Thanks to R. Seth Friedman-Wolf for helping add great joy to my birthday celebrations. Most years I just ignore my birthday entirely but since we had a houseful of guests I made a point of it being my birthday and pretending to celebrate it. Seth had already given me a disc containing a Brazilian and a Turkish post-StarWars scifi atrocity which I watched in tandem on Saturday night. The premise of the former is that four Brazilian stooges are taken into space to help a prince find half a computer and basically create a feeble mockery of Star Wars. The Turkish movie just takes what looks like footage from a faded theatrical trailer of Star Wars and uses that for all the space stuff, then has the heroes be on a planet where they ride horses and use spears, and it makes the Brazilian one look fairly high budget. You can do a lot of SF in caves, or in Anatolian cave villages. The only ray gun type effects were actually hand drawn on the film. There is a karate expert guy who fights these guys in fake fur monster costumes and karate chops them in half and tears their heads off. The Brazilian one is called Tramps in the Space War or something like that and I don't know what the Turkish one is called.
Sunday morning, my birthday, we (Donna, me, Dr. Howl and the Stangs) went out for breakfast at Pig'n'Pancake and while waiting for our pancakes and pig fragments, part of the discussion involved two films (Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women) which had been made from parts of the Russian movie Planeta Burg (Planet of Storms) by proteges of Roger Corman. When Seth came over that evening he brought me some SF DVDs including Battle Beyond the Sun, the other movie made from the same source material. Even better, that disc contains Star Pilot, a.k.a. 2+5: Missione Hydra (1966). It seems to me to be a fixer-upper, that they just tacked together the best they could with what they had. There is some splendid Italian SciFi stuff with a sexy alien commander in tights and a sexy professor's daughter who soon shares the alien commander's wardrobe - including garments with a CLEAVAGE PORTHOLE in the chest. A round plastic window over the cleavage. The professor's daughter also spends some productive time in a full-body fishnet suit with scarlet feathers attached to the bikini zones, and much of the photography of her focuses on her very long legs, especially when she is stuck rolling around on the spacecraft ceiling in "zero gravity," exposing her black garter belt up to the hip. The scenes in general are beautifully composed and very pleasing to the eye. BUT!!! Suddenly the incoherent plot is made even more incoherent by the almost random inclusion of footage from the American micro-budget fixer-upper Doomsday Machine which includes space model footage from the superior Japanese film Gorath. There was also a notable lack of background music for most of the movie, and the "fighting" was unusually inept and unconvincing play-fighting. And then there were a WHOLE LOT of fake fur monster suits. More than I have ever seen on one crummy looking little star treky sound stage in my life, jumping around going ooga booga. It's just what the doctor ordered, a visually fascinating and conceptually head-poundingly screwed-up delight and really fun to watch with the founder of a UFO suicide cult and our wives. I can't even give stars to any of these movies because they are skewed at an angle to our reality and cannot be judged.
