One A Week Reviews #36: Galaxy of Terror

Now THIS is a movie that starts out quick and dirty. A sci-fi mash-up of Battlestar Galactica, Forbidden Planet, and Alien, (and evidently a heavy influence on Event Horizon) Galaxy of Terror hits the ground running with a deadly prologue that rolls right into the launch of a mission to a strange planet. I assume it's ostensibly to check out what happened to the people who died in the prologue but frankly there's so little plot development you'll be damned if you can follow what's going on. It doesn't matter though. Our dispatched B-movie crew does some of the fastest space travel ever put to film before starting to drop like flies while facing a monster of the id channeling their nightmares. Not only will they die, they'll go mad while they do it.

I think Event Horizon lifted a lot from this film, and I'm gonna have to watch it again to compare. I do mean "drop like flies," too. I don't think I caught more than 2 character names through the whole she-bang. Character development? No thanks.

This is a Roger Corman quickie and it wrings fairly high production values out of a tiny budget. Deliciously good lighting, sometimes reminiscent of Italian grind-house fare (one shot of a slime-covered lass really reminds me of Lucio Fulci), and surprisingly good matte and miniature effects, it looks better than it has any right to. The cast features some real B-movie stalwarts, and they're all pros. Edward Albert and Erin Moran (as the Universe's least-empathetic psychic) get top billing, but you'll find Grace Zabriskie (playing what seems to be her current age), Ray Walston, Robert Englund, a slient-but-deadly Sid Haig (seriously, he makes frequent faces that look like he's passing serious gas), future soft-core porn auteur (and terrible actor) Zalman King, and Taaffe O'Connell, in an evidently notorious rape-by-giant-maggot-with-LOTS-of-goop scene. I say "evidently" because this is just now hitting DVD and has been out of print on VHS for years.  This one is also known for having pre-fame James Cameron and Bill Paxton working behind the scenes on effects. Beisdes the lighting and matte paintings, there are some great puppet creatures, terrific backpacks that seem to be made of car headlights, and supposedly old styrofoam clam-shell boxes for burgers lining the spaceship walls. One shot has some of the most seamless split-screen I've ever seen in a movie.

A neglected, VERY nasty 1981 Sci-Fi trash classic, and definitely worth a watch. Don't wait - go buy it, now, lovers of sci-fi sleaze!

The Yucky Movies of October: 976-Evil

6) 976-Evil

I can't believe I'd never seen this one before. A 20-year old movie directed by Robert Englund, 976-Evil features Stephen Geoffreys ("You're so cool, Brewster!") and Sandy Dennis (she of the "post-nasal drip school of acting") in a story involving a dial-up "horrorscope" that lets the Devil into your life.

Slow to start, 976-Evil picks up some steam even as the proceedings get sillier and sillier. Some incredibly dated special effects and tortured set-dressing lends a greatly sleazy 80s air to the proceedings - the bathroom in the High School is like something from late 70's Time Square and every crew member must be chain smoking through the movie based on the smoky atmosphere. One character gets a hand cut off but seems to suffer all the pain of a clipped fingernail from it. A few cheesy kills kick things off - evil phones make cause a man to catch fire and blow up plate glass windows - but things end with hell itself coming through the floors and Geoffreys made up to look like a demon who's oddly reminiscent of Michael Jackson. With him and future Fem2Fem singer Leslie Deane, this should have all the gay subtext of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, but sadly, everything is pretty dry and dull here. Deane's Suzie has the most spark of anyone and it's a shame she didn't make more films. Sandy Dennis seems to have wandered in from a completely different movie as a blowsy, evangelical housewife. She's more interesting then the secondary leads, a reporter and teacher who barely registered with me even though they survive to the end.

All it really needed was for Robert Englund to have done the devil-voice on the phone line.

Perhaps it was the big shot of Nyquil I had to take to fight an incipient chest cold, but on the whole I enjoyed this one...