INTERSTELLAR OVERKILL:
IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU BLEED
(No picture this week -- sorry!)
Any gorehound worth his weight in foam latex and stage blood will tell you that their Holy Grail is a "kill effect" they've never seen before, one that will make them gasp an amazed "Beautiful!" even as their gag reflexes struggle to engage projectile-vomit mode. They sit in the darkened theater, clutching overpriced snacks as a taunt to the special-effects nausea they're about to confront, and dare the screen, "Amaze me! Astonish me! [Dirty Harry monotone] Go ahead -- gross...me...out." And two years after ALIEN painted the command module red by bringing FRIDAY THE 13TH into the Space Age, a little slice of cinematic Spam from Roger "I'm-not-cheap-I'm-just-budget-challenged" Corman's cinematic sweatshops did just that.
GALAXY OF TERROR (1981) was, if nothing else, the first (and arguably -- very arguably -- best) ALIEN ripoff to hit the market. The script (by director B.D. Clark and partner Marc Siegler) is incomprehensible, the acting (by a mishmash of TV personalities, Corman/New World regulars, has-beens, and yet-to-be's) clunky, and the production design -- by some young punk named James Cameron, who'd later make this killer-robot movie with Arnold the Barbarian -- serviceable at best.
But oh, those splatter scenes! Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the far-out space nuts who were killed by fear:
See, there's this backwater planet ruled by "The Master," whose entire head is obscured by a red glow and who spends his time playing a cross between "Pong" and a Fillmore Theater lightshow. When top advisor Ilvar (Bernard Behrens of DEATH RACE 2000) informs the Master that one of their spaceships has crashed on the planet Morganthus, the latter authorizes the spaceship "Quest" to fly a rescue mission led by Ilvar, but with crew assigned by the Big Cheese himself. The crew includes dykey captain Trantor (Grace Zabriskie, pre-"Twin Peaks"), level-headed Cabren (Edward Albert), grouchy/ trigger-happy Baelon ("Red Shoes Diaries" auteur Zalman King), ship psychic Allumna (Erin Moran, post-"Happy Days"), tech chief Dameia (Taaffe O'Connell), tech assistant Ranger (Freddy-Kreuger-to-be Robert Englund), "master crystal thrower" Quuhod (B-movie heavy Sid Haig), ship cook Kore ("Favorite Martian" Ray Walson), and junior crewmember Cos (Jack Blessing) -- the latter amusingly referred to in the Internet Movie Database listing for GALAXY as "ship's newbie/cannon fodder."
The fun (and I use that term VERY sardonically) begins when an unknown force causes the "Quest" to crash-land on Morganthus. When the rescue party ventures onto the planet's surface, they are picked off one-by-one by something that preys on their panic attacks and/or deepest fears. The jumpy Cos gets cacked first; left alone in the wreckage of the spaceship the "Quest" was sent to rescue, he's attacked by alien claws that peel his skull open like the pop-top on a can of Fancy Feast. Ilvar (who frets he's too old for this kind of mission) gets his internals slurped out by leech-tentacles, Trantor (still torn up over being "the only survivor of the 'Hesperus' massacre") immolates herself with a laser cannon, and "shoot it if it moves" Baelon eventually meets his maker at the hands -- uh, claws? -- of a rubber-suit monster as cheesy as any from Corman's 1950s heyday.
And those aren't even the "good" deaths! In a scene that wasn't PC even back in '81, Dameia no sooner declares "I hate bugs" than she gets raped/slimed to death by a fifty-foot caterpillar. One of Quuhod's crystals (three-pronged Lucite boomerangs) decides to bury itself into his arm; when he tries to remove it, the tip snaps off and burrows under his skin, forcing him to karate-chop his own arm off! Ranger, unexpectedly jealous of Cabren's successes in life, finds himself attacked by his own doppelganger and is forced, in effect, to shoot large laser-pistol holes in himself. And the claustrophobic Alluma ("I must have gotten stuck coming out of the womb," she jokes, whistling-past-the-graveyard style), while relunctantly crawling through a narrow tunnel, gets a repeat visit from the tentacles that did Cos in: they rip her body in two and squeeze her head until it explodes. (Da Flatline is not alone in his belief that, based on Moran's annoying performance thoughout the film, this one scene makes the entire movie worthwhile.)
Cabren (and us lucky viewers!) eventually finds out why everyone's being turned into interstellar shish-kebab (hint: The Cook Is Not What He Seems), but by that point you've either hit the "Eject" button or celebrated the discovery of a serious .44-caliber Guilty Pleasure. This is a movie with a lotta plasma -- and I'm not talking about what's coming out of the "Quest"'s exhaust nozzles!
For some less...er...charitable reviews of GALAXY, set a course for:
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