Star what now?–

A smoking hot chick in a bikini, a robot named Larry the Cable Guy and a guy with a perm to die for, go in search of Princess David Hasselhoff, who is the son of Christopher Plummer, the Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe. Stop laughing.

It’s STARCRASH, a film which outright plagiarizes STAR WARS (1977) less than a year after that groundbreaking film’s release. And doing it so badly, it actually looks like an older film than STAR WARS (with its grimy production values, rudimentary effects shots and clueless depiction of what outer space actually looks like), so succeeds in fooling at least some people into believing that STAR WARS ripped them off!

Opening shot of a giant spaceship hoving onto the screen from above the camera, talk of imperial troops, jumping to hyperspace (which looks like a video game of Asteroids gone horribly wrong), lightsabers, laser blasters going peeuw peeuw, an anthropomorphic robot (like C-3PO), David Hasselhoff as a princess that needs saving (like Leia), a guy with superpowers (like the Force), and of course, a smokin’ hot babe that wears almost nothing throughout the whole film (like Chewbacca).

Whatever’s happening here – I wanna be in the middle of it.

Stella Star (Carolyn Munro – rowrr!) and Akton (Marjoe Gortner) are flying aimlessly through space in a triangular spaceship with seats that look like they were designed to be uncomfortable, when they are accosted by green-skinned Thor (Robert Tessier) and a robot named Elle (Judd Hamilton with the voice of Hamilton Camp speaking like a redneck from DELIVERANCE) as space cops trying to “bring them in” (oh, so I guess they’re… “rogues” like Han Solo?). Turns out Thor and the hick robot are trying to deliver Stella and Akton to the Emperor (Christopher Plummer) who wants them to find his effeminate son with a perm even badder than Akton’s. That would be David Hasselhoff before he became male.

Emperor tells them of a giant weapon the size of a planet (oh, you mean like a Death Star?) owned by the evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell, from THE GODFATHER to ROCKY to, uh, this?).

They travel to a planet made of ice (like Hoth) to do something-something, where they blatantly rip off other movies, like the Talos scene from JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, and Amazonian warriors (take your pick of countless movies), and walking the desert like C-3PO and R2-D2.

After being beaten for ten minutes, Akton suddenly displays superpowers. Uh, we can only assume you like beatings, Akton. After letting Elle and Stella walk around a planet looking for something and getting captured, Akton effects a rescue and tells Stella they were on the planet they were looking for all the time. Can we assume you got your pages of the script late, Akton? The excuse that he is an “alien pathfinder” doesn’t really make much sense in a galaxy where everyone is in space. What actually constitutes an “alien”?

Okay, just one more look. Now go do your homework.

Director-writer Luigi Cozzi’s “space fiction” as he calls it, is a disjointed, confused, uneducated, hardly-written, poorly-filmed orgy of ineptitude.

Dubbing and looping is almost as good any given GODZILLA movie, and the actors walking while acting-like-they’re-walking, is priceless. Stella informs the crew that “In hyperspace, you can reach your destination in a couple of hours, when it used to take a couple of weeks.” Thanks, from all the astronauts onboard the ship that have traveled in hyperspace before. During a space dogfight, Stella informs the crew, “There’s one more” enemy fighter left, while we see a shot of three flying across screen, and in the next second, she says, “We’re down from six to five.” Then, after we see just one fighter being vaporized, Thor says, “We’ve done it. We’ve won.”

Third base!

END