We've featured some terrible Star Wars knockoffs in the past, but Star Virgin may actually be the worst. (It's probably not fair to compare a porno with "serious" space opera films anyway, but even as porn, Star Virgin is very, very bad.)

So the blonde Barbarella wannabe, who's "played" by a Hustler Centerfold of the Year, is learning about sex from Mentor, her robot companion. And he does this by showing her a series of truly awful porno vignettes, the worst of which is in black and white and has captions, like a silent movie — and it features a Dracula motif, except that Dracula is wearing a Richard Nixon mask for some reason. Yes.

In between each vignette, the blonde and her robot have further dialogue about the mysteries of sex, and why humans like it, etc. etc. And the blonde gets more and more worked up, until the robot finally has to give her a space dildo, which shoots white stuff everywhere, covering pretty much every surface. The movie ends with a voiceover suggesting that this means the human race will be repopulated after all, and we will once again rule the cosmos. Or something. Bleh. [IMDB]

I love the way that one guy jumps over the prone body of the superior officer his buddy has just decked, and then pirrhouttes as if to say, "Ha cha cha!"

Other things I love: the nebbishy robot who's sort of R2D2 crossed with C-3PO, the disco-bots who chase the heroine until a door closes and then just sort of shrug and wander off as if to say, "What can you do? It's a door!" The Darth Vader-wannabe with the really really bad acne and flowy creamy hair, saying things like, "Blast it!"

As you can tell, Star Odyssey reuses costumes, props and whole set pieces from War Of The Robots, which we featured not long ago. Once again, you have the army of lightsaber-wielding androgynous disco-bots, fighting humans with bad hair and sucky jumpsuits. This installment in the unofficial Spaghetti Space Opera series, however, is so bad that it makes this movie's older mentor figure clutch his head. Wouldn't you?

The Humanoid was directed by "George Lewis," the pseudonym for Aldo Ladi, who also directed 1975's slasher Torture Train. Salon.com interviewed Luigi Cozzi, who directed Star Crash, in 2002, when he was working the cash register at Profondo Rosso, a horror movie shop and museum in Rome which he co-managed with Dario Argento. Cozzi acucsed Ladi aka Lewis of being a "hired gun" rather than a true lover of Star Wars like himself. In any case, the golden age of Italian space opera was brief: in the early 80s, the studios switched over to making cheaper post-apocalyptic movies in the mold of Escape From New York and Mad Max. Says Salon:

Some of the results of this next trend included Yor, the Hunter From the Future (1981), and the 1983 movies After the Fall of New York and Exterminators of the Year 3000, which depicts 31st-century life as dominated by savage gang leaders and early '80s Oldsmobiles.

It's good to know that old-fashioned American engineering will survive for another thousand years. [Salon.com]