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Starcrash (1978) is an Italian Star Wars ripoff that stars David Hasselhoff.
Hasselhoff was born in 1952 when a scientist mixed Errol Flynn DNA with beach sand and vodka. Starcrash catapulted Hasselhoff into Knight Rider, then Baywatch and finally to the very heights of cinema verite itself…
Starcrash also stars Caroline Munro. Did you know Munro employed a towel boy who followed her around on set and wiped up the excess sexuality?
What happens when you combine the estrogen levels of Munro with the testosterone levels of Hasselhoff… in space? I’m pretty sure there is a Roger Cormon creature-feature about that somewhere.
Actually, Corman was involved with Starcrash. New World Pictures distributed it in the US. However, the movie was written and directed by Luigi Cozzi, who brought us the Lou Ferrigno Hercules.
Starcrash also stars Christopher Plummer, Joe Spinell (The Godfather and Rocky) and Robert Tessier (The Cannonball Run). Judd Hamilton stars as a robot. Hamilton is a genuine Renaissance man. He produced Maniac, married Munro, helped her with her music career and invented an advanced ceramic concrete radiation shield.
Despite this, the most fascinating cast member of Starcrash is Marjoe Gortner (Food of the Gods). Get this, Gortner was an ordained preacher at age four and worked the American revival circuit in the 1940s. Children of the Corn anyone?
Anyway, let’s watch this latest turkey in the Sci-Why? Theater Series, which includes The Dark Side of the Moon, Inseminoid, Forbidden World and The Humanoid.
This much radium paint is safe, right?
Starcrash
We open on stars. None crash. Instead, we get a Revell Model that copies the opening of Star Wars. We zoom in so close to said model that you can almost read the “Made in China” factory stamp on it.
Crewmembers consist of dudes in Nazi uniforms with Roman helmets. An, admittedly, nice shot occurs where a stationary camera rotates between sterile white corridors.
Eat your heart out Stanley Kubrick!
Red blobs that looks like outtakes of blood corpuscles from Fantastic Voyage attack. The Roman Nazis scream and clutch their heads. Escape pods take off before the ship explodes.
Cue credits and a rousing score. Of course it is a rousing score. It turns out John Barry did the soundtrack. This is weird because the last movie I watched (Body Heat) also had a John Barry score. Should I stalk his corpse? I think I should. This is definitely a sign.
Next, the camera focuses on a different Revell model that wobbles on wires as it zooms among the stars. It is piloted by Munro and Gortner. Munro is a woman with large breasts. Gortner is an alien with a perm larger than Munro’s breasts.
Yet another Revell model shows up piloted by Tessier and Robot Hamilton. They pursue Munro and Gortner. Tessier is adorned with green face paint…or he is sick from starring in Starcrash. I always liked Tessier. He was stuck in tough guy roles, but you can tell he had a gentle soul. This perhaps best came out in his role as Kevin in The Deep. I was genuinely concerned for him when Earl Maynard tried to cut his face off with a boat motor.
Madonna videos were wild.
Battle of the Network Starcrash
Munro and Gotner banter during the space chase. I’m pretty sure a young Aaron Sorkin did some dialogue work on this movie. How else do you get sublime lines like this:
“Ha-ha! Looks like the cops!”
My brain starts to hurt already. This is compounded by the fact that Starcrash somehow packs three movies worth of events into roughly three minutes of runtime. I’m not even sure what happened, but somehow Munro, Gortner, Tessier and Robot Hamilton end up friends.
We should address Robot Hamilton. He definitely looks like an Italian robot because looking at him makes you crave an expresso and contemplate starting a loan shark business. There is just something about that elongated faceplate that screams coffeemaker and the pursed lips of a goon that breaks your fingers over fifty bucks.
The group of them are now teamed up to track down the son of the Galaxy Emperor, who is played by Christopher Plummer. Plummer is definitely a pro. He hits his marks and delivers his lines no matter what movie he finds himself in. I’m pretty sure Plummer could bring class to a Tik-Tok twerking video by Shakespearing it up a bit.
“That woman’s jiggle is wroth with baby-daddy come hither…”
Munro also brings the acting effort in Starcrash. She looks slightly manic at times, like the makeup person mistook cocaine for facial powder. She also spends a good portion of the movie in a vinyl bikini. Actually, they probably used more powder on that than her face to try to get her in and out of it under studio lights.
Gort, Bort and Zort.
Battle Beyond The Starcrash
We are about thirty minutes into Starcrash right now, and I am lost. A bad guy has appeared. I can easily understand he is the bad guy because the role is occupied by Spinell dressed like a 1930s carnival mesmerizer. It would not surprise me if he is named Zoltan. (I looked it up. He is called Count Zarth Arn. I got the “Z” part right at least…)
Spinell has two cool robots with him. They are stop-motion and obviously based on the skeletons of Ray Harryhausen from Jason and the Argonauts. This perks me up with the thought of stop-motion battles later on. I can now watch at least another three minutes.
Munro gets sentenced to work on a prison planet by a head with tentacles. She “tastes the burning of energy whips” and then escapes five seconds later. Five seconds after that she is on another spaceship. Five seconds after that she is tasked with finding Spinell’s secret planet-sized weapon and destroying it.
Through it all, Munro’s mascara is on point. If her eyes were any more smokey, they would be Snoop Dog’s.
Starcrash Man
Starcrash now becomes a fetch-it movie. Munro, Gortner, Tessier and Robot Hamilton go from planet to planet to investigate escape ship crash sites. Each planet has its own weird aspect. The first one they go to is ruled by Amazon women on red horses.
Nadia Cassini is the leader of the Amazon women and very nearly steals the movie from Munro with her version of a space bikini. Cassini worked as a stripper and had many affairs with wealthy men, including author George Simenon, who wrote the Jules Maigret detective novels. What an incredibly strong woman.
Cassini also has a giant robot based on the Talos statue from Jason and the Argonauts. The robot chases Munroe for five seconds and falls over. The move is very similar to many of the folks who decided to start jogging in the New Year.
We would like to complain about the makeup artist being a mortician…
Starcrash Wars
Next, the motley crew ends up on an ice planet (I use that phrasing because it all looks like a Motley Crue video). Tessier betrays everyone and is killed by Gortner while Robot Hamilton lets Munro freeze solid but keeps her alive by laying down to make snow angels with her and holding her hand. Five seconds later she is fine. My favorite part of all of this is that Munro wore heels in deep snow.
At one point, Gortner talks to a giant plastic brain and materializes oscilloscope displays with his hands. Summarizing this movie is like trying to make sense out of a Kamala Harris quote.
The red globs attack Munro, Gortner and Hamilton. Hamilton laughs about this. It is the kind of laugh a harried mom makes right before she drives her kids into a lake.
Eventually, they end up on a caveman planet. The cavemen destroy Robot Hamilton and take Munro prisoner. Munro wears an odd amount of clothes in this sequence. She is basically dressed in one of those suits Evil’s henchmen wore in Time Bandits. They probably needed ten kilos of talcum powder to get her in and out of that thing. It all makes sense now. Starcrash was a cocaine-smuggling operation, wasn’t it?
Munro is rescued by a man wearing a helmet that looks like it was based on that floating head in Zardoz. Eye lasers shoot from said helmet and scatter the caveman. The helmeted man is revealed to be David Hasselhoff. When he takes off the helmet, I laugh. His hair is like a helmet within a helmet.
Hasselhoff’s mascara is as on-point as Munro’s, and he gets a chance to mince about as Gortner arrives and battles cavemen with a lightsaber.
Eventually, they all end up in mechanical tunnels. Barry’s score here makes me expect Sean Connery to cross paths with them on his way to a volcano. This place is the giant secret weapon of Spinell. They locate its nerve center, which seems to be an old-timey arcade full of those lever-operated hockey games under plastic domes.
Starcrash Trek
Spinell arrives with his Harryhausen bots. The robots are charged with guarding Munro, Hasselhoff and Gortner until they die, but the robots also have the option to kill them if they want…
Makes total sense.
Gortner battles the robots but dies, Hasselhoff minces and Munroe stands off to the side like she is watching a dance battle from Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.
And here comes the point where my brain cracks in two…
Plummer arrives to save Munroe and Hasselhoff. Hasselhoff informs Plummer they only have “forty-eight seconds” before the place blows up and kills them all.
Plummer shouts:
“IMPERIAL BATTLESHIP, HALT THE FLOW OF TIME!”
Plummer then tells Hasselhoff that in “three minutes, every molecule will be immobilized” and they can escape their imminent deaths.
BUT…THEY ONLY HAVE FORTY-EIGHT SECONDS!
I feel like Annie Wilkes yelling in a movie theater here. I give up. None of matters anyway. They all beam back to Plummer’s ship. Plummer then launches a massive assault on Spinell’s ship. Spinell’s ship is pretty cool. It is a clawed hand, and it makes a fist when attacked.
We are treated to a sequence of ships taking off from Plummer’s ship to carry out their mission, much like the X-Wings approaching the Death Star in Star Wars. Except Starcrash only has three ships to work with, so they show them taking off from various angles roughly fifteen times. I counted…
Starcrash Light, Starcrash Bright
A large senseless space battle happens that makes me question every single decision I have made in my life that has led me up to this moment.
Maybe Anton Chigurh was right about everything. Why didn’t I simply seduce a Belgian writer of detective fiction to finance my days?
Somehow the bad guys win the space battle because they were, perhaps, the most nonsensical in their strategy. Plummer only has one option left. He is forced to use…
STARCRASH!
What is Starcrash, you might wonder? It is flying a giant city into Spinell’s ship. Oh yeah, and the fourth dimension is involved. Don’t ask. No one knows how exactly…
You are so fierce…
Starcrash Ship Troopers
And that is exactly what happens. Munro and the rebuilt Robot Hamilton crash a giant city into Spinell’s ship. The giant city looks kit-bashed from ketchup bottles, model sprues, Christmas lights and flashbulb cubes. Before impact, Munro and Robot Hamilton escape.
Via an escape pod, you might assume, and that is certainly a reasonable assumption, Padawan, but no. They simply jump out a window and float in space until Hasselhoff picks them up.
Hasselhoff minces up to hug Munro…but he doesn’t kiss her. Draw your own conclusions from that…
Plummer then monologues us out of Starcrash.
“The wheel will also turn, but for now, it is calm. And now, for a little time, at least we can rest…”
It almost sounds like the poem Robert Howard wrote before he shot himself.
Oof-dah, as we say in Hickville, USA. Starcrash is extremely ambitious, but yeesh. It is all over the place and moves at a crazy pace. If you watched this movie using the SLO-MO drug from Judge Dredd, you might be able to make sense of it. Otherwise, it is a lost cause.
As things stand, the best way to describe Starcrash is as a newspaper comic strip come to life. Every sequence is roughly four panels long, and the movie is a series of 1,344 sequences. That is an accurate number. I totaled them all up. What else do I have to do? Look at my life. I just dedicated hours to watching Starcrash and writing about it.
I am not even going to give Starcrash any stars. This picture is a sufficient rating. “Happy birthday,” indeed…
The post Retro Review: STARCRASH (1978) appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
