the goggles do nothing

[rone]

I dropped by tongodeon's pad last night, and met the charming matrushkaka, as well as tritone's and morrisa's adorable mirandapod.  In between snacks, beer, and tacos, i was exposed to two horrors of modern cinema: Dünyayi kurtaran adam, AKA "Turkish Star Wars", and Starcrash.

DKA is an exercise in eye-poppingly bad levels of plagiarism, costuming, editing, cinematography, action... i couldn't take more than five or so minutes before my brain started demanding more cohesive and less truculent input.  It felt like the scenes were out of order because the shoehorned Star Wars footage was out of order (there was even one scene that involved some ship firing at the Millennium Falcon which i don't recall ever seeing in any Lucas movie).  At one point, my brain caused my legs to walk back to the TV because it identified the "Battlestar Galactica" theme; soon thereafter, the "Indiana Jones" theme started playing, and i fled again before i did something picturesquely memorable.

Starcrash felt like On The Waterfront after that.  If you thought Jeremy Irons must've been desperate for cash when he agreed to do Dungeons & Dragons, imagine what sort of depraved pictures must've been held against Christopher Plummer to force him to appear in Starcrash.  Again, i wandered in and out of the movie, so i didn't quite catch the whole plot, but the main characters were a feisty babe in various revealing and shiny outfits, a guy with mystical superpowers and William Katt's hair, a bald guy with "WARNING: TRAITOR" written all over his pale blue skin, and a robot policeman with a bad Texan accent; they all travel aboard a ship named Murray Leinster (which, Google tells me, is the pen name for American author William Fitzgerald Jenkins; the significance of the ship name escapes me, but it seems that they used parts from the models of Space: 1999's Eagle Transporter and the Apollo Saturn V to build the Murray Leinster miniature).

They end up going off to rescue Emperor Von Trapp's son, who is on a planet that's populated by cavemen that destroy the robot cop and hog-tie the silver-suited babe onto a girder and haul her away. She is then rescued by the Emperor's son, played by —yes— David Hasselhoff, who has a masked helmet that shoots eye beams (and which is inexplicably left behind on the planet).  Then they are both rescued by the William Katt wannabe, Akton, who wields a lightsaber that was much more reminiscent of the Schwartz rings from Spaceballs than the Jedi weapon.  Akton is a superstud, who cannot be killed until the end, when he meets his nemesis: cheap robot cutlasses coated in deadly ROBOT POISON.  Or something.  Anyway, Count Zarth Arn (a villain whose superpower seems to be the ability to speak only by moving his lower jaw in a counterclockwise motion) comes along, the Emperor whups him by issuing the famous order, "Imperial Battleship: HALT THE FLOW OF TIME!" and the movie mercifully ends.

Comments

Argh

[rjray.livejournal.com]

Starcrash

Damn you, man, I had almost erased that film from my memory. And I suffered through it in the theater. Just because I was a 12-year-old child at the time is no excuse. Indeed, the only reason it didn't qualify as child abuse at the time, was that this was Oklahoma in 1980-- nothing short of fatality actually qualified as "abuse" at the time.

You forgot to mention that the Schwartz-sabre had to be held stationary in one cutlass-bot until it finished fading out of existence. Unfortunately, the FX crew apparently got paid by-the-frame and the fade out took several minutes, during which time cutlass-bot #2 (surprisingly) carved him like the turkey that the movie itself resembled, infecting him with the ROBOT POISON. Which, of course, gave him time to croak out a few more lines before dying. God, if only #2 had just decapitated him outright...

IMDb lists two entries on the "goofs" page. Oddly, neither of them are, "Making this steaming pile of movie in the first place."

Oh yeah...

[rjray.livejournal.com]

And apparently, Fiesty Babe was the same chick from Adam Ant's "Goody Two Shoes" music video. Mrawr.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

Wow, it's been more than twenty years since I saw Starcrash. Mercifully I'd forgotten nearly everything about it, as evidenced by the fact that your plot summary awakens no recollection whatsoever. But I do remember the spaceship shaped like a giant hand, which when they go into battle mode squeezes itself into a giant fist, and the space torpedo that is shot at another ship, crashes through the other ship's window (causing no violent loss of air), and pops open to release its load of three or four stormtroopers... my God, it was funny.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the Turkish Star Wars, but Deniz S. Kayabay's analogy on IMDB is evocative:

It is like that you've got only 100 bucks and you like to own a brand new Ferrari F50. What you do is find out some pictures of the Ferrari ( and they're even lousy xerox copies ), put them on cardboards, assemble them with cheap green adhesive tapes, and try to drive it on your feet. If that's something to laugh at, here you go.

Starcrash is an ultimate act of cheese. The William Katt wannabe was ex-child-evangelist and Real People co-host Marjoe Gortner; Feisty Babe was Caroline Munro, who was the love interest in Golden Voyage of Sinbad and was cast to be the Doctor's sidekick in the unmade Doctor Who vs. Scratchman movie.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Murray Leinster (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/authors/Murray_Leinster.htm) was a moderately prominent science-fiction author, probably best known for the 1945 short story "First Contact"; someone involved in the production must have been a fan.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And, yes, he wrote novelizations of both The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Eep!

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I was going to mention that Starcrash has a certain Who-vian feel.

Caroline Munro was also a babe in The Spy Who Loved Me.

This was was Hasselhoff's second big screen appearance; the first, the immortal Revenge of the Cheerleaders (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0075137/).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I like to annoy people by doing my impression of Hasselhoff's line right after he takes off his helmet: "This... is an energy shield mask."