Battle Beyond the Stars is a 1980 sci fi film directed by Jimmy T Murakami and starring Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn and John Saxon.
Let’s start with the premise, which is not only flimsy, but hilariously moronic. Our villain, such as he is, is Sador played by John Saxon. He suffers from some bizarre affliction that makes him lose limbs, which he replaces by chopping off other people’s limbs and grafting them onto his stumps. Anyway, needless to say Sador is a bit of a narcissist, and so over-confident that he shows up at planets he plans to vaporise and very helpfully informs them that he plans to return in a week to vaporise them, giving them the perfect opportunity to, oh I don’t know, mount a defence?? He’s got to be the most considerate villain I’ve ever seen. It’s like showing up on someone’s doorstep and announcing you have copied their keys and plan to return in a week to rob them, then being miffed when you show up a week later and the locks have been changed.
Not wasting any time, the peace loving inhabitants of…some peaceful planet I can’t recall the name of enlist their own Luke Skywalker, Shad (Richard Thomas) to save them. He takes to the skies in the weirdest spaceship I’ve ever seen – I’ve never quite been able to figure out what it is, but to me it looks like a giant brown cow with tits.
Roger Corman was undoubtedly the king of B-grade films. That’s not an insult, by the way. He had a great knack for taking whatever the latest blockbuster was, and making a really cheap knock off of it (like 1993’s Carnosaur – arguably a better movie than the one it’s knocking off - Jurassic Park. I don’t recall any scene in Jurassic Park that was even a shade as entertaining as watching some Leftie vegans tie themselves to logging equipment only to be devoured by rubber dinosaurs). In this case, the blockbuster was Star Wars. So he took the idea of The Magnificent Seven (itself based on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai) and made a B-grade sci fi film out of it.
Shad’s first port of call is to go visit a scientist on a space station who might be able to provide help. Unbeknownst to him the ageing scientist has gone a bit loopy and is now just a head attached to a Dalek-style robotic body. The costuming is so cheap it’s hilariously obvious it’s just an old guy sitting in a plastic bucket, but that’s part of the film’s charm. Anyway, I like that the scientist becomes fixated on keeping Shad prisoner on the space station to bang his daughter because – God love him – he wants grandkids. I like that she’s so horny and desperate she falls for Shad after he mumbles some bad pick up lines about ‘wind’ and goes trekking off after him when he escapes. He is a damn good citizen though, I’ll give him that. If it was me faced with the choice between criss-crossing the galaxy in a sass-talking giant cow or staying aboard a comfy space station to repeatedly bang a hot blonde, I think Shad’s people would be doomed.
Anyway, Shad proceeds to recruit an assortment of characters to round out the ‘seven’, all of whom are surprisingly memorable. The most interesting, I think, is ‘Nestor’ – a kind of collective consciousness whereby whatever happens to one is experienced by the rest (that would save hundreds on the weekly alcohol budget). But they are all pretty cool. Probably my favourite is the lizard guy who hates Sador (his planet apparently didn’t take Sador’s advanced notice seriously) and shrieks a delightfully obnoxious war cry at every available opportunity. He has these two sidekicks called the ‘Kelvins’ whose only way of communicating is through degrees of heat (get it? ‘Kelvins’?) and this makes for one of the films many odd moments of humour when the other characters use the Kelvins to cook hot dogs.
The one member of the rag tag bunch who is supposed to be the coolest actually winds up being the least interesting. It’s Robert Vaughn basically reprising his role from The Magnificent Seven. He plays a mercenary who is apparently so wanted throughout the galaxy that he’s unable to spend any of his ill-gotten riches so he just sits in a chair and broods. He comes along for the ride but doesn’t really do anything other than occasionally remind all the others about how tough he is.
Of course it’d be remiss of me not to mention Sybil Danning as the Amazonian warrior woman with an inferiority complex due to the fact that she’s small. Her coping mechanism is admirable though – she just wears tight-fitting outfits that emphasise her enormous breasts. Nice.
Anyway. Our seven heroes return to Shad’s homeworld just in time to launch the heroically suicidal defence against Sador and his wannabe-Death Star (hey, it destroys planets and I forget what it’s called) so we get lots of blue-screen effects and ping-ping laser sounds. They also use some kind of Dune-like audio warfare to sink trenches to prepare for the ground assault. Why Sador sees the need for a ground assault when he has a laser than can vaporise planets is never explained but just adds to the film’s enjoyable loopiness. I guess he just gets a kick out of the hands-on approach. But it does afford me one of my favourite moments in the film – when the Kelvins take out a tank by standing in front of it and turning their heat up to maximum – burning themselves out like light bulbs in the process. My heart always breaks for the little guys.
In true sci fi style our outnumbered and outgunned heroes manage to save the day and destroy Sador and his minions. The peace loving Shad finds his inner warrior, gets the girl, and saves the entire planet. Not a bad way to spend 90 minutes.
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