It's time.
As far as I understand, Starcrash is an equal of Troll 2 and Birdemic as far as Famous Bad Movies go. Maybe it's not as famous--but until Troll 2 kicked off its reign as a Bad Movie Prince, Starcrash was possibly the most famous Bad Movie made by someone from Italy. Nearly everything about Starcrash is done badly in some way, but the cohesive whole is never annoying or agonizing. Far from it--the film is pure trash fun, in a nearly classical sense, and some parts are even done (mostly) well. Of course, there's the fairly obvious caveat--see that title? See that release year? Hope you're ready to take the fast train to Cashinsville.
This movie opens with a shot which has by now become classic--thanks to a different movie. Hmm, what other science fantasy motion picture came out in the late '70s that opened with a spaceship flying away from the camera, descending off the top of the screen? The name escapes me at present. Anyway, our decently impressive starship is manned by a bunch of guys who look like the Time Lord Chancellery Guards from Doctor Who. We will learn later that they serve the Galactic Emperor...who is a good guy in this one! See, this movie is totally original. The Imperial crew are wiped out by flashing red lights, which the film's characters insist on calling "red monsters." Um, sure. They use the same effect to make the stars of the space scenes, changing the red lights to white. Anyway, after the rampage of the "red monsters," we cut to our heroes, smugglers Stella Star and Akton. They are on the run from the Imperial authorities, represented by a green, bald, human-like alien named Thor and a robot named L. Thor's green skin ends at his neck in some shots, and L speaks with a Yosemite Sam accent. Later, he'll turn out to be a coward because they couldn't have him roll around and speak in beeps. Stella and Akton escape but end up at the border of "the Haunted Stars," a deathzone of uncharted cosmic territories. Here, they find the Imperial ship, with a single survivor left aboard. Before he dies, Akton reads his mind, because as we will learn wayyyy later in the movie, Akton has
Speaking of the future, did you know that leather bikinis will become standard for female prison laborers in the centuries yet to come? Well, actually, it's just for Stella Star. Don't know what makes her special, but she'll keep on wearing this outfit for damn near the rest of the movie. There are multiple opportunities for her to change, but she just sort of doesn't. I guess it would be comfy if you did a lot of running on planets where modesty wasn't a huge issue. Stella is surprised when Thor and L show up to collect her--she and Akton are no longer the Emperor's prisoners, but his guests. They were the ones who met the dying guard, after all, which gives them at least a tangential reason to meet with the ruler of the galaxy. The Emperor--whose privileged, uncertainly-ironic air gives him a strange resemblance to Prequel Palpatine--asks Stella, Akton, Thor, and L to go into the Haunted Stars and looks for the "phantom planet" of his evil counterpart, the wicked Count Zarth Arn. Indeed, it was Zarth Arn who sent the "red monsters" to attack the Imperial ship, which was one of several being sent into the Stars to combat the Count under the command of the Emperor's son. As with all the crew of all the ships who sought Zarth Arn's planet, the Prince has been lost, and the Emperor fears the worst. Stella promises to bring him back one or another, and the quartet leaves, with all prior grudges seemingly erased.
The first planet they go to sets up a formula which will follow for much of the rest of the film. Stella and L take the ship's shuttle down to the planet, while Akton and Thor stay aboard and uh. Tend to the machinery, I guess. Or maybe they "tend to the machinery"--hey, it's a great way to deal with boredom. When we do cut to Akton in the ship, he's practicing making plasma rings or something with his psychic powers. As she explores the beach, Stella utters one of the best lines of a movie made up of best lines: "Oh my God! Amazons on horseback!" L's reply is relaxed, despite his newly-acquired and oft-proclaimed nervousness: "I hope they're friendly." They are not. They take the pair back to their queen, an ally of Zarth Arn's, and when they try to escape they attack L en masse. This movie is another occasion outside of Death Note where I must be careful spoiling that L dies. Except not really--he just gets back up and saves Stella, but not before the smuggler learns from the Amazon queen that Zarth Arn's planet is protected by two guardians. The movie does remember this later, but the payoff is really stupid. Stella and L try to go back to the ship, when they are attacked by--and I'm not kidding here--a giant humanoid stop-motion robot with enormous spherical tits, complete with giant blown-out industrial nipples. The not-Harryhausen creature stumbles after them but they manage to get away safe and sound. Of course, they have to shoot down some Amazon fighter ships along the way, in a sequence which is similar to the TIE fighter scene from A New Hope in spirit if not in totality.
The next planet is an ice-world, just like in Star W--wait, hold on. This movie came out before The Empire Strikes Back. Surely it's just a coincidence, and not an instance of George Lucas having seen this movie. Anyway, it turns out Thor is a traitor, and he plans to leave Stella and L on the planet to die, after having seemingly killed Akton with a single karate chop. Akton is a little bit stronger than that, though, and shoots lasers out of his hands to kill Thor (making a creepy murder-face in the process); he saves Stella and L, but not before they have a genuinely cute bonding moment where they call each other friends and reminisce about how far they've come since the days of fighting each other. It turns out Akton knew Thor would betray them because he has future-vision. When Stella reasonably asks, "Why did you never tell me about this before?" his reply is totally amazing: "Because if I told you the future, that would be changing the future, and that is against the law." (Emphasis mine, but some words don't need to be spoken intensely to be emphatic.) I assume this is a weird dubbing thing, and they mean, like, the laws of reality, but I love the idea of the Emperor meticulously studying the future and then enforcing its flow no matter what, including the parts of it which don't go well for him, and dispatching time-cops--dressed perhaps even more ludicrously than their chronally-bound counterparts--to punish those who try to change the future. All while pretending not to know what's going on.
In orbit over the third planet, the heroes' ship is attacked by the "red monsters," but Akton reveals that they are actually a psychic illusion. While on the planet, Stella and L are attacked by cavemen. While the pair hold their own, the cavemen are great in number, and they attack L en masse. This movie is another occasion outside of Death Note where I must be--oh goddamnit! This movie needs to stop repeating itself. This time, L is really, truly dead, at least for now. Stella has been kidnapped and is about to be cooked and eaten when she is rescued by a figure in a fish-man mask. He takes the mask off of his head, and reveals his true identity: DAVID HASSELHOFF. Again, I am not kidding, it is actually Hasselhoff. Hasselhoff with a fuckton of eyeliner, no less. This is Simon, and he is the only surviving Imperial from the original wave of ships that entered the Haunted Stars. He and Stella run into Akton, who whips out a lightsaber (there's no other name for it) and cuts down the cavemen who were chasing them. He then says that the red monsters and the cavemen were the twin guardians spoken of by the queen of the Amazons--thus, the planet which contained the last survivor of the Emperor's mission was conveniently also the base of Zarth Arn's they were looking for. Those are not interesting guardians, although the Count has a pair of really shitty stop-motion robots to protect him--a simple dialogue transplant would have fixed some things, because it's more likely to me from a story perspective that these robots are the guardians, and not two unrelated, random menaces. It turns out that Simon is, of course, the Prince, and the Count is using him as bait to come to the phantom planet--whereupon he will blow it up in his face, killing the galactic ruler alongside his son and the two smugglers. But Akton breaks loose and kills the robots with his lightsaber, sustaining fatal injuries in the process. He refuses to save himself because changing the future is against the law and everything. But he dies giving the universe a better chance.
It seems that Stella and Simon are doomed to die anyway, because they can't escape the planet--however, the Emperor appears and announces he has powers of his own. At that, he commands: "Imperial Battleship...stop the flow of time!" That ship can suspend time, alright, but it can't suspend my disbelief. The Emperor announces the final plan, which involves crashing his flying city into Zarth Arn's fleet--a Starcrash, as it were. The last battle begins, pitting good against evil in a fight to the death.
Starcrash does its best to do good with plundered loot. While there are countless scenes and moments shamelessly plucked from the vine that grew from Star Wars, the sets and costumes usually have some sort of creative image apparent in them. It is entirely possible that the design team had seen episodes of Doctor Who, as that aesthetic is present too. There are odd European touches here, as well as Flash Gordon. Yet all of these elements work in their own pulpy goofiness--this is a space opera, after all, and opera is nothing if not garish. This movie is surprisingly sexless for an Italian film of this vintage. But like the model it "borrows" from, Starcrash is more concerned with an unquestioning, un-cynical world which could appeal to children as well as adults, rather than the universes of anything that the Umberto Lenzis and Bruno Matteis of the world would ordinarily turn out. Hope is valuable in Star Wars, and that Starcrash preserves the hopeful atmosphere of its better counterpart is vital. It's a bit easier to believe in the cheapness, because at no point do you feel that the characters would get annoyed watching their own movie. The scene with Stella and L on the ice-planet is, as I said, genuinely affecting, and while Akton was kind of a tool who did mysterious things for dumb reasons, his death is upsetting because we care about Stella and we know by this point how dear Akton is to her. Also, with lovable robots being more popular than ever, it's hard to watch L's longer-lasting second death, even if he does come back in a new body for the finale. A lot of people, including myself, like to say things that try to synopsize cinema as a whole, and I want to avoid universal conclusions because I love movies for how amorphous they are--all the shapes they can take, all the games they can play. But I will abide by a broad and general maxim that Good Characters + Entertaining Events = Good Movie. I don't know what I need aside from compelling characters and interesting things for them to do. Throw in a Good Message and we've got something going here.
Of course, Starcrash is very funny, and not on purpose. I think my favorite scene is the one in the final battle where Zarth Arn's idea of leading his men is standing on a catwalk shouting "Kill! Kill!" over and over again. Maybe that's all I need. I don't know what I need, actually, but I seem to keep finding great things in life anyway. Starcrash is most certainly one of them.
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