will anyone make it out alive to warn the world of what’s to come?
There is certainly no end of things you could crap on this movie about. The dubbing is comical in a few scenes and Goblin is credited with scoring the movie but in reality they just used Goblin music lifted from Dawn of the Dead. Footage from the film La Vallee was also incorporated into the movie. Shot in Rome and Barcelona it was originally scripted to take place in Africa but was considered too costly. So by all means watch and enjoy Hell of the Living Dead in all of its eye-popping, maggot eating, head crushing glory and I’ll see you at Knoebels.
Man, when you get Bruno Mattei to make a mondo, you get something that’ll shock even the most jaded of us. Like me.
Working under the name Jimmy Matheus and basing his work on German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis — which had already been made into a film by Albert Zugsmith — you may think, hey, this could very well be a well-thought-out exploration of man’s carnal side. I mean, the opening even gives credit to Sigmund Freud, the Marquis De Sade and Masters and Johnson.
Then you realize, hey, it’s Bruno Mattei.
This movie was so upsetting on release that 38 minutes of the film was cut in its native Italy. This is the same country that gave birth to movies like Giallo In Venice and Salò. It did, however, run uncut in Germany. They got to see everything from a sex maniac cutting off a girl’s leg and a sex change operation to flirting with farm animals and priests making sweet, sweet love to dead people.
Now, that’s the stuff I felt comfortable discussing in this review. Just imagine what got left out. Nope, it’s worse than that.
Mattei also made a sequel, Sesso Perverso, Mondo Violento, bringing on Claudio Fragasso to direct the second unit.
Anyways, there’s also a lot of stock footage and, if you’ve never seen a mondo in your life, plenty of scenes taken from other movies and outright fake moments presented as being real. There are also experts debating what we see, lending an air of scientific meaning to what one can only assume is footage that someone, somewhere finds inordinately arousing.
This movie is quite literally the Justice League — more like the Legion of Doom — of scumbag film superstars.
It was written and produced by Harry Alan Towers, who went from syndicating radio and TV shows to being arrested along with his girlfriend Mariella Novotny — who was played by Britt Eklund in Scandal — for operating a vice ring. He jumped bail and ran to Europe while his lover revealed that Towers was a Soviet agent using his girls to get info for the Russians. And Novotny, a high-class call girl, had already been linked to both John and Robert Kennedy, as well as having experience working for MI5.
Once he settled down in Europe, Towers married actress Maria Rohm — she’s in this, as well as several other Jess Franco movies — and started writing and producing movies based on the novels of Agatha Christie, the Marquis de Sade and giallo father — one of many, but a father nonetheless — Edgar Wallace.
Plus, he worked extensively with the second member of our rogue’s gallery: Jesus “Jess” Franco. This may have been the first film that Jess and Towers worked on, but they would make The Girl from Rio, Venus in Furs, Justine, Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion, The Bloody Judge, Count Dracula, The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu.
Franco made at least 173 movies and took a gradual slide from horror, Eurospy and softcore films into grimier and grimier films. He’s an acquired taste that I’ve grown to enjoy, yet for every well-made movie like Bloody Moon, you’ll find one where you wonder if Franco had even seen a film before, much less made one.
The reason for that is often the funds that Franco had at his disposal. He’s the kind of filmmaker who would make ten bad movies instead of one good one, providing that he was getting the chance to make a movie.
He reminds me a lot of the third member of our exploitation army of evil and that would be the man that edited this movie — and from all accounts directed the pornographic insert (pun intended) scenes — Bruno Mattei..
The French version of this movie features eight minutes of fully adult footage, shot with body doubles in similar settings, all to give the illusion that this movie is way more hardcore than it really is.
To be perfectly frank, this movie is an aberrant work of absolute indecency even without seeing gynecological footage of the old in and out.
New inmate Marie (Rohm, yes, the producer’s wife, yet she endures so much that you really get the idea that this is not an example of nepotism) has arrived at Castillo de la Muerte, an island prison where she’s given the number — she no longer has a name — 99.
She’s joined by Helga, now known as 97. She’s played by Elisa Montes, who had appeared in several peplum and westerns before this. And Natalie Mendoz — 98 — is played by Luciana Paluzzi, who was SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpa in Thunderball, as well as showing up in everything from The Green Slime to A Black Veil for Lisa, The Man Who Came from Hate and The Klansman.
They’re suffering under the oppressive sapphic rule of Thelma Diaz, a tough warden who is, shockingly, played by Oscar-winner Mercedes McCambridge, who won that award for All the King’s Men, was nominated for Giant and was also the voice of Pazuzu. She’s berserk in this movie, laying it all on the line, unafraid to go over the top and then keep her upward trajectory.
“From now on you have no name, only a number. You have no future, only the past. No hope, only regrets. You have no friends, only me,” she barks at them before they even get into the prison.
Eventutally, Diaz takes things too far, but even the new warden Caroll (Maria Schell, who had an affair so memorable with Glenn Ford that she remembered it two decades later and gifted him with a dog named Bismarck who became his constant companion) can’t improve this hell on earth. So the women escape at the same time that several men break out from the similarly brutal rule of Governor Santos (Herbert Lom).
What happens when you have several damaged women on the run being followed by men who haven’t even seen a woman in decades? And what if that happens in a Jess Franco movie? Yeah, you can see where this is heading.
Rosalba Neri — Lady Frankenstein! — is also on hand to pretty much set the film on fire in every single frame that she shows up in.
Every Women In Prison movie that would follow in the slimy wake of this film would be based upon the path that it blazed, including Mattei’s own The Jail: Women’s Hell, which he waited nearly four decades to make and pretty much stuck pretty close to what Franco started. Well, he was also following the even more berserk template he’d established with Violence In a Women’s Prison and Women’s Prison Massacre. Man, if you want a WIP movie, call Bruno Mattei. Sadly, you can’t. He’s dead.
Or you could call Jess Franco, were he alive. He made nine WIP movies in his career, including Women In Cellblock 9, Tropical Inferno, Justine, The Lovers of Devil’s Island, Barbed Wire Dolls, Women Behind Bars, Love Camp, Sadomania and this movie.
This is one of the Franco films where he’s making not just a movie, but a good movie. The focus is soft, the feel is surreal and the interplay with the Bruno Nicolai score is fabulous. I could have done without the scumdog feel of the French cut, but hey, I’m doing an entire week of Bruno Mattei movies.
Pittsburgh-based artist Ed Piskor has made some incredible comics, including issues of American Splendor, Wizzywig, Hip Hop Family Treeand X-Men: Grand Design. Now, he’s unleashing Red Room, a comic that fans of our site will love, because it’s basically an exploitation slasher gore film on paper.
Red Room is about a group of killers who use the anonymous dark web and nearly untraceable crypto-currency to live-stream the senseless slaughter of their victims for entertainment. Each issue of this 12-part series is a complete self-contained story.
Piskor gets the whole feel of why we love slashers, which I think comes from teen years of bicycling from video store to video store to find the latest transgressive movie experiences, as well as buying every bootleg he could find at conventions.
Make no mistake, Red Room features the kind of gore that you’d see in the world of Italian cinema or in the films of Takeshi Miike. Nothing is held back as the world of killers like Poker Face, Donna Butcher, Mistress Pentagram and more basically annihilate people for the gratification of sick bastards like, well, me and you.
This is comics as close to the works of D’Amato and Mattei as it gets. I’m really excited about this series and happy that Piskor sent us some advance copies so we could get the word out. If you love slashers, EC Comics and social commentary all in one very bloody package, Red Room is quite literally the best comic book of the year.
You can get Red Room from Fantagraphics or at your local comic book store this week!
Somehow, CBS aired a movie starring Klaus Kinski and William Devane — together at least — on March 10, 1987. Even more amazing, the movie was written by Brian Clemens — yes, the man who created Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter — and directed by Michael Schultz, the man who made Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but also has Car Wash, Cooley High, Krush Groove, The Last Dragon and Disorderlies on his resume.
Dude, I love movies.
Based on Ray Brown’s The Tintype, it has Devane’s character losing his wife and son (Danny Pintauro from Who’s the Boss) to a drunk driver. Later, he attends an auction with his friend General Joe Brodsky (John Ratzenberger, yes Cliff Claven was in a movie with Kinski, wrap your brains around that nugget) where they buy some of Joseph Cole’s (yes, Kinski) trunks from a century ago. Devane believes that Cole was a time traveler, a fact backed up by the appearance of Georgia Crawford (Lauren Hutton!), who travels with him to Crossfire, CA to get to the bottom of everything.
At this point, a plot to kill President Grover Cleveland — yes, really — emerges and Forest Tucker, James Avery, Tracy “Bob the Goon” Walter, Tim Russ (Tuvok!) and Terry Funk — again, what is going on with this movie — all appear.
I really think that the real time travel in this movie is me going back in time and making it happen before my bedroom is crushed Donnie Darko-style.
“My friend Joe put on anti-radiation clothing and tried to stop the female enemy agent! My friend Joe, I repeat, put on anti-radiation clothing and tried to stop the female enemy agent from stealing the weapons from the base.”
If you’re wondering, why is that line repeated, perhaps you should steer as clear as possible from Alien Beasts, a movie that has no story, no meaning and no real reasons to recommend it to you, dear reader. To call this a movie is the most charitable and kind thing I’ve ever written.
This movie is constant repetition broken by moments of absolute weirdness and gore, then replaced once against by computer generated titles that appear to tell us “Security camera inoperable” while that is voiced over and over again.
And then it happens all over again.
Carl J. Sukenick wrote and directed this movie, in which he also plays Carl J. Sukenick, the commander of the CIA, which mainly consists of sending his friends to do backyard chopsockery while his bored father stays behind in the security center, which one can only imagine is the family couch.
The film claims that it gives you the opporunity to “See the ultimate action-packed adventure of a lifetime as Earth is attached by hideous, evil creatures from an extradimensional universe.”
Yeah, sure.
An agent named Neal was sent out to deal with the terrorist threat, but he was a traitor and has been mutated by radiation. So Carl must send Sara Shell, her husband Mark and their daughter Sheila to deal with things, but they’re all killed as well. Hell, they cut off poor Sara’s hand!
By the end of this, well, film, Carl must kill all of his friends before hunting down the hideous extra-dimensional being, which we are to assume comes from a place beyond our understanding, a universe of claymation.
Look, you can talk down on this movie all you want, but somehow Carl was smart enough to somehow get it out into the world and charged people $31.95 to see it. People bought it. Some people may have even rented it. Heck, I just wasted 74 minutes of my life watching it.
You can consider this a successful art project on many levels, the least of which was completing it. The foremost amongst it is that in the scene where the female enemy agent is caught and is forced to strip and have her breasts touched while someone says, “I must punish you,” Carl sent his friend Joe LaPenna home and did the stunt work with a masked and half-nude woman. Carl knew what he wanted and did it. He’s pretty much an auteur. Or aa maniac. Maybe both.
If you’ve ever wanted to hear narration of a film by someone who seems like they’re instead attempting to do their remedial reading homework instead of dialogue we are to assume that they have written, all while numerous people are horribly killed with some of the most homemade effects you’ve ever witnessed, then sit on down for some Alien Beasts. Here’s hoping you survive the experince.
“To rule the galaxy, an evil dictator kidnaps a scientist and steals his invention, which will provide limitless energy for his robots.” — Where have we heard this story before, Mr. Copywriter?
Uh, I have, in fact, seen this movie before . . . and George Lucas didn’t make it: Alfonzo Brescia made it back in 1977 and it was called Star Odyssey and the “energy invention” was Iridium/Etherium. The scientist who discovered it was subsequently kidnapped and a space rogue and the scientist’s space beauty of a daughter recruits a not-so-Magnificent Seven to save the universe — which is why this movie (just by the trailer alone) looks way older than its 1990 VHS-release date.
This time around, in the year 2097, the good doctor Ivan Integgin (which sounds like Iridium/Etherium), the head of the powerful Omega Institute, discovers a self-rejuvenating energy source, called Egrin (it sounds like, oh, never mind). It’s the answer the human race has hoped for to save the Earth!
Uh, hold on there, Starbuck . . . not if the evil Doctor Croam has a say about it. He plans, with his black-clad stormtroopers, to enslave the galaxy by stealing the discovery. And not even the Rebel Alliance, the United Galaxy’s Royal Fighters can stop him. But Han Solo Ryan Chase, a galactic bounty hunter and soldier of fortune (with gambling debts and a price on his head, natch), along with his Wookie buddy, Chewbacca, Arto, his blue-skinned Chameloid sidekick, Gloria, his smart-mouthed onboard computer, and the smart-mouthed (she’s not a skank!) Princess Leia galactic princess, Aurora, they’ll rescue Doctor Integgin and save the galaxy!
Yikes. Even the cover reeks of rotted, coagulated milk proteins.
What’s great about revisiting these VHS ditties all these digital years later is our celluloid Schadenfreude in the efforts of the young, burgeoning filmmakers who worked on the films, when they social media-resurface to share their frustrations with their film’s troubled production. And in the case of Space Chase, this time it’s not the IMDb or a Facebook thread, but You Tube, as three of the actors — Bill Freed, aka actor Philip Notaro (an agent forced the stage-name change; he stars as Tane), Traci Caitlyn, aka actress Traci Hart (Princess Aurora), and Barry James Hickey (our rogue hero, Ryan Chase) — swap memories via the user thread on the embedded trailer (seen below).
And since we’ve never heard of nor seen this film — only first learning of it by way of our review for Star Crystal, by way of that film’s screenwriter Eric Woster serving as the cinematographer on this film — we’ll have to use their insights to describe the film to you.
Is Space Chase intended as a homage to the Italian Star Wars clones* of old?
Your guess is as good as ours. Again . . . based on the memories of Mr. Freed and Hickey and Ms. Hart, we’ve pieced together this film’s past. . . .
While it looks like it was shot several years earlier during the Italian “Pasta Wars” craze of the early ’80s** (or, at the very least, languished on the shelf for several years before its release), writer, producer and director Nick Kimaz’s non-union film was actually shot in 1989 in Palmdale, California. His mom did all of the “too spicy” homemade catering. At least one of the actresses, Julie Nine (starred as Romy), allegedly posed for Playboy — and she threw a fit on-set when her (expensive?) jacket was stolen from the set. Actress Traci Hart ended up dating and having a long-term relationship with Nick’s brother, Tom, who served as the film’s soundman, and she almost had Nick as a brother-in-law. (We’ve since learned the correct family tree — via a December 2021 WP comment, seen below — from actress Traci Hart: Tom wasn’t Nick’s brother, but Eric Woster’s brother-in-law. At least we got the “jacket story,” right!) If you’ve actually seen this obscurity, we’ll settle your bets: Nick Kimaz rented the baddie “black stormtroopers” costumes of Skeletor’s forces from Masters of the Universe from Cannon Pictures, as well as the props and sets from Battlestar Galactica from Universal. Yep, the starfighters were kitbashed from SR-71 model kits (actually, the in-camera model effects are the best part of the movie).
What’s really cool is that three of the film’s other actors who got their start in the business on Space Chase are still in the business. Thanks to some IMDb-mining we’ve discovered Michael Gaglio’s 87th film, Copperhead Creek, is in-production and Art Roberts is on his 193-indie credit with a role in the currently-in-production American Soldier. Then there’s the recognizable Patrick Hume. While he’s on his 67th project with the in-production Cockroaches, he’s guest-starred on the top-rated TV series Criminal Minds, NCIS: Los Angeles, The Rookie, S.W.A.T, and Sons of Anarchy.
When you consider Roland Emmerich’s Moon 44 was released in the same year, and that Space Chase was made thirteen years after the George Lucas inspiration it blatantly rips off, and that it looks like Alfonzo Brescia shot it as a “Pasta Wars” sequel to his Star Odyssey from 1979, these galactic proceedings make the plastic-verse of Glen Larson’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century look good. And if you know my disdain for that series. . . . Is Space Chase so-bad-it’s-fun as Space Mutiny or Escape from Galaxy 3, which serve as the pinnacles in space opera awfulness?
No, not quite, but Space Chase makes Eric Woster’s other space romp, Star Crystal, look even better. But if there’s ever a movie that needs to be dumped onto a Mill Creek 50-film pack, Space Chase is it. For it is a film that needs to be saved and transformed into a MST3K’d classic. How did this NOT end up on a Commander USA’s Groovie Movies or USA’s Up All Night movie block? How is it, across multiple video store memberships and my celluloid diving the discount bins and close-outs of video stores, never encountered a copy of this movie?! Yet . . . it ends up in dubbed in Turkey and Russia and clipped on You Tube? Ye programming executives of Comet TV: I hereby implore thou to get a copy of this film onto the channel, forthwith. If you can program Convict 762 and Timelock (both reviewed, this week), then you can program this well-intentioned, valiant Wiseauian space effort on your channel.
So, thanks Nick Kimaz. Thanks to you, today was a good today. For I enjoyed myself as I discovered a new, cool obscurity and I have a digital platform to share it with the readers of B&S About Movies. Yeah, a great day, indeed. Now, I need to get a VHS copy for my collection. To eBay . . . and beyond! This is a really fun movie! Watch it!
Sadly, there’s no free or PPV streaming copies of Space Chase on the web — not even on You Tube or TubiTV, where all lost VHS’ers of the ’80s go to die. Well, not to worry, in addition to the trailer (embedded above), and thanks to this film’s rabid fanbase, we found ten scenes/clips from the film that we’ve compiled into one convenient-to-stream, You Tube playlist. Enjoy!
As we’ve said many times amid the digital pages of B&S About Movies: the backstories on movies are sometimes more engaging than the actual movie itself. And this Alien-cum-E.T. VHS-hybrid is one of them. And, in spite of that fact, I still love this movie.
Of course, the danger with these theatrically-shot but ultimately released as direct-to-VHS flicks from the ’80s, when reissued, first, to DVD, then Blu-ray, then into the Amazon-cum-Netflix streaming-verse: instead of sticking to the original artwork, those ’80s ditties are redressed with flashy artwork that grossly oversells the movie — and accomplishes in destroying the film’s only endearing quality: its nostalgia.
Then, ye, the dear B&S reader, say to yourself: “Those B&S guys are full of B.S. This movie sucks the feldercarb off the DeLorean flux capacitors. Frack them and their ‘nostalgia’ daggit-dunged memories.”
Hey, we get it, ye more-youthful-than-us readers. If our first exposure to Star Crystal were these two, home-video promotional one-sheets — and then we watched the movie — we’d feel hornswoggled, as well. For no one is encased in any “crystal” coffins or tombs, and nothing in this particular crystal’s clarity looks nothing like Tobe Hooper’s theatrical-distributed and thus, better known, Star Wars-cum-Alien rip from 1985, Lifeforce. And check that Gigeresque alien with toothy grin at the next asteroid, Buck.
Yeah, leave it to Roger Corman’s lipstick-on-a-pig art department minions at New World to dupe you into renting a movie. But, to be honest, I’ve never felt duped by this movie. Again, damn me and my nostalgia: I love this movie.
So, who came up with the idea to mesh Alien with E.T, you ask?
Would you believe an ex-video director (Toto was one of his clients) and Cheech and Chong associate? It’s true! While he ended up acting in a space flick we’ve never, ever seen nor heard of, Space Chase (1990; and we sense a tingling in “The Force” that it’s recycling sets and etc. from Star Crystal . . .), in addition to writing, directing and starring in a horror film we also never, ever seen nor heard of, Sandman (1993), the late Eric Woster (1958 -1992) made his feature film debut as a screenwriter with Star Crystal, a film that also used his past music video skills as an editor. Yes, you’ll see Eric’s credits in the C&C movies Nice Dreams, Still Smokin’, Things are Tough All Over, and Far Out Man (okay, only one “C,” and with another “Eric”: the everywhere Roberts one). According to his obituary in the February 21, 1992, edition of the Great Falls Tribune: Woster, majored in film production at Montana State University, later working for Columbia and Warner Bros. Pictures, as well as having his own production company, 58 Productions, named after his birth year. While the IMDb does not list it, Woster wrote, directed and acted in his last production, Common Ground, most of which was filmed in and near his hometown of Columbia Falls, Montana, before his death.
As for the director behind the script: It’s TV actor Lance Lindsay (the IMDb lists only one credit: a 1976 episode of TV’s McCloud, but surely he did more series) in his directorial debut. It is said his (step) mother is actress June Lockhart. June was, in fact, originally married to John F. Maloney until 1959; they had two daughters: Anne (of Battlestar Galactica: TOS fame) and June Elizabeth. In 1959, June married an architect by the name of John Lindsay, divorcing in 1970. As with Eric Woster, Lindsay took the celluloid bull by the horns to write, produce, and direct, yet another film we’ve never heard of nor seen, Real Bullets (1988). And has anyone ever seen Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs’s (Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington from TV’s Welcome Back, Kotter) acting-directing effort, Quiet Fire (1991)? We haven’t. Well, Lindsay apparently acted in that film, as well.
So, that’s the full resumes on the writer and director put to bed.
Now, for the actors: This is one of those films where no one was very good at their job, so they subsequently vanished from the business (it turns out the actors were also investors in the film; or the unskilled thespians hornswoggled their acting gig by investing). The only actor able to develop a resume (who’s quickly dispatched in the film’s opening salvo) is an actress we’ve named dropped a few times at B&S: Emily Longstreth. Em starred in Private Resort (with Johnny Depp), the abysmal American Drive-In, and had a support role in John Hughes’s essential ’80s comedy watch, Pretty in Pink (1986). Oh, and we can’t forget the uttery-forgettable Wired to Kill (1986) — that, if not for starring Kim Milford (Laserblast), we’d probably wouldn’t have reviewed it at all.
Set design and visual effects-wise, Star Crystal — courtesy of SFX Supervisor Lewis Abernathy (wrote Deep Star Six, directed House IV, bit-acted in James Cameron’s Titanic) — when considering its budget, looks pretty darn good. The SFX team also includes Steven P. Sardanis; his work goes back to Charles Bronson’s The Stone Killer and 1974’s The Towering Inferno, and Chuck Comisky; he worked on Battle Beyond the Stars, Star Knight, and James Cameron’s Avatar.
So, granted, the proceedings maybe not be as effects-craftsman-good as William Malone’s quintessential low-budget Alien rip, Creature(1985), but just as good, if not better, than the space station interiors of the Canadian apoc-romp Def-Con 4 (1985). Considering Def-Con 4 also carries the New World imprint, it probably is the same set, if not the same set retro-fitted to a degree; it looks like it to me. As John Levengood, our fellow VHS dog over at John’s Horror Corner pointed out: About 10 minutes into the running time, watch out for sculptings of the Millennium Falcon on the doors of a space station. The repurposing of popular model kits is impressive. The practical, in-camera model work is also impressive and fun to watch, as well (yes, the ship reminds of — but is not — the “Hammerhead” from Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars, as some reviews have stated; it’s original to the film, but kitbashed nonetheless, as was the Hammerhead, from other popular, over-the-counter model kits).
The reason this all looks so good on camera is cinematographer Robert Caramico*. He got his start with Ed Wood’s Orgy of the Dead (1965) and Lemora (1973). The spacesuits (we’ve learned another “recycling” are the spacesuits used during the film’s opening scene on Mars: they’re repurposed from 1977’s Capricorn One**) and various jumpsuits and wares are also well-made. And the alien tendrils and humans-sucked-dry gore effects (that, considering the film’s R-rating, could of be bit more gorier) are pretty decent. And, when we finally meet the once evil alien that becomes a friendly alien, he-she-it looks pretty good, too — granted, it can’t run and just oozes and goozes in one spot, but, it does blink and glow!
Then there’s the acting . . . oh, whoa the thespin’ that just kills all of that hard-SFX work. And the “suspenseful” chase scene between alien and human in the ship’s conduits/tunnels — as depicted by ’80s DOS-level video arcade blips on a rudimentary computer-map of the ship watched by the crew members . . . yikes! And what’s the deal with the ship not having any actual corridors or decks that forces the crew to crawl on their hands and knees through tunnels to get from compartment to compartment, e.g., from the bridge to the lab? Why couldn’t Mr. Corman lend out the Battle Beyond the Stars sets? Since when is ol’ Rog apprehensive to set loaning-recycling? He gave them to Fred Olen Ray for Star Slammer, after all.
Anyway, if you’ve seen Alien — or any of its ’80s knockoffs (but this really isn’t as “Alien” as you may think) — you know the tale: In the year 2032, a routine expedition of a crater near Olympus Mons on Mars discovers a mysterious rock. And the crew of the SS-37 cracks it open. And it has a crystal inside (that acts as the alien’s “life force” and its “intelligence” . . . and an alien organism that grows . . . that leaves a gooey, “lemon” scent during its rampage. . . .
When the Nostromo-light (aka, the SS-37) shows up at the L-5 space station (aka, Gateway Station-light; yes, it’s also a “spoked-spinning wheel” station, but it is not the same space station from Creature, as some reviewers have stated) — with everyone on board dead-by-suffocation — a five-man (three women, two men) military-civilian technical crew is dispatched to run a systems check on the ship. Then the alien sabotages the station and the tech crew escapes the destruction aboard the damaged-not-repaired SS-37. With not enough food to last the two-year shuttle trip back to Earth or a (hopeful) one-year rescue mission, they decide to search for supply depots in orbit between Mars and Earth to make the trip home. But not if the alien, known as GAR, has anything to say about it: it’s poisoned the ship’s water supply and now there’s not enough to make it to the first supply depot. The alien wants the ship to get back home — and not to Mars. But when a meteor storm damages the ship and neither homo sapien or xenomorph can get home, they realize they need to bury the galactic light-hatchet.
Ah, the ol’ used and beat-to-hell ’80s VHS that I burnt into blue screen.
Truth be told: While the acting and its (many) bad bits of dialog detracts from the script, the story itself is intelligent and heartfelt, and the last act when GAR and the two surviving humans become friends and must depart to their individual destinies, is actually heartbreaking. But then . . . oh, that friggin’ song kicks in — that’s not as bad as the theme song to The Green Slime(1968) or as hokey as the eco-theme to Silent Running (1972), but still, it’s pretty bad — has to ruin that tear-jerking moment. If you take away the strained thespin’, you’ll discover there’s actually a great movie in the frames of Star Crystal, with its sci-fi poignant message regarding humanity’s ways that’s ripe for a big-budgeted remake. Yes, Jesus Saves — even aliens. Come on, now: a film with an insight about love and freewill among the (alien) races? How can you hate on that message? (Personally, I enjoy a chunk of religion and philosophy chocolate in my sci-fi peanut butter.)
In my discussions with Sam, the Bossman of B&S, about the film: He takes this film to task for the bad alien changing its xenomorphic ways after reading the human’s Holy Bible, and for playing chess with a human (moving pieces with its mind) as a rip on the Dejarik hologram game from Star Wars. My irritations result from the overbearing “futuristic” soundtrack by Doug Katsaros, later of the ’90s animated series, The Tick (it’s mixed to loud, IMO). Then there’s the British-accented, smart-mouthed ship’s computer, the Bechdel test fails of the ship’s engineer cast an unattractive bitch (the “Lambert”), the ubiquitous hot blonde being a weeping willow of the “what are we gonna do now” variety (ack, King Dinosaur), and the hot brunette being a strong-willed bitch (aka the “Ripley”). Lastly, the men are dismissive, sexist dickheads: dicks who assign the women the grunt work (such as being in charge of the kitchen; ack, Flight to Mars) as they kick back on the bridge to spew chauvinistic dialog and crack bad jokes. Oh, and our Captain kissing the passed out/knocked out female crew member: icky!
What Sam and I do agree on — and everyone calls out — is “Crystal of a Star,” the caterwauling-awful end-credits song by American-Icelandic singer and actress Stefanianna Christopherson, aka Indria. And if not for her starting out as a child-teen actress with roles in the Jacqueline Bisset-starring The Grasshopper (1970) and TV’s Mayberry R.F.D., and becoming best known for her work as the first voice of Daphne Blake in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, no one would probably have called out the song at all. (Well, yeah. They would have.) Hey, we even found the film’s opening-titles theme song by Doug Katsaros.
You can enjoy the full film (seriously, you will enjoy it) as a commercial free-stream on You Tube. The fine folks at Kino Lorber (2017) offer Star Crystal as an HD-restored DVD and Blu-ray (Ack! Not with the Giger-cum-Tobe Hooper faux artwork on the cover?). Used VHS tapes are still easily obtainable in the online marketplace. If you like to caveat your Blus before you buy, you can get the technical low down at Blu-ray.com. There’s also an older (2003), bare-bones Anchor Bay DVD in the marketplace, which also proliferate the online marketplace.
And that’s the saga of Star Crystal!
*As Bill Van Ryn at Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum has said, “Robert Caramico has, as a DP, given us so many great films!” But Bill, Sam, and myself have never seen, nor been able to find, a copy of Robert’s lone theatrical directing effort: the faux “adults only” documentary Sex Rituals of the Occult (1970). So, to say “the search is on” in an understatement. He also shot Octaman and Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, so to say Robert “makes chicken salad of the daggit dung” is an understatement — and if you’ve seen those two films, you know what we mean!
**Speaking of space suit recycling: The suits from NBC-TV’s 1991 telefilm, Plymouth, have also made the rounds on other low-budget productions.
Update: Never say never, young star warrior. Once a movie gets stuck in our heads . . . we finally gave Space Chase a full review proper, and it runs at 8 PM this evening to close out our “Space Week” of film reviews. So join us!
Update, February 2023: Our thanks to a few of the makers behind this film for reaching out with their appreciative insights for the review and backstories (such as the trivia about the suits and the June Lockhart connection) which now appears in this review.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
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