A 3ª Galáxia

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.

ESCAPE FROM GALAXY 3 is yet another uproarious STAR WARS clone from Italy. With its disco-fueled sensibilities and ultra-fab costumes, this is why God created cinema!

It seems that intergalactic meanie, Oraclon (Don Powell) is up to no good, causing havoc and astonishingly bad "special" effects! Now, only one explosion after another can possibly stop him!

Cue the continual, generic disco music.

The wonderful thing about these epics is that they don't have to make any sense. At all. Just watching Oraclon in his flower-like, aqua / pink outfit and glitter-beard is enough to satisfy any fan of these films.

Enter Belle Star (Sherry Buchanan) in her dancing queen pantsuit, complete with a missing pant leg! As a bonus, her suit is also missing one upper side, compensated by a strategically-placed breast star!

This movie even has a Marjoe Gortner lookalike, wearing the latest in spandex ballet uniforms! Annnd, don't forget the entire civilization of men in miniskirts!

This is entertainment sent straight from the gods!

The quotable lines of dreadful dialogue are nonstop! The soft-soft core "love" scenes are painful! The endless dancing will twirl your brain in your skull!

WARNING: If you are sickened by the sight of pasty man-legs, stay away! This will only be traumatic for you!...

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'.

The most astounding and even downright perplexing observation regarding "Escape from Galaxy 3" is that all the many cast members and extras - and I assume these were all mentally sane people - deliberately agreed to walk around in ridiculously infantile costumes and speak the most nonsensical lines aloud! Were they not embarrassed? Did they not fear their relatives and friends would make fun of them for the rest of their lives? Or could it be they were genuinely believing they were part of something great? Maybe some sly Italian producer persuaded everyone this would become ten times more successful than "Star Wars"...

Although I'm not sure it's official, "Escape from Galaxy 3" is often referred to as sequel to Luigi Cozzi's "Star Crash". I don't remember a lot about that one, except that it was also an utterly deranged George Lucas rip-off, but a lot of fun to watch and starring a handful of stellar names like Caroline Munro, Christopher Plummer, and - oh yeah - David Hasselhoff. The wannabe sequel hasn't got any famous names, and even less budget.

In a galaxy far, far away (obviously the synopsis must begin like this) two interstellar tribes are at war. The evil tribe is led by a black guy with a golden beard, a preposterous costume, and a sort of Nazi henchman. The amiable tribe has a king with an oversized crown and an unearthly beautiful daughter named Princess Belle Star (she sure is!). The horrible war is illustrated through a lot of pew-pew with lasers and miniature toy-spaceships flying in front of colorful backgrounds that must have been drawn by the kindergarten class next door to the film studios. Since the tribe with the nice people is losing, the king sends his daughter and 1st commander away on a mission to seek allies in the galaxy. However, the two end up on Earth which was supposedly extinct after a nuclear war many centuries ago. Purely coincidental, I reckon, the duo does land amidst a tribe of human survivors that live primitively, and for some strange and inexplicable reason only hot women and hunky blokes live here. Belle Star and her boy learn about the joy of kissing and caressing, and they forget about their mission. In the end, sex saves the galaxy!

If the plot sounds absurd and idiotic, I can assure you sitting through the movie is actually worse! "Escape from Galaxy 3" must be one of the dumbest and mind-numbing movies I ever watched, but somehow you keep gazing at the lovely lead actress Sherry Buchanan in her hypnotizing outfits and forgive all the goofiness.

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.