Braincrashed

I have given myself a brain injury

I meant to, too.

This is going to take some explaining so bear with me as we go on a journey to a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...

Okay, really we're going nearly twenty years ago to an office five minute's walk from where I currently work. Way back then, I worked for the UK arm of MicroProse, doin' games and hittin' my co-workers upside the head with laser guns (actually true).

One of the more interesting characters in the office was an artist by the name of Mark Wilson, whose work you can see if you ever dig out the Atari STe version of Civilization, which you totally should because it's aces and much better than the Amiga version because there's not so much disk-swapping. He was quite a Sci-Fi fan, specifically of Dr Who and various extraordinarily bad films. When he'd been at University, he'd been involved in the cinema club and would run all-night showings of some truly magnificent movie catastrophes, and when he wasn't banging on about Dr Who or exactly why his friends had written a dedication to him in a Call of Cthulhu role-playing adventure (or why our head programmer was an evil troglodyte from Greek myth and how we should probably trap him in a giant wicker man and light him on fire, if only we could somehow get hold of all the wicker in the world), he would regale me with stories of the finest film in cinema history.

Starcrash.

No, wait- don't run off to Google it. You'll spoil the fun and the Wikipedia article, while accurate, is dull as hell and makes the film seem a lot more reasonable that the actual film itself. Sure you could Youtube it, but then you'd just be found face down in a coma with cerebro-spinal fluid leaking out your ears and nose from where your brain escaped.


Let's examine the cast. Two big names who aren't at all mismatched. Christopher Plummer and David Hasselhoff. Naturally, they play father and son. Space Emperor father and son, no less. Happily, the film was made in 1979 to cash in on Star Wars fever, so Hasselhoff has not yet transitioned to full-on 'Hoff and does not spoil the subtle balance of the film with his massive personality. Also, he wears a mask with laser eyes.

Next up is the heroine of our adventure, a lady by the name of Caroline Munro. Star of a number of Hammer horror films, including The Abominable Dr Phibes, she is best remembered for starring in an ad campaign for Lamb's Navy Rum and also for being the first woman to be killed by James Bond. Deliberately, anyway. Her main attributes are a willingness to star in a film where about half the time she is wearing a space bikini and fighting other equally scantily-clad women and an ability to be called by the name "Stella Star" without bursting out laughing, as I imagine that film stock was pretty damn expensive, it being a cheap Italian Star Wars knock-off  with all the production values that implies, especially since they'd probably used up half their budget on Christopher Plummer- ten percent on his fee and the rest on the enormous amount of valium he seems to have consumed.

Our heroine's sidekick is interesting. All the way through, I was thinking "who is this incredibly curly-haired scary-eyed lunatic Space Jesus wannabe?" and "When is the woman with the second-highest billing in the movie going to show up? I bet she looks damn fine in a bikini". Well, it turns out that they were both one and the same person, by the name of Marjoe Gortner. This is remarkable on account of my "scary-eyed lunatic Space Jesus wannabe" comment, which I really did think at the time. Turns out Marjoe (portmanteau of "Mary" and "Joseph") was a revivalist preacher from the age of four, racking up a fortune of some three million dollars by the age of sixteen (a lot in 1960, fully half a Steve Austin). Space Jesus has powers. He brings Stella StaAHAHAHAr back from the dead with his magic gay disco microwave defrost powers and survives being hit with a stick by a bald-headed green man who was probably envious of his lovely locks.

 He also has a lightsaber and uses it to beat troglodytes with. Our Space Jesus is an Angry (and crazy-eyed) Space Jesus!

The villain of the piece is Joe Spinell, AKA Lord Zarth Arn, who has built the most powerful weapon in the cosmos, so big it is built into a planet, that's how big it is! No poxy being mistaken for a small moon for this doomsday weapon, it's a whole planet that destroys people's minds by superimposing the red goop out of a lava lamp on them. Except for our heroes, as they "aren't like normal people". Actual Line.

Lord Zarth Arn (never, ever Lord Arn. Not even Arnie to his bessie mate Elric) has presumably built his terrible doomsday weapon (terrible in the sense that it is rubbish) on account of waking up one day to find out that a mad space-doctor has swapped his skin with that of Edward James Olmos. Also, despite being thin of face, he is surprisingly rotund of tum and should not wear so much skin-tight PVC.

There's a robot too. The fourth worst robot in history ever (the three even worse robots are in this film too thanks to the magic of Stop-Motion Animation!) , his creators couldn't be bothered wasting time giving him a good name, or even a two letter, two number registration like a certain other movie with somewhat better production values. This robot is called "L" or "Elle" and is identical to Elle McPherson is that he has legs and arms and a head. And the name. He is rubbish and his idea for avoiding hypothermia is to lie down in the snow and hold hands. Happily, cave-dwelling trolodytes smash him to bits with styrofoam bones, revealing his giblets to be made from an old, broken movie camera.

I don't want to spoil the plot too badly, partly because there isn't much of a plot to spoil, and partly because the Youtube video I'm going to link to later will do that for you. Instead here are a few highlights:

A giant stop-motion robot made of silver putty and bits of stuff left over from a meccano set. It has robot boobs and flashes red when shot in said boobs. Now I know why every videogame boss in every Japanese bullet-hell shooter flashes red when hit in the vulnerables. It is possibly the worst-animated thing in the history of history. Elbows do not bend that way!

Two smaller stop-motion robots based on the Ray Harryhausen skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts. Problem is, they didn't have Ray Harryhausen.

Music by five-time academy award winner John Barry who scored fourteen James Bond movies, including Goldfinger, for pity's sake! He did the theme music for the Persuaders! He was the first man to use a synthesizer in a film score!

Presumably his contribution to this film was made in the form of scrunched-up music scores covered in dog-ends, cigarette ash and banana peel, with "Crap! What was I thinking?" scribbled on them. I also presume that as a result of his work on Starcrash, he learned to shred stuff before chucking it in the bin.

Enemy spacecraft that fly in trains of five ships with less than half a ship-length between each other. They fly into combat this way too. Happily their ray-guns shoot every-which-way but straight ahead, so there's no danger involved. Also, brakes don't work in space, so no accidental five-spaceship pileups in the Haunted Stars here.

A bigger enemy spacecraft that is a giant hand made of tin cans and model kit sprues. The hand closes into a fist for battle. It has nice, big picture windows that turn out to be a slight tactical weak-point.

Imperial battleships that can stop the flow of time (for three minutes, which is interesting because how does time know the three minutes are up?) and whose primary combat strategy is "It's raining men" through the medium of golden torpedoes full of er- men. Happily, they were up against an enemy with big windows instead of a half-metre thick face-hardened steel hull, because face hardening does not mean "hardened with faces".

Did I mention the bikini chick-fights?

There is no punchline or moral to this blog post, save to say that even after twenty years of anticipation, I was not disappointed, this truly was one of the best worst films I've ever seen. Wherever you are, Mark, I salute you.

Click here, you know you want to.