Battaglie negli spazi stellari

I never saw this flick either, but it was obvious it was made in the 70's from all the unisex fashion and day-glow colors. It's included on that 50 Sci-Fi movies DVD set...the transfers are so poor the picture is hideously dark and the audio is terrible weak and muddy.

The saving grace of this film is John Richardson (who starred with Raquel Welch in 1,000,000 Years BC) as the outspoken commander of a long-range spaceship. One of the very few people in this flick that can act, his expressions and serious voicing of cornball dialogue keep it interesting just long enough for the scenery to change.

The story is a convoluted mess involving A.I. hatred, paranoia, arrogance, space war, a destroyed civilization and a megalomaniac machine!!! It's hard to follow from scene to scene as people are not identified, photography is terrible, lighting is dark, and no one seems to think for a minute about what's the smart thing to do.

Think of Star Trek done on a shoestring and that's basically it. It's amazing, but the filmmakers do seem to be trying to make something interesting, and the English voice-dubbers seem to have fun with their cheesy lines. It was hard to sit through, but not a waste of time. Call your pals over and do a MST3000 on it!!!

I am tempted to mention the fact that The Film "Mission to Mars", directed by Brian DePalma, bears a strong similarity to this film.... there, I've mentioned it! One of the most remarkable things about this film is the fact that "Star Wars: A New Hope" came out in the same year. Despite the title, this film bears no resemblance whatsoever to Star Wars. However, I should note that its own title is completely unrelated to the film as well. There is no war, really. But films without plots are hard to name, so c'est la vie.

This film stars a lot of good looking actors (both male and female), though they are all too thin, just like the script, and the special effects. The technology depicted in the film is reminiscent of the first Star Trek series or even Lost in Space. The special effects are variable. Some are actually fairly decent miniature shots, but then there are a few cardboard cut-out sequences reminiscent of some of Terry Gilliam's animations in Mont Python's Flying Circus. The behavior of the actors is sometimes inexplicable, but the dialog is so bad that you hardly even notice. For example, every time the entire crew of the spaceship is about to die (and this happens a lot), they all stand up and cheers and hug each other when they survive. various subplots are developed and then abandoned (just as well IMO) and, towards the end, it almost seems as if we are going to get a coherent story-line. Maybe they ran out of film? This film is a hoot. I recommend it highly for bad film buffs and MST3K fans. MST3K probably avoided this because it was a too-easy target.

In a future where all decisions are made by a giant supercomputer called "The WIZ" (I kid you not) and military men wear weird little miniskirts, renegade space captain Mike Leighton is sent on a routine mission. His ship is attacked by two alien ships. On orders from Earth he lands on the alien's planet which seems at first to be deserted - don't they always? - one by one his crew men are attacked and killed by a mysterious force (actually it's only one crew man - this film is THAT cheap).

The captain and his party are lured into a mysterious cave where they meet the "degenerate" remnants of the former inhabitants. The leader of the natives informs them that that once his people once ruled the planet till the machines they built took over. Leighton agrees to help destroy the machine brain that rules the planet (I'm making this all sound a lot more coherent and structured than it actually is). They return to the ship and consult their on-board computer who tells them the Bad computer will have a destruct button, "probably red" (I wish I was making this up). The captain and another crew member confront the Deep Thought like supercomputer and are instructed by it to replace one of its circuit boards, the only thing stopping it from dominating the galaxy. They do so and spot a red button. They press the red button. The computer explodes. The planet starts to explode (as they do) with the usual stock footage of volcanoes tinted nice reddish colours. The crew make their escape taking with them 2 crew members we know have been attacked and left for dead by the evil supercomputers robot henchthing. Big Mistake! Big mistake! Within minutes one of them is wandering around frothing at the mouth killing people as his face falls off - our hero soon puts a stop to that by jettisoning him into outer space but there is one final twist to come!... and you'll just have to watch the movie to find that out.

I was amazed to discover this film was made as late as 1977. It looks like a 1960 film. It is truly awful. The music is dreadful - almost random. At one point, when we first see the Bad computer, they actually use Bach's Toccatta and fugue in D minor!. The dubbing is hilarious and I guess the dubbed script must have been written by the Italians because the English is so tortured and twisted to make it fit the lip sync that it, at times, makes no sense at all. Even more amazingly when there is no need to lip sync, like when the natives talk to the Captain telepathically or the computers talk, the English is just as bad.

Surrealy Awful

Alfosno Brescia's BATTLE OF THE STARS was actually the first of no less that five (5) ultra low budget Italian made grade C movies inspired by the success of STAR WARS in 1977. Which, by the way, is not meant to put them down, but to help classify these odd, offbeat little gems of Italian genre cinema. And by that I mean what might be referred to as "second tier" cinema using basic entertainment formulas to make movies of different genres that existed as sort of pure entertainments. You don't learn anything by watching them (except perhaps how to make a low budget genre film), there are (usually) no greater messages or meanings to be gleaned, and a week later there would be something else just like it there instead.

Starting first with the sword & sandal Peplum films, then graduating to Gothic horror movies, spy thrillers, space operas, spaghetti westerns, WW2 potboilers, urban crime & police films, giant shark mayhem and finally a quick spate of science fiction quickies, all of the films were "inspired by" the success of a major blockbuster that would then be imitated to satisfy the hunger of movie audiences who wanted to see more. So in 1977 the film to emulate was STAR WARS, at least by providing audiences with some threadbare contrivance involving space ships, guys in foil suits, robots, otherworldly dames wearing odd hats or hairdos, laser guns, star fighter dogfights, some sort of semi-robotic alien overlord, and plenty of pseudo-technical mumbo jumbo that would lend some weight to the shenanigans.

Spaghetti western/war potboiler/crime drama director Alfonso Brescia (billed as Al Brady in an attempt to not frighten distributors away from the material) did a marvelous job of making five movies for the price of maybe one medium budget Hollywood hit by reusing the same stock casts of actors, the same costumes, sets, special effects, even the same special effects sequences & basic story lines, and a marvelous cacophony of a couple hours of electronic ambient space music composed & performed by genre favorite Marcello Giombini. The films were all recycled into each other to stretch budgets across a series of paste-up jobs that, on their surface, seemed to offer much of the same visual vocabulary as the George Lucas & Steven Spielberg hits that were dominating the box offices.

The difference is of course what these films say with their vocabulary, which is admittedly far less than what STAR WARS or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE 3RD KIND were able to say, but you have to keep in mind that BATTLE OF THE STARS for instance was filmed over a course of maybe three weeks, with perhaps two more allotted for post-production work. The goals that the movies set out to achieve was far less than Lucas & Spielberg's more lofty ideals. Not because Brescia and his casts/crews were untalented, but because the point was just to string together 90 odd minutes of events that would sell movie tickets, using their talents & guile to stretch their budgets to the absolute limits.

On that plane of consideration the movies are marvelous examples of the human imagination using bits and pieces of nothing to come up with nine hours of entertainment. BATTLE OF THE STARS would be quickly followed by COSMOS: WAR OF THE PLANETS, which would in turn be quickly followed by WAR OF THE ROBOTS, which would in turn be quickly followed by STAR ODYSSEY, and finally the pseudo-pulp porno THE BEAST IN SPACE, the less said about which the better. It's easy to laugh at them but if you understand why the movies look as threadbare as they do it helps one to quantify what they may or may not have achieved.

The most remarkable thing that can be said about them perhaps is that people are STILL watching the things some 30 years after they were tossed haphazardly at audiences. Sadly the surviving elements of the movies still available today leave a lot to be desired, with crummy fullscreen versions formatted for home video and dubiously dubbed into English that do indeed come across as quite silly at times, so it is perhaps to be unfair when judging their collective merits based on what's left, hence my neutral 5/10 score. What I and others admire about them though is how comparatively honest they are about just being quickie entertainments. Sure, the costumes and klunky sets & effects will make sophisticated contemporary audiences gag with laughter or embarrassment, depending on your temperament.

But that's part of the charm of B grade cinema which, once you get down to it, Mr. Lucas was paying homage to with his STAR WARS and Indiana Jones movies. You can't fault art for imitating the life that it is imitating itself, perhaps.

Where to begin? The clothes all look like they're from a 30's sci fi film, even though this was made in the 70s. The dubbing is terrible. The plot is almost totally incoherent; it centers around a hothead space captain who believes that he can make better decisions than computers, and therefore is always getting into trouble (though in this film, he's probably right considering that the main computer is called "The Wiz", no kidding!). The characters actions often don't make any sense, like one scene where two crew members die, but everyone else is happy for no good reason. The evil giant robot looks like something they made on purpose to make people laugh, but you're supposed to think it's scary. Throughout everything, the deadly earnest and serious tone of the acting and story just makes the whole experience more surreal and more funny. My favorite scenes: destroying the giant robot/computer, and the space command guys dealing with the reporters. This film is worth seeing with a bunch of friends, with or without any substances that may enhance one's sense of humor!