Battle Beyond The Stars

The Seventh Steal

Battle Beyond The Stars
1980 USA 
Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami and Roger Corman (uncredited)
Shout Factory US DVD Region 1

I guess readers below a certain age won’t understand why a film like Battle Beyond The Stars was a big deal with its target audience back when it was released in 1980. It is, after all, a notoriously cheap (although not by Roger Corman’s standards, since the film cost $2 million to make) remake of a classic which is 100 times better than either this or its more famous remake from 1960. Let me give the baffled among you a little bit of context though.

The “space opera” arm of sci-fi had just re-emerged at cinemas again, three years earlier, with the release of George Lucas’ classic Star Wars. There were a fair few bandwagon films like the theatrical release prints of the Battlestar Galactica TV show, Disney’s The Black Hole and the big movie budget version of Star Trek - The Motion Picture coming out around this time to cash in on the success, not to mention much smaller vehicles like Star Crash and The Humanoid. However, sci-fi films were still relatively scarce occurrences at the local cinema so any excuse to go and see the latest extravaganza was always taken. Some of the special effects may look a little ropey today (not as ropey as some of John Sayle’s dialogue in this one, for sure) but in those days it was state-of-the-art and every kid fresh from being reminded of the joys of science fiction from the release of Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here), earlier the same year, would have rushed their parents out of the house straight into the cinema to see this one.

I loved it just as much as everyone else, of course. I think I ended up seeing it three times at my local ABC cinema (now a Tesco car park) and I even remember one of my cousin’s rare visits to Enfield to see it with me, one afternoon. I knew that Shout Factory had produced this deluxe edition DVD and snapped it up when it came out (in hindsight I should have waited for the Blu Ray) but it’s taken this long for me to make some time to watch it and, as you can imagine, I was curious to see how it held up nowadays.

The film starts off with the planet Akir (named after director Akira Kurosawa, for reasons which will quickly become apparent), home of Shad... as played by Richard Thomas (John Boy Walton himself), being threatened with destruction if the planet doesn’t give up its crops and resources to evil Sador (played with villanous relish by John Saxon with a “Donald Pleasance as Blofeld” style scar/make up enhancement on one of his eyes) on his imminent return to their star system after a small time period. All the residents of Akir know is dusting crops and lounging about in simple clothes but they dig out their technological relic of a starship, from decades gone by, and send John Boy, sorry, I mean Shad, out into the galaxy to rustle up a cheap, rag tag team of space mercenaries to return in their spaceships and help defend the planet from the evil Sador.

And if this is all starting to sound just a little bit familiar with you by now, you’ve probably recognised that this is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s original Seven Samurai. And the film very much follows the main, basic plot points of that movie but condensed into a much shorter running time and with some quite nice and often quite solid sci-fi decoration. I was surprised to see, as I watched this, that the film holds up a lot better than I expected it to after all this time and there are some nice little, well thought out details in this which are worth the price of admission.

Scenes, for example, such as those of one of the main female characters repairing a robot as she plays music by inserting a tape (or advanced technology equivalent of a tape) into a slot into the androids torso... so it can sing the contents to her as she works. Or Shad’s ship whose argumentative female personality talks to him and banters with him throughout the whole film... even going so far as to take matters into her own hands by destroying an enemy ship. When Shad points out to her that she just broke this movies conceptual steal of the first of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws Of Robotics (yeah, funny how everyone uses those... for good reason) she retorts something along the lines of , “Yeah. It’s a stupid law!”... which was quite a refreshing attitude at the time.

That ship, Nell, by the way, has got to be one of the most beautiful spaceships ever designed for a movie. Resembling, quite deliberately, a giant pair of boobs to rival those of one of the lead actresses (yeah, don’t worry, I’ll get to her in a minute) it’s like a giant, flying, sea ship’s figurehead with the arms, legs and head cut off to just leave a beautiful torso that flies and swoops through space. One of the most unique and spectacular designs of 1980s science fiction by my reckoning. Corman must have liked it too because he recycled all the footage of it and used it as the main spaceship in at least two of his other science fiction movies subsequent to this... which is about right when you think about Corman’s notoriously groovy cost cutting measures on his movies.

There are some pretty interesting actors in here too, with George Peppard playing the Earthman “Space Cowboy” and hamming it up with the best of them like there’s no cheque in the post after this gig. Also, we have the addition of Robert Vaughn playing Gelt, a very similar character to the one he plays in John Sturges well loved 1960 Seven Samurai remake, The Magnificent Seven... asides from the “lost my nerves, cowardice” aspect of the character, which gets ditched here. In fact, some of the dialogue in Battle Beyond The Stars, and with Robert Vaughn’s character in particular, seems to have been lifted pretty much intact from The Magnificent Seven, it has to be said, There’s also a vague attempt to have Gelt inherit this movies equivalent of the Mexican kids who follow around Charles Bronson’s character at one point but, this is only a token reference and I’m not quite sure, to be honest, why they decide to use it here without following it up later in an appropriate sequence.

And, of course, no look at this movie would be complete without a mention of every young boy’s dream made celluloid flesh in the presence of Sybil Danning as St. Exmin of the Valkyrie. They manage to pop one of the most buxom and boobage blessed Austrian actresses of all time, give her some of the skimpiest outfits which make you feel like she’s going to just pop out by accident any minute, give her some specific lines about sexuality (which wasn’t that normal for something which was being sold as sci-fi space opera to kids) as well as giving her the most memorable and oft quoted mantra of the movie... “ Live fast, fight well, and have a beautiful ending.” I’ll bet a lot of young, adolescent teens went home and thought about a whole lot more than space opera when they left the cinemas after seeing Sybil in this movie (yeah, me included).

There are two other things this movie is quite notable for, that I can remember.

One if that it employed a young James Cameron on the special effects crew (listed as art director but I’m guessing he was doing a lot on this production) and it’s reportedly where he met his future wife and movie making partner Gale Ann Hurd, which led to the directing of his second feature, The Terminator.

The other thing this film has is a terrific score by James Horner. Sure, it’s reused in numerous other Horner scores and also borrows from composers like Prokofiev, but however you view Horner’s rampant borrowings, there’s no denying that he writes entertaining scores and this is one of them. However, it's said he’s never been happy with the performance of the orchestra on this score so nothing other than the original album master has ever been used for score releases over the years... which is a shame because I, and a lot of other people, would love to get their hands on some kind of expanded remaster of this one. However, the obstacle to release on this one seems to be Horner himself so, at the time of writing this, it looks like there’s not going to be any movement on that front for a while (probably not in my lifetime, I expect, which is a shame... for me).

And what more to say about this one. At times it’s cringe inducingly embarrassing and at other times a certain worthiness shines through its small budget. It’s not the best movie in the world and it’s certainly not a good remake of Seven Samurai, but it is one of the better put together of the “ride the Star Wars band wagon” films that came out at the time and I’m sure youngsters, and the much older variety of youngsters, will get something out of it even now. And it’s surely worth it to see Sybil Danning rocking and almost popping out of those groovy costumes. One that should not go forgotten, I think.

Piranha

The Long Fish Goodnight


Piranha USA 1978
Directed by Joe Dante
MGM Region 2

So I finally took a look at the Roger Corman produced, lets-all-ride-the-Jaws-bandwagon movie Piranha because, frankly, I can’t resist the allure of the Piranha 3DD trailer which has been doing the rounds (using a bust size to denote a movie’s chronology... genius) and so I want to see the previous four Piranha movies before this one gets unleashed in cinemas (that includes the first remake of Piranha if I can get it, the TV version called Piranhas). So that’s why, if anyone asks, I’m watching movies about fish with teeth.

However, there’s good compensation to be had from sitting through some of this twaddle. For instance, this first movie in the sequence is only the second feature film by a director you may have heard of... you know, Joe Dante? He’s a great director and some of his trademark signature points are already showing up in this one, such as the use of cartoons on television. It’s also got a few of his usual cast of character actors turning up to help him out including the one and only Kevin McCarthy in the role of a crazy over-acting scientist. Of course, he doesn’t run down a street shouting “They’re here! They’re here!” but, you know, good enough.

In addition to a raft of great character actors, the cast includes Bradford Dillman as the male protagonist Grogan (in kind of a lethargic Burt Reynolds mode) and TV's Jessica 6 from Logan’s Run, Heather Menzies, as the main female protagonist. In addition to these two, there’s also genre favourite Barbara Steele (Black Sunday, Pit and The Pendulum, The She Beast, Shivers etc) as a military scientist and ex-lover to Kevin McCarthy’s character. So there’s a real display of interesting actors (or at least “personalities”) to look at in this one.

And all this is wrapped up in a package scored by the popular Italian composer Pino Donnagio... it’s not his best score but it does have some interesting trademark flourishes and, though I’m used to watching Joe Dante movies when they’ve been scored by Jerry Goldsmith, I’d happily take Pino Donnagio as an alternative.

Oh... and did I mention it’s the first story and screenplay to make it onto the screen that’s been written by John Sayles? So, yeah... there’s that too.

Now you might think that, with all this incredible talent both in front of and behind the camera on this one, it means we have an absolute masterpiece of “death fish” mayhem on our hands. Alas, I’m afraid that’s not true. It certainly wasn’t as trashy or exploitational as I’d expected it to be but, with films of this nature, I find that a lack of sleazy fun injected into the proceedings is not neccessarily a good thing... it could have done with being a lot trashier in my book. Because of the quality of the artists involved, what you have is a movie which strives to be more than its budget allows and, though this is not neccessarily a bad thing, in some ways it’s to the movies detriment. On the other hand, it’s a not bad showcase/calling card for some of these artist’s talent so there’s that too. Worthwhile creatives have begun to forge a career off the back of this one.

There have been attempts made, probably by Corman post-rough cut I should think, to “trash the movie up good”... and I guess in some ways this works better than others. There’s an obvious flash-cut (if you’ll excuse the pun) where a body double has been unceremoniously cut into the footage to make out that Heather Menzies is flashing her breasts... this is so obvious and it kinda kills the mood. Doesn’t work well at all. Kinda makes you wonder what Heather Menzies was thinking, getting involved with a Roger Corman movie.

There are, however, a lot of plusses to the movie as well. For instance, a completely superfluous stop-motion animation a-la-Harryhausen styled miniature creature is wandering around Kevin McCarthy’s lab in some of the early scenes. It doesn’t interact with the human characters, just gets out of their way, and the human characters don’t see it at any point. Now it could be argued that this loosely animated character is there to show the demented nature of Kevin McCarthy’s experiments for the military (in almost direct contradiction to what he tells our main protagonists later) but my guess is that this little creature wasn’t even mentioned in the script. I think it’s probably Joe Dante practicing his craft for his future movies where knowledge of how to handle such scenes would be more than relevant. As it is, it’s a cute curiosity which adds another little layer of interest to this film.

Piranha is certainly, and perhaps surprisingly, not a terrible movie. Nor is it a particularly good creature feature, although to be fair to the producers... it was popular enough to spawn a sequel, a remake and then a rebooted franchise, so it was obviously liked by enough people to make these things possible. I wouldn’t personally go out of my way to recommend it to anyone but for fans of this genre of film (technically I think this counts as a horror film since the plot deals with a genetically altered and mutated school of fish) then it’s always going to be worth a watch and, certainly, for anybody interested in the early careers of some of the cast and crew, it’s a bit of a modern historical document. Fish around for a while in this movie and you might find something interesting.