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Would you believe that StarCrash, the ridonkulous space opera starring Caroline Munro and David Hasselhoff, was even campier before it was edited for U.S. release? The masterful new 2-DVD set includes loads of deleted scenes, including this batshit supervillain moment. More »
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Witness the best of the worst of cheap CG space battles. 2000's Starforce doesn't just boast atrocious CG and awesome "pew-pew-pew" sound effects, it also features incredible acting and accents that change from line to line. Update: Videos fixed! More »
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Some French people seriously misunderstood what Star Wars was supposed to be about, and the result may cause severe nausea and internal bleeding. Four C-3POs dance rather salaciously with four Darth Vaders in space... and then the awful wirework begins. More »
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The last human alive, grown in a test tube, begs her robot guardian to teach her about sex, in this hilariously awful scene from 1979's Star Virgin. "You are a messy biological organism and your erogenous zones are useless." NSFW! More »
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In the late 1970s, Italy flooded the world with awesome Star Wars knock-offs, but the greatest may be 1979's Star Odyssey. What other movie features pilots making strangulated gurgles when their ships are hit? More »
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There's so much to love about this-clip from War Of The Robots. The tongue-flirting. The lightsaber-duels. The disco-bots. But really, it's all about the sound effects. More »
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Every late-1970s Star Wars-ripoff had to have a cantina scene, but few of them offered as much panache as Message From Space, the 1978 Japanese film. You have the dancers, wearing eye-liner, spangly metal bikini tops and g-strings, including the boys. You have the drinks-serving robot, who wears a bright pink robo-bikini. And then the obligatory dancing robot, who's got more game in one servo than R2 had in his whole body. But the film also features one of the greatest spaceship dogfight/sword-fight battle scenes of all time, and you can see for yourself below. Directed by Kinji Fukusaku, who also directed the Japanese sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora! in 1970 and the ultra-violent Battle Royale in 2000, Message From Space is weird, even by Star Wars-ripoff standards. (Other films in this awesome sub-genre include Star Crash, The Humanoid, Turkish Star Wars, The Beast In Space, and Legend Of Orin. (Note: the Humanoid clip still plays fine. But you may have to give it a minute after pressing play. It seems to be taking a moment to load.) What makes Message stand out from this distinguished pack? Let's see. The bad guy takes orders from his mother, who's played by a male Japanese comedian in drag. Also, the good guys are recruited by means of finding special walnuts. There's a giant wooden galleon, which flies through space and gets into fights with Imperial star destroyers and tie-fighters. The pilot of the Millenium Falcon is a bouncy chick, who makes the most of the giant joystick and executes barrel rolls. The good guys include some hippie people, who wear flowers in their hair and fight with actual non-light-based swords. And the bad guys wear actual metal armor, including helmets with horns. What does this film not have? [IMDB] More »
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The most demented Italian Star Wars ripoff isn't Star Crash or The Humanoid — it's the XXX-rated The Beast In Space, which is also a quasi-sequel to 1975 supernatural bestiality epic The Beast... except in space this time. Newly on DVD, the Beast In Space has the laser gun fights and fake light sabre fights with guys in silver jumpsuits, the Han Solo-knockoff, and a robot that rules the planet Longion by keeping everybody in a mind-controlled haze of non-stop sex, in which they never age. Weirdly, the porno's science is more accurate than the science in Star Wars. Our sister blog Fleshbot has another clip (very NSFW) from the film. [Fleshbot] More »
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The Italians created two awesome Star Wars clones in 1979: the David Hasselhoff-in-eyeliner movie Star Crash (which we featured a while back), and this movie, The Humanoid. It stars Richard Kiel ("Jaws" from the James Bond movies) as a super-soldier — who decapitates like eight guys by throwing one pylon in this clip. It also has some of the best Darth Vader dialog ever, a robot dog named Robodog, a psychic Jedi-child, and an evil queen who has to absorb the juices of one topless young fashion model every day to stay young. The directors of Star Crash and The Humanoid had an undying rivalry, that endured 23 years later, when one of them was working in a gift shop. More »
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The Hoff, wearing buckets of makeup, fences with killer bots in Star Crash. The worst of the late 70s Star Wars knockoffs, Crash features lots of Harryhausen-style stop motion animation alongside widescreen space battles. Caroline Munroe has really shiny hair and low-cut tops. But my favorite character is the Southern-accented android (Hamilton Camp), who looks like Darth Vader but is named Elle and wears a rainbow flag on the back of his belt. Click through for a video of the climactic battle and Elle's daring escape. More »
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