NOT Available on DVD: STARCRASH

What’s the best movie from the late 70’s that features light sabers, an enormous space fortress capable of annihilating entire planets, wisecracking robot sidekicks, and dogfights between interplanetary spaceships? If you said STAR WARS, you’d be wrong! Leave it to the wacky Italians, always quick to exploit a popular trend, to rip off George Lucas’s cash cow resulting in a film so spectacularly cheesy that over 30 years later it has actually aged better than the film it emulates. That movie is of course is the insane 1978 sci-fi “epic” STAR CRASH, an infamously harebrained but entertaining-as-hell STAR WARS knockoff that is NOT available on DVD.

Like STAR WARS, most of STAR CRASH is comprised of a string of FLASH GORDON-inspired cliffhanger adventures. Caroline Munro stars as Stella Star, an intergalactic smuggler who, along with her alien companion Akton (Marjoe Gortner), is captured by some sort of galaxy-wide police and sentenced to a labor planet where people carry radium slopping around in buckets. The Emperor of the Galaxy (Christopher Plummer) has her released to help capture the evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell) who has developed some kind of planet-sized “Doom Weapon” that he wants to use to take over the universe and has kidnapped the emperor’s fey son Simon (David Hasselhoff). Accompanied by a Hillbilly-voiced Space Robot named Elle (voiced by Judd Hamilton) and a bald green ape-man named Thor (Robert Tessier), Stella and Akton travel across alien planets, including one populated by scantily-clad Amazons and another made of ice, in their quest to stop Count Zarth Arn before he destroys the universe. The future of the entire galaxy is in their hands!

STAR CRASH is kitschy, filled to the brim with unintentional humor, and transcendent in its dopiness. It rips off STAR WARS blatantly but the cast seems to be having a great time and it really is one of my favorite science fiction movies from the 70’s. Connoisseurs of wretched special effects will be in heaven viewing STAR CRASH. The spaceships look like they were assembled by a dim 9-year-old who combined plastic model kits with soup cans and Lego pieces and spray-painted the results. There’s a goofy stop-motion monster that looks a lot like Talos from JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS with breasts and walks in a most awkwardly jerky fashion (Lou Ferrigno battled a similar stop-motion creature in the equally absurd HERCULES in 1983 by the same director). Deep space is depicted as a kaleidoscopic backdrop of colorful stars using Christmas tree bulbs and the sets seem to be lit with disco lights. The score is by composer John Barry who had scored most of the early James Bond films. Seven years later, Barry would recycle the main theme from STAR CRASH into his score to OUT OF AFRICA which would win him an Oscar!

STAR CRASH was written and directed Luigi Cozzi who claims he wrote it before STAR WARS as a tribute to the old space serials and was only able to get it financed after George Lucas’ film became such a hit. True or not, Cozzi was certainly able to assemble a much more colorful cast than Lucas. For gravitas, STAR WARS cast Oscar-winner Alec Guiness. For highbrow cred, STAR CRASH has Golden Globe nominee Christopher Plummer who recites some of the silliest dialog in cinema history (“I wouldn’t be the Emperor of the Universe if I didn’t have a few talents” and “Imperial battleship: Stop the flow of time!”) as if he were performing Shakespeare in the park. Okay, STAR WARS did have Peter Cushing for cool points but STAR CRASH has Joe Spinell, star (along with Ms Munro) of the grindhouse classic MANIAC as well as appearing in TAXI DRIVER and both GODFATHER films. Spinell, with his beer belly, melodramatic laugh, and dime-store satanic cloak, chews up the scenery as Count Zarth Arn with lines such as “By sunset, I’ll be the master of the whole universe!”(Sunsets in outer space!?!). Too bad Spinell’s voice was dubbed as it would have been a hoot to hear him spew this tripe in his Brooklyn accent. Best of all, his spaceship is shaped like a giant hand like something straight out of “Johnny Socko and his Flying Robot”! Joe Spinell, who died in 1989, was way too cool to be found in any STAR WARS movie! Cast as Thor is bald toughie Robert Tessier, who was best known for playing ‘Mr. Clean’ in TV commercials in the 60’s and 70’s and had bare-knuckle boxed Charles Bronson in the incredible cage match sequence of the 1976 masterpiece HARD TIMES. Had anyone in STAR WARS fought Charles Bronson?….Nope!. STAR WARS may have had Harrison Ford but STAR CRASH had……Marjoe Gortner !!!! Gortner started in showbiz at age 4 as a child evangelist (there was even an Oscar-winning documentary made about him in 1972 titled MARJOE). Gangly, hawk-nosed, and nasally-voiced, Gortner was always a strange choice as anyone’s idea of a leading man, yet he was one over and over throughout the decade opposite some of the my favorite 70’s B-movie glamour girls including Pamela Franklin (FOOD OF THE GODS in 1976), Bobbie Bresee (MAUSOLEUM in 1983), Lynda Carter (in 1976’s BOBBIE JO AND THE OUTLAW where the lucky prick slobbered all over Ms Carter’s bare breasts!) and Caroline Munro here. Even with his goofy white-man fro and spandex suits, Gortner is Lee Marvin here compared to David Hasselhoff (credited as David Asselhoff on the cover of my French import DVD!!) making just his second screen appearance in STAR CRASH (he’d played ‘Boner’ the year before in REVENGE OF THE CHEERLEADERS) and he resembles a drag queen here with his bouffant hairdo, scrawny pre-“Baywatch” physique, and loads of mascara (seriously, the guy wears more eye makeup than Caroline Munro!). But if for no other reason, STAR CRASH is worth seeking out for the unforgettable presence of Caroline Munro as Stella Starr. The sultry brunette was a high profile pinup girl in late ‘60s London before starting her acting career with roles mostly in horror and fantasy films. She was in films for Hammer studios (DRACULA A.D. ’72 in 1972 and CAPTAIN KRONOS VAMPIRE HUNTER in 1974), Ray Harryhausen’s THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1974) and was a memorable Bond villainess in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1974). In STAR CRASH she wears a variety of sexy leather and latex outfits that look like they were stolen from Barbarella’s closet. Always a fan favorite, today the still-stunning Caroline, who went on to work with Jess Franco and Paul Naschy, is a familiar face at autograph shows and I asked her why her character on the American STAR CRASH one-sheet (which she signed for me) looks nothing like her. She explained that the studio sent a photo of Kay Lenz, the wrong actress, to the artist who did the painting on the poster and they were to cheap to change it once the mistake had been discovered!

At 93 fast-minutes STAR CRASH never has a dull moment, but is it really better than STAR WARS? STAR CRASH is juvenile, poorly acted and written, full of wretched comedy relief, cheesy, and doesn’t make a lick of sense. But couldn’t you say the same thing about the first STAR WARS (sounds of geek heads exploding!)? Made for a fraction of the budget, STAR CRASH has more ambition and imagination and if I had to choose one to take to a desert island, I wouldn’t hesitate to pick STAR CRASH. I first saw STAR CRASH at the Holiday Drive-In in St. Louis county in the summer of 1978 perfectly double-billed with director Kinji Fukasaku’s MESSAGE FROM SPACE, an even more gonzo STAR WARS knockoff starring Sonny Chiba that featured massive sailboats in space! STAR CRASH was released on the Orion VHS label in the mid-80’s (and on a cheap label under the title FEMALE SPACE INVADER) but has yet to appear on domestic DVD. The aforementioned French import is a double-disc doozy though, complete with a making-of feature, interview with Cozzi, and handy English-language track (although the scrolling text that opens the film STAR WARS-style is in French) Also included is STAR CRASH 2, a retitled unrelated Italian film originally called ESCAPE FROM GALAXY 3 that does not have an English dub and I have not watched. If you have not seen STAR CRASH, drop what you’re doing and track it down right now. You’ll never want to watch STAR WARS again!