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Certain movies have titles too awesome to possibly be watchable movies. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension for instance. That title writes a check you just KNOW the movie can't cash. What's rarer though is when you have cover art so awesome yo know the movie is going to suck. Galaxy of Terror here is an excellent example. We have this totally awesome Glistening Chests cover tableau with a screaming girl on some crazy alien cliffside being menaced by this totally awesome green and purple exoskeletal skull-faced pterodactyl monster, with some other crazy space monsters in the background. This totally looks like a movie about people getting stranded on and having to explore some weird alien planet populated by surreal crazy critters like that thing in the closet from House. Rock on. You just KNOW looking at this cover that it isn't going to come close to representing what we're actually going to get. My money's on a totally shameless Alien knockoff.
We start off with... the title, written in incredibly unimpressive fashion. Just... a boring font, blow lettering, right there on screen. Doesn't pan in, doesn't zoom out from anything, doesn't get slowly written, nothing. The rest of the opening credits do the same... but in a fantasy novel cover font. So... we're slowly panning around the planet Foggy it seems and.... now we're cutting straight to a guy in work clothes panicking and running around a dingy metal corridor spaceship with a ridiculous looking laser rifle. So yeah. Seems my guess was correct. But now here's some crazy old lad playing like, Xaxxon Checkers with some red glowing headed guy, talking about prophecies and talking to an imperial general from Star Wars on a viewscreen. Hot dang. You know, for all the MANY MANY MANY blatant Alien clones to come out in the early 80s, and how Star Wars just completely warped the sci-fi landscape over the same period, it's actually really surprising hw infrequently people go and get their Star Wars chocolate in Alien's peanut butter and vice versa. Honestly, the only other example I can think of is Chronicles of Riddick, but that's a huge cheat since not only is it well past the expiration date on both trends, it's honestly a straight up space opera, that just happens to bafflingly be the sequel to a gritty space based horror movie. And even then, Riddick isn't really a Star Wars vibe, just holy cow someone made a new space opera movie, and Pitch Black was kind of a weird mix of a few different elements, with Aliens being one of them, but didn't really do the cramped hallways on a spaceship deal.
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Anyway though, after the brief moment of awesome there, Ripley is in a hurry to jump the nostromo here into hyperspace and go check out that distress signal they're being sent out to investigate, so she jumps it into hyperdrive. So... I guess we aren't going to have a cryo pod underwear scene. Which is surprising, because otherwise we're being pretty freaking blatant about this. Also? Pretty cool looking ship honestly. It's kinda this three level pancake, like if a Star Wars ship and a Star Trek ship had a baby? Or like, a stretched out space biplane. So now we're exploring the intro ship and everyone has these weird backpacks with headlights. The obligatory corpse drops down from the roof and this guy who... really is just totally sporting the Evil Bald Bearded Vizir look throws a uh.. huge 3 pointed plastic throwing star at it. Huh. It's kinda like the "glaive" from Krull really. I'd compare it to a throwing weapon from a console RPG but it's not THAT ridiculously huge, just like, the size of a frisbee.
GIANT STOP MOTION SPACE BUG! YES! That's two unexpected treats so far! It's that real awesome pasted in looking stuttery stop motion too. I don't know way but I have a gigantic soft spot for that sort of thing. I guess it can be blamed on seeing Clash of the Titans too many times as a kid. You know I hear the new one has a quick gag mention of Bubou as totally lame and never brings him up again. That's inexcusable. Anyway though, yeah, someone just got killed by the silly stop motion cockroach. It looked like a scene from mimick... being recreated in a school play... with a little slapstick added in. Just kinda jumped onto his back, grabbed him with each foot, and started gnawing on his skull. Also, seriously, it is HILARIOUS how hard Ripley here is trying to be Ripley. I mean, the thing to do is DOWNPLAY what your character is based on. Here we're just going all-in with it. Anyway, they just got out and are apparently wandering over to uh... the Xel'Naga temple from the last Protoss mission in StarCraft. Like, flat out. This is an identical mysterious black techno-pyramid. Also? We seem to be in the clear on the boobs by paragraph free front. I'm surprised. I kinda cheated and watched the trailers before starting the movie, and they're totally in here, just not front loaded like I thought was the rule for this sorta cheese.
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So yeah. They're uh... kinda really milking the climb up the pyramid here. And do hese backpacks even hold anything? I don't really see a way to open them. That's not all just the battery for the head lights is it? Oh OK, there's stuff in'em. Old Guy is rappelling down with a harness and bungee cord through a hole near the top. Also I blinked but did I just see a head crab skitter by? Ah. It was just a fleshy blood sucking wall tentacle. Here's a few of them grabbing his face. And... wow. That is quite possibly the least appropriate sound effect ever. You know that really cartoony slurpy slorpy cartoon side effect that you get for uh... generic sound effects for goop monsters doing stuff in games that can't really show anything visually and thus there's no real action you can equate it to? Kind of a "SHLEE-rup! Shloo-rup! Shloo-papa SHREE-lup!" looping over and over again? Yeah, that's the sound these blood sucking tentacles made when they shot out and glommed onto old guy here. That just ABSOLUTELY sucks any possible tension out of the scene. It's worse than the dog in the original Resident Evil intro making the WarCraft 2 dragon noise. Also, Evil Vizir apparently has a ton of his clear plastic throwing stars, as he just tossed two to wedge an automatically closing door open. This movie actually has a lot of cool stuff in it provided you set the bar of your expectations REALLY REALLY low going in like I did. Honestly, I kinda worry sometimes whether watching almost nothing but TERRIBLE movies for... what? Like 2 years now? How long have I been doing this, seriously? Anyway, I worry I might be doing irreversable damage to my standards.
OK, so... that was weird. The throwing stars eventually got smashed by the door, and shattered to little crumbs. Shortly thereafter, Vizir is wandering around in that general area, and sees ANOTHER door automatically closing, so he goes to hold it open manually, almost getting crushed before jumping free. Man. Dude has problems with doors almost as bad as my D&D party. And we recently used a freaking WISH specifically to never have to deal with doors again... and still there's problems. Anyway though, he jumps free, then... his shattered stars across the room rewind and fix themselves all Prince of Persia style. So he goes to pick them back up, but one jumps up and stabs him in the arm, and one of the points breaks off and starts crawling under his skin. So.... I guess he used the other one, but it kinda looked like he just karate chopped his whole left arm off pretty much at the elbow to keep it from crawling into his chest. But... then his shard possessed arm moves of its own free will, grabbing the other star, and throws it at him, killing him. But wait! There's more! One of the girls... I'm going to say girl 3 because she isn't Ripley and also isn't other girl who looks like the other girl from Alien... or maybe it WAS Girl 2. Anyway, she wanders in on the scene, and finds the ambulatory arm motionless, but totally covered in maggots. So she incinerates it with her laser rifle, because that's just gross. But one of the maggots manages to crawl free, suddenly becomes giant, and proceeds to rape her. THERE'S our random boobs. And... actually this is really an awful lot of gratuitous nudity. I mean, yeah, there's a giant maggot blocking out a lot of it, but we're talking full on spread legged crotch shot of a girl covered in transparent slime here.
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We cut away to Ripley arguing with Other Old Guy who clearly is going to turn out to be a milk-powered android just you watch, then some generic dude finds rape girls corpse and incinerates that too. Because much like maggots, that's just gross. Actually it's just a full-on naked girl lying on the floor, but apparently he found it gross, so burninate it goes. Oh then someone just randomly opens a door to see a screaming burn victim zombie corpse which we cut away from and never address again but it's quite silly. And nope, nope, that was a third girl. Here's Girl 2, or Girl Who Looks Kinda Like The Girl From Alien Who Looks Kinda Like Susan Surandon. We honestly have like twice as many characters as we actually need here and none of them really get enough screen time to have them stick with you. I mean, the only charactersI'm recognizing when they show up are Ripley, because she totally is, Girl 2, same deal, Guy Who Looks Like Peter Gallagher, who we're probably better off just calling Guy With Mustache. Old Guy #2 here is the only old guy left, so that's easy, and then we have Robert Englund, who I only recognize because, well, watch enough lousy horror and you get used to spotting Robert Englund, and he just kinda looks out of place here. There's a bunch more characters than that though, seriously. I mean, there is anywhere between 10 and 20 people in the initial party here. I genuinely can't say beyond that. They're all dressed the same, and most have similar hair, so when you only see'em for a few seconds at a time, and people are constantly splitting up and regrouping and dying in weird ways, so... yeah.
Anyway, here's a big wad of characters playing with an automatic door. Seriously, they find this wall vagina you can stick your hand in and fiddle with to make this- Oh slow down movie, one weird thing at a time! Anyway, yeah, there's a switch in it to make the automatic door open and close. So... they just stand here for like, a full minute, going "OK, open it again, and close it again, and open it again..." because they see this triangle on the wall the glows when it's in use. Seriously though, they hit it like 15 times before it jams and someone gets stuck outside. At that point, a reasonable facimile of a capital-A Alien appears and gets all up in his face... and then just kinda disappears. It's weird. Doesn't jump away or hide or anything, just, poof. Then it appears behind him and kills him. Oho! The giant glowing triangle is some kinda teleportation portal. Amazing. Something actually made sense! So yeah, people wander through that and get split up more.
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Anyway, Robert Englund just got tackled from behind by uh... Robert Englund. So we've had an evil arm, which is close enough to an evil hand, and now an evil twin. Plus something got raped by something weird before both of those. So... yeah, we're pretty much covering major bases from all three Evil Dead movies in order. Not the good ones though. That'd be zombie head games, chainsaw arm, and skeletal fife players. Anyway, the Roberts Englund fight a while, then the real one just stops and laughs about how ridiculous this is getting. Then Gil 2 gets grabbed by funky vines which squeeze her to death. This involves really funny inappropriate bloop gloop noises as her torso is rupturing, and a pretty nice exploding head. But really, how often do you see a head explosion that isn't amusing? Oh and I almost forgot! To get to the room where they played with the door, everyone had to pull out little sleds and ride the super-fun happy slide waterpark tube. That one was kinda weird.
So... Robert Englund is apparently fine, and is tring to shout warnings now to Mustache, who's walking up this elaborate light up staircase towards Totally An Android Guy. Who he finds sitting in... yeah that's totally the zerg briefing room from StarCraft. This movie is CLEARLY an influence on SC visual design. Along with like, everything else, but still. So yeah, Android Guy's head starts glowing red, just like the guy from the begining, who he might be. And also I guess a robot or space monster leader or whatever. Anyway, he mumbles a bunch of important plot exposition I couldn't make out because we have volume issues here, and uh... this just turned into a videogame? Suddenly Mustache guy has to fight all of the bosses again in rapid succession, all last level of an NES game style (bosses in this case being Alien, Maggot, Sucky Tentacles, and Stop-Motion Cockroach). Then he does a freaking spin jump over a pit and runs onward, where he's attacked by the suddenly zombified versions of everyone who has died so far. Then he is woken up, as if from a dream, by Girl 2. Who presumably is also a zombie what with her head exploding. Tends to be fatal. So yeah, she tries to strangle him, is shot, and... we're back in glowy head's room.
And uh... Mustache shoots pink lasers from his tummy care bear style at Old Red Head to kill him. Excuse me a moment, that takes a bit to process. Yeah, apparently by surviving the boss gauntlet, he now gets magical red glowy head awesome powers, like Old Guy here received the first time he came here, which he can use to do whatever he wants... and Production Designer: James Cameron? Seriously? Crazy. So anyway yeah, as my surprised reading of the credits suggests, that's the end of the movie. I... guess everyone else died. Pretty sure we didn't get to see how Robert Englund died, unless his doppelganger killed him off camera, and I guess that makes Ripley the burn victim corpse. Kind of a seriously abrupt ending though. Anyway, the important thing is, that movie was a gigantic ball of crazy, and way more interesting than the generic Alien rip-off I was expecting. Still not as awesome as its box art, but, you know, show me a cheesy horror movie from the 80's that is.
