Thiel-a-Vision Review: Battle Beyond the Stars

1/2

Yes, that is a spaceship with breasts on your screen. You may think for a moment that you're watching a remake of Barbarella, but Battle Beyond the Stars is something else entirely: one part Star Wars, one part The Magnificent Seven and one part just plain weird. 

Screenwriter John Sayles is well-regarded for his mainstream work, but he started out penning scripts for Piranha, Alligator and The Howling. Here he runs wild, tossing off dozens of ideas and putting them in a blender set on puree. Yet, while the film is wholly derivative of other, better flicks, Sayles manages to inject occasional flashes of sly humor.

The plot finds the simple culture of the planet Akir threatened by the villainous Sador, played by a scenery-devouring John Saxon. For seemingly no reason other than simple cussedness, he orders the peace-loving folk to capitulate or face annihilation courtesy his Death Star...er, Stellar Converter. 

However, one of the Akir--Shad, played by Richard Thomas--decides to take the planet's sole spacecraft in search of mercenaries to defend against the would-be conqueror. (Exactly why a somewhat primitive culture has a working interstellar vessel is never explained, nor why said ship should have the aforementioned titties.) He enlists a young woman who is "good with computers," a humanoid lizard, a space trucker from planet Earth, a ruthless criminal (the only actual mercenary he finds), a scantily-clad Valkyrie and five members of a hive-mind intelligence named Nestor.

One of the appealing elements of this film is the sheer variety of beings and spacecraft onscreen. The defending ships come in all shapes and sizes, from a sporty dart to a glowy flying saucer. Meanwhile, the denizens include the heat-communicating Kelvin, the three-eyed Nestor clones and the mutant Malmori.

Just as varied are the performances. Richard Thomas plays it straight and a bit dull. George Peppard, as the space-trucking Cowboy, is laid-back and taking things less than seriously. Meanwhile, Robert Vaughn's world-weary scoundrel seeking nothing more than a meal and a place to hide with his well-earned loot appears to be in a different movie, out-acting everyone and bringing some real pathos to his doomed character.

The film is full of strange moments: Sam Jaffe's bodiless scientist, the Dial-a-Drug machine, Cowboy's ice cube-dispensing belt, hotdogs roasting over the heated bodies of the Kelvin, and Sador's inexplicable fetish for replacing his body parts with those of his victims. There's a certain "what the hell were they thinking?" quality, but I have to admire the imagination involved.

This was the largest budget producer Roger Corman had ever worked with up until this point, and it's all up on the screen. The effects--which were reused endlessly in later Corman films--are better than average for the time, and there are a lot of them. The sets are frequently of the egg carton variety, but again, they're numerous. The music by a pre Wrath of Khan James Horner is spirited and fun.

If I have a complaint about the film--aside from the laziness of some of the performances and the dumbassedness of the plot in general--it's that all of the interesting characters are killed off, leaving us with only the bland hero and his whitebread love interest.

I was originally going to give Battle Beyond the Stars a middle-of-the-road two stars, but as I wrote this, I realized that it has so many enjoyable elements that it deserves the extra half-star. It's dumb fun, to be sure, but fun nonetheless.

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