Star Crash 2

Star Wars certainly has a lot to answer for. Its massive success perhaps unsurprisingly led to the Italians producing their own sci-fi adventures. Except, of course, they made them very cheaply and the results look absolutely ridiculous now and I daresay they didn't appear all that impressive back in the day either. Escape from Galaxy 3 is a pretty good example of this type of thing. It's a committedly ridiculous film from start to finish. It tells the story of a couple of aliens on the run from an evil tyrant who wind up landing on Earth and learning about love and sex in the process.

This one starts out with great potential, with a first half hour ram-packed with sci-fi idiocy of the most promising kind. We have a kindly space ruler who sports a crown and his evil nemesis who wears an elaborate costume and has a glittery beard; there are a couple of male/female heroes who have laser rings and supersonic powers, the male of which sports a bubble perm; we have space battles and intergalactic chases; and all of this is scored to an insistent disco soundtrack. All of this bodes well and it still seems like it's going in a good direction when our heroes land on Earth of the future, where the population has evolved into what looks like extras from the Buck Rogers TV show. But unfortunately, all the good work is soon to be undone when events here pan out in a most tedious of fashions. For what seems like an eternity, we witness our alien beings learn about love. This entails all manner of tiresome scenes and an alarming abundance of abysmal humour. It also ensures that there is nudity in what otherwise would be a movie for children. Towards the end the evil tyrant returns and things do pick up a bit but the damage has really been done unfortunately and the over-riding feeling is of a missed opportunity at an entertaining cheese-fest.

It's kind of a Sci-Fi that bogs down and never really recovers. Sherry Buchanan as Belle Star the Princess looks like she is ready to line up for the 800 meters in the Olympics. She is beautiful and in great shape while her leading man boyfriend Lithan played by Fausto Di Bella looks like a reserve forward on a "B" league soccer team. Fausto is not leading man material in any universe. The evil Oraclon, played with zeal by Don Powell, first blows up Bells Father the King, which has no effect on Belle strangely, and sets out to run Belle and Fausto down in his fast spaceship . He finally catches up to them on earth where they have passed the time by watching stupid dance routines and learning how to "get it on" from the brain dead earthlings. The movie continues to just keeps getting worse from there. Watching skinny Fausto play soccer would have been better then this movie, and I hate soccer.

Italians have been notorious for churning out lots of bad sci-fi films in the late 70s in the wake of the success of STAR WARS. Who is this film supposed to appeal to? The special effects, costumes and dialog are childish and the sex scenes are so tame they could probably get a PG-rating in this country. Two aliens on a spaceship land on primitive Earth and learn how to have sex, while they're being chased by a big black dude with silver glitter in his beard. I fell asleep for awhile in the middle but I doubt I missed much.

Escape From Galaxy 3 is also known as Starcrash II, which—if you've seen Luigi Cozzi's disco-era Italian sci-fi—should give you a pretty good idea of just what to expect from this film by director Bitto Albertini: multicoloured starscapes, funky music with laser sounds, some of the dumbest dialogue in the history of cinema, amazingly stupid outfits, a pitiful villain, dodgy special effects, unconvincing space battles, and a major space babe in a revealing outfit. Like Luigi Cozzi's film, Galaxy 3's sheer awfulness is the key to much of its appeal.

However, what gives this particular piece of Euro-garbage the slight edge over Cozzi's film is its beautiful female star Sherry Buchanan. Not that she is sexier than Starcrash's Caroline Munro (who would be very hard to beat in the sexy stakes) but simply due to the fact that unlike Ms Munro, Sherry gets her kit off and experiments with sex in what is otherwise a PG-rated space fantasy, something that proves hilarious and hot in equal measures!

Sherry plays Princess Belle Star, who escapes the destruction of her home planet by evil baddie Oraclon (Don Powell in an outfit that would embarrass Ming the Merciless) on a spacecraft piloted by curly-haired hero Lithan (Fausto Di Bella). The fleeing couple eventually find refuge on a strange blue planet (no prizes for guessing that it is Earth) where they befriend the primitive people who live there. It is here that Belle and Lithan experience the pleasures of procreation (as well as the joy of food and the visual and aural delights of formation disco dance routines) with lovely Ms Buchanan stripping off for a series of close encounters with various men.

Princess Belle in the altogether is most definitely the highlight of this unintentionally hilarious film, although writer John Thomas (*snigger*) deserves a special mention for coming up with the movie's incredible technical space jargon, which includes such priceless gems as 'hyper solar missile systems', 'mega degrees', 'equitonic tangents', and my personal favourite, the 'megamethmic teleprobe'.

I saw this film when I was quite young, my folks had no idea what they were renting for me. Seeing as it was slightly saucy, my memories of this flick are fond ones! ;-)

I remember the F/X being dodgy, and the film being dubbed I think. Infact, the only thing I can remember vividly (apart from a sex scene) was the stuff about the Aliens (I say aliens... they just looked like pretty people in loin cloths!) not knowing what water was!

Although i'm sure if I watched it now... i'd probably laugh all the way to the Eject button!