Starcrash (1979)

There are exactly two reasons anybody ever needs to watch Starcrash. Either they’re under ten and want to see laser swords and Vader villains and exploding spaceships, or they’re over ten and want to ogle Caroline Munro while she’s wearing several ridiculous, skimpy costumes.

Well, alternately, a person could be stuck trapped on a sofa between these audiences. Poor Mommy.

Starcrash is arguably one of those projects that began its long development before Star Wars, but nobody outside the producers’ immediate families is going to defend its originality. It even opens with a shot that’s been stripped right from Wars, only while the ships in that movie looked like actual spaceships, these look like toys. All of the miniatures here look like toys with the little leftover bits from model kits glued on them and given solid white or gold spray jobs.

No, what money there was in this movie, after securing the services of Christopher Plummer, Caroline Munro, David Hasselhoff, and a bunch of other people who look like they were on a two-week furlough from the steel mill, went into the location filming. Munro plays Stella Star, a pilot and smuggler who’s been pardoned by the Emperor of the Universe and commissioned to find his missing son. The search takes her and her crew to a beach planet, an ice planet, and a volcano planet, where they get into battles with space amazons and space cavemen, before confronting the evil Count Zarth Arn, which might be the best and silliest name for any of the screen’s Vader clones.

Speaking of best and silliest actually, and you won’t believe me, but my favorite part of this movie wasn’t actually Caroline Munro in her leather space bikini and boots, but the laser guns used by Zarth Arn’s troops. They have these absurd and delightful little red crosshairs printed on the barrels of their rifles and I chuckled every time I saw them.

For our six year-old, this was serious business and he adored this film. He liked it just fine until the climactic space shootout, and told us that his favorite part was “the end, when everything went boom boom boom. I liked everything else, but I really liked it when everything went boom boom boom!” There are lots of explosions as all the extras and stuntmen shoot at each other in a set that looks about the size of our apartment, but which nevertheless somehow holds about a dozen of these little torpedo ships which crash through the living room windows of the Death Sta– I mean whatever Zarth Arn calls his space station — but that wasn’t the really big explosion.

Our son also really enjoyed this movie’s obligatory robot. This sort of movie just wouldn’t be complete without one. It’s a police robot called Elle, voiced by Hamilton Camp in a possibly Texan accent. Like C-3PO, he worries and complains about everything from water to flying a floating city, but he also guns down amazons and cavemen.

With the battle almost lost, Emperor Christopher Plummer realizes that there’s no alternative but to execute the dangerous plan of Starcrash. The other really great thing about this movie is the wonderful way that David Hasselhoff replies “Fourth dimensional attack!” You’d think that something called a fourth dimensional attack would be a little more impressive than two model kits bumping into each other, though.

Starcrash was released in America by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures after the original producers, AIP, judged it too poor a movie to bother. It’s been a cult classic for almost forty years of mocking – some friends have been shouting “Fourth dimensional attack!” at inappropriate moments since the early nineties – and it finally made its way to Mystery Science Theater 3000 three months ago. I very much doubt my wife will ever sit through this film ever again, even with Jonah, Tom Servo, and Crow to help us through it.

Incidentally, the unmistakable miniature work and silly Christmas light star systems in this film would, you’d think, be unique enough that nobody would think about using them anywhere else, but two years later, the visual effects all turned up again in a really dopey movie called Escape From Galaxy 3. It was apparently marketed in some countries as a sequel to Starcrash, but it certainly isn’t!