Starcrash

Absolute love. The campy charm of Starcrash isn’t derived from ironically ridiculing it or seeing it as a guilty pleasure, but from its endearing enchantment with guileless naïveté and genuine enthusiasm. It’s easy yet entirely ignorant to simply disparage the film as a cheap knock-off of Star Wars and to accuse the filmmakers of ineptitude and plagiarism, or even of debasing the sci-fi genre. But that would be inappropriate, as Luigi Cozzi loved fantasy genres, wrote sci-fi stories and contributed to the prestigious magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. He longed to make a sci-fi movie according to his own ideas and his chance came when the calculating producer Nate Wachsberger commissioned him to make a variation on Star Wars. Despite what he led the producer to believe, Cozzi hadn’t even seen Lucas’s hit and tacked the screenplay together based on the novelisation of that hit, which he had hastily skimmed through. Like Lucas, Cozzi admired classic sci-fi trash. However, his ambition was not to make a sophisticated movie with ground-breaking special effects that could evoke the equivalent of childlike wonder in adult viewers by attempting to achieve seeming believability. Cozzi rather loved sci-fi in its naïve pulp form before the genre was legitimised in the eyes of the general public and film studios by serious movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Star Wars. The absurdly impractical weapons, naïve spacecraft designs, theatrical costumes, bombastic sets and cosmic expanses abounding with all the colours of the rainbow comprise an intentional homage to the classic covers of sci-fi novels by the masters of dime-store romanticism like Earle K. Bergey, Richard Clifton-Dey and Frank Frazetta. With the central fearless and scantily clad heroine, Cozzi professed his adoration for Barbarella (both the film and the comic book) and his preference for stop-motion effects is a tribute to the beloved Ray Harryhausen. Starcrash is a fanboy pastiche made long before such things were cool. Unlike the modern ones, however, it remains refreshingly free of the ambition to justify its childish obsessions by pretending to be earnest and passionate. On the contrary, everything here is dominated by exuberant naïveté, exalted unreality, sincere sloppiness and even operatic papier-mâché sets. But that is far from a complete list of the elements that can be enjoyed in this film. Here we have casting that will warm the heart of every trash fan, an ambitious soundtrack by John Barry, cringy acting and a ridiculously simple screenplay packed with childishly fateful twists. Starcrash is not artless dreck, but a magnificently endearing campy gem. (01/15/2023)

John Barry's excellent score didn't deserve this rubbish. A rip-off of Star Wars (there's even a lightsaber!), Star Trek(s), Barbarella, Alien and who knows what else... With not-quite-so-over-the-top special effects, fetishistic costumes of the main character, a charmingly dumb script, stop-motion animation that doesn't even come close to Ray Harryhausen's work... Seeing it with someone, somewhere, I'd probably have more fun. Seeing it solo, however, was not great. I found myself expecting the whole thing to devolve into porn during the Planet of the Amazons episode, but it didn't. Alas? Thank god? It's hard to say. (08/11/2013)

Unfortunately, about half as much fun as I expected. And yet, it has almost all the ingredients for a truly entertaining spectacle, the sum of which would inevitably become material for a very specific cult: the beautifully wooden actors (with the exception of Plummer and even Hasselhoff, who’s pretty decent against the protagonist duo), the cheap sets, the porno wardrobe with retro hairdos and the incredibly cheesy and often funny dialogues. But its serious dramaturgical approach doesn’t contribute to the otherwise light entertainment. The ending, for instance, is a bad rip-off of Star Wars that generates pity instead of laughter. But the robot was great and Caroline Munro in a bikini was awesome. (01/16/2021)