Star Crystal

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')

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.

Oh this wasn't good. Far from it! The problem here is that isn't entertaining and it seems to get worse as it goes along, but 'Star Crystal' is a hard one to get your head around. Everything looks bare bones… and it is. But what does it in, is that it just lounging about… aimlessly. It was completely dull and uneventfully drawn out. Wooden performances, drably second-rate sets and vapid dialogues in the mould of 'Alien (1979)'. Truly routine, but a z-grade rehash! We get some tentacle action as the meagre crew are quickly picked off when they encounter the threat. So it's the survival of the fittest, with some minor hopeless diversions. Then it spontaneously changes course in the last 10 minutes (you'll see), and I don't know what the film-makers were thinking. It was so unhinged and ridiculous; you could be mistaken in asking "Was it the same movie?" However talk about cheese… super cheesy and laughable! 'can we just get along?' And wait for the sweetly weeping closing song about crystal… Oh why? Saying it was goofy is an understatement, but hey you can't see this one coming.

The special effects must have received top-billing, (no it did, but scrap the meteor shower sequence) with few icky inclusions and dashes of blood, but it's still a spotty display. The creature is mixture of a slug and fluorescent E.T., as we watch it morph from a puddle that dripped off some outerspace crystal. The score has that dreamy, soft edge that seems to meld in quite well.

Jeez! This movie was really bad. If I made a feature movie, this is what I would try to NOT make my movie look like. I rented it because I thought I would give it a chance. I saw it was an unknown sci-fi movie from the 80's and I was in the mood for some old fashioned sci-fi. This movie was horrible. It came out in 1986, the same year that ALIENS came out, and we all know that ALIENS is one of the best sci-fi movies ever. ALIENS shows that good special effects were achievable in 1986, but this movie didn't even come close! It was bad from the beginning to the end. I suppose you should watch it if you are in the mood for cheesy sci-fi and bad special effects. The acting is AMAZINGLY bad, the story is nothing but a second rate rip off of the original ALIEN, and if you really want to laugh, watch the ending credits and listen to that closing song. The singing is the WORST I have ever heard. Listen for one distinctly FLAT note that girl hits. Its just simply comical. You would think they would listen to that and at least try to fix it in the recording studio, but they don't even bother. That is pretty much representative of the rest of the movie, which appeared to be entirely done on the first take for each shot. I payed two dollars to see this movie and I want the production company that made it to give me my money back, plus monetary reparations for the pain and suffering I went through watching this pile of crap! YUK!

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.