Star Spats Part Two-o

(continued from yesterday's post -- Battle Beyond the Stars)

Ah, good ol’ reliable Roger Corman. The cheesemeister himself, whompin' up a cheese casserole.

This movie has it all. Androids. Bad guys. Spaceships. Really bad laser weapon effects. It’s even got a Valkyrie. Oh, yeah, and a cowboy. A space cowboy, no less, played by George Peppard. But, somewhere across the galaxy, he lost his accent, so he sounds like a cowboy from the western fields of Illinois.

All the characters are a patchwork quilt of other characters we’ve seen in other films. They lifted the Robert Vaughn character, Gelt, straight from The Magnificent Seven, where he played the gunfighter-on-the-run, Lee. He also had a smidgen of the Charles Bronson character from Seven thrown in, too. But, the two most bizarre characters had to be that of Peppard as Cowboy (a Han Solo-like character), and Sybil Danning as St. Exmin, a Valkyrie, complete with foam rubber helmet. In the back of my mind I'm hearing Bugs Bunny music -- "Kill de wabbit, kill de wabbit!"

Richard Thomas as Shad (gotta love the characters' names in this souffle) the farmer plays a cross between Luke Skywalker and also a composite of the Mexican villagers in The Magnificent Seven going off to hire the mercenaries. He meets a young woman while on his quest whose father (played by veteran character actor Sam Jaffe), who has a head but a robot body, wants her to procreate with Shad (not enough room or time here to go into that). She's never seen other humans before, other than her father, the robot, so she runs off with Shad. This part is pure Forbidden Planet (1956).

And, the list goes on. The exterior spaceship shots are not too bad, pure Star Wars sequences; sound effects made me think of every late-70's early-80's video game I ever played, with some machine gun sounds for Cowboy's laser (?); the laser effects, well, they really didn't spend much there; and John Saxon as Sador, the bad guy, sported a facial tattoo, that looked really similar to Eric Bana's Nero character in 2009's Star Trek reboot.

All-in-all, it's an absolute hoot. I wouldn't spend much on it, but it's fun just seeing some bad post-Star Wars effects.

'til next time... Adios.