rone | the goggles do nothing (Reply)

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.