Star Crystal

You get a warning pretty early on into this film that it has the budget that could probably buy you a bag of crisps and maybe a Coke at a cheap convenience store, and you don't even have to get past the credits.

The actors are literally no-names, none of them having starred in anything before. The director and editor both pulled multiple duties by writing, directing, editing, producing, and working on the SFX.

The plot is standard "we found a strange evil thing somewhere".

None of this is necessarily a bad thing. Alien used the same plot to explore very dark themes. John Carpenter made the brilliant Dark Star with almost no money.

Unfortunately, the difference is that those films were made by people with talent. Star Crystal, sadly, isn't.

We have tons of the bad movie staples, from shots holding too long on certain things and not enough on others, to abysmal acting. The opening scenes alone have about five establishing shots of the same darn spaceship. I get it guys, we're on the same ship, since no one moved anywhere, I don't see why you have to keep telling me about it.

I will say that some of the special effects are decent (for the time), but this would have worked better as a short film to generate a budget for something better. The alien has a cool icky feeling to it, all creepy flesh and slime.

It's mildly diverting for the occasional funny badness on display and ridiculously over-the-top school play acting.

Watch it if you can get it free.

I rented this movie expecting it to pretty much be a waste of time. I liked the description on the back of the box so I thought what he heck. It turned out really, really good! A group of people set off in this space ship and encounter a strange life force, and of course they all start to get killed by it. Let me just say the the end is NOT what I was expecting! I was very pleased how this movie was done. Not bad special effects for the time either.

In 2032, two members of the research team of the spacecraft SC-37 find a stone in Mars and bring it to the craft for study. A life form (lately called Gar) leaves the crystal and attacks the oxygen reservoirs of SC-37, killing all the crew. The space base L-5 rescues SC-37, and Gar explodes the base. Only five persons survive in SC-37, and they face with a developed and threatening life form. The end of the story is amazingly corny and bad. It was my fault, I did not believe in IMDb Users reviews and rating and many Video Books rating, and decided to see this flick. I like trash movies, and sometimes I find interesting unknown movies, but 'Star Crystal' is indeed a cheesy, ridiculous and corny Sci-Fi. The VHS distributed in Brazil by 'Look Video' shows in the front cover that the year is 2032, and in the back cover 2035. Therefore, even the Brazilian cover is a mess, in a total lack of care with the non-correlated information. The design concept of the spacecraft is one of the most ridiculous I have ever seen. The persons have to crawl to move to another compartment. Imagine a long voyage to Mars and the crew having to crawl in a craft wearing, for example, space outfits! The screenplay and the dialogs are very silly and the ham actors and actresses complete this horrible film. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): 'Terror no Espaço' ('Terror in the Space')

In the year 2032, a mysterious, oddly-shaped rock is retrieved from just underneath the Mars surface. It turns out to contain a crystal and a pile of slime that slowly evolves into a predatory life form (named Gar!). Gar causes lots of damage before eventually terrorizing the five astronauts adrift in a shuttlecraft, a long ways from civilization.

If it weren't for the final act, which this viewer wasn't expecting, he would have been prepared to just write this one off. It's amateurish on almost every level (especially in terms of acting and writing), and director Lance Lindsay isn't capable of producing a sufficient amount of tension from the familiar, tired plot. (This, despite the fact that all the rooms on this ship are connected by long, winding, dark tunnels which the astronauts have to CRAWL through.). Ultimately, the story gets just a little too cute, which flies in the face of the nastiness that came before.

The characters are by and large inane, although the last two astronauts standing finally become a little more tolerable as they face off against Gar. The performances are absolutely nothing special, and in fact can be pretty abrasive. That said, the obligatory "first victim" in this is a hoot in her crankiness. Gar itself is a reasonably amusing creation; the creature effects (and especially the gore on the victims) is actually not all that bad. The electronic score adds a bit of atmosphere.

This isn't a B genre flick that this viewer would really recommend, although he couldn't bring himself to completely hate it.

Four out of 10.

Set in 2032, as missions from Earth are being sent to explore Mars. After two groups of astronauts are mysteriously killed following the discovery of strange artifacts on the martian surface, the crew of the SC-37 go in to try and find out what happened. They soon learn what became of their predecessors when a bloodthirsty space monster begins lunching on members of the crew. Will any of them make it back to Earth alive? Pretty poor "alien" rip-off has lots of slime and gore, useless acting, poor editing in the "attack" scenes, and a horrible "Psycho" rip-off score (Man, that was so obnoxious!). Not worth your time.