Life, Writing, Weirdness

So I appear to be on a vague and meandering quest to see all those ridiculous B movies from the 1970s and 80s that I could have been exposed to growing up but somehow wasn’t. I have a list that I’ve built from IMDB “also watched” and other online lists, and I deliberately don’t read anything about them other than cast names before watching. While the TV and sound system in my living room don’t match the scale of a movie theatre of the time, the quality is generally better and I want to pretend I’m in that audience seeing the movie when it was new. Although I like to look things up during the movie, like “where do I know that actor from?” and “that background is familiar, where is it?”

I’m not watching them every night, only about a dozen off the list so far (with 50 or 60 still on the list) and randomly pick a movie from it once in a while. Some of them have been surprisingly fun. Some of them have been unsurprisingly terrible, and so almost turn comedic for me. Galaxy of Terror falls somewhere in the middle of that range, but hits both sides of the coin at times.

This movie gives the impression of someone wanting to make a creepier version of Alien on about a tenth of the budget (actually a little less and there were a couple of years of inflation in there), but hated that there was only one monster involved.

It’s got a great cast, particular including Ray Watson, Erin Moran, and Sid Haig, but the characters they’re all asked to play are one-dimensional, at best. And there are too many characters, really, but most of them are only there to die in “interesting” ways.

TRIGGER WARNING/SPOILER: one of which would have (or damned well should have) landed the movie in trouble at the time. The editing of the scene fortunately makes it feel less like the “raped by a giant maggot” scene that Roger Corman seemed to want and more like the maggot just didn’t want clothing with its meal so stripped them off its victim to give the audience some gratuitous nudity while it slowly swallowed her. It’s still pretty disturbing.

The plot is very linear and very thin. Unexplained lost spaceship crew upsets the all-powerful ruler of an interstellar empire who then handpicks a new crew full of misfits he mostly doesn’t like who have never worked together before to go investigate/get killed. The twist of the pyramid essentially being a training toy used by extinct aliens to master fear is a good one, but it isn’t really supported by the rest of the writing. Not that there’s really much in the way of writing, and a lot of the special effects, visual and sound, feel recycled. Mix in a little ripping off of Jedi acrobatics and a few zombies, neither of which actually improves the movie or the ending.

It’s maybe worth the watch to see some of the cast members who were later, or earlier, A-list actors, but they weren’t given a lot to do, although they mostly did their best while doing it. I’ve watched far worse

Be well, everyone.