Friday, November 24, 2006

[1980] GALAXINA: Jeez, it's low budget and everything, but it's successful at recreating parts of the Star Wars and Alien aesthetics when it needs to, and combining it with general weirdness and softcore porn and both broad and usually ill-conceived humor. It's like one of those sleazy, corny, entertaining Heavy Metal serials. Directed by William Sachs (of The Incredible Melting Man fame; the same giant power station hallway from that movie makes an appearance), who definitely didn't have much money for space stuff but made the right investments on stuff like creatures (recreating the Mos Eisley bar scene as a brothel and as a frontier saloon) and interiors and shooting in weird color stocks and doing long slow takes of the Stephen Macht-Dorothy Stratten romance (where the film becomes almost genuinely romantic.) Avery Schreiber is singularly goofy as Cornelius Butt--and it's a stupid joke but the way he says "butt" is always funny. And naming a character "Cornelius Butt" is the level of the humor in this movie, though there is a very good version of the "to serve man/It's a cookbook!" gag. I liked it, it's an endearing little piece of cheapo pop filmmaking and the 2.3 out of 10 it has at the IMDB is either a perfect score or completely backwards. (The commentary by Macht and Sachs on the DVD is super entertaining, by the way. Listen for Sachs taking shots at Peter Bogdanovich at about the 100 minute mark.)

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