Star Odyssey (1979)

It's no secret that other countries love our movies - or rather they love the success our movies have and want to emulate same for their product. That's not jealousy; that's good business practice.

I know I've told all of this before, but this is where our bigger chunk of ripoff b-movies come from: oversea. Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, India, Australia, Korea, Japan...you name the country (or continent) and odds are there are at least two or three cheapo exploitation-ish movies based on an American better.

And whilst on this tangent, there is no more prime a launching pad for this equation than 1977's reason for being, Star Wars.

This was such a successful, gargantuan blockbuster that its legacy stretched far beyond the Seventies and exists strong and solid to this day. And believe me, I've got the reviews to back it up.

Why should it be a surprise that almost every other country in the world wants a slice of this pie? Let's forget for a moment about our own country's liberal prowess in feasting on our own children with films like Battle Beyond the Stars, Battlestar: Galactica and The Black Hole. We're just that way. Just look then at Dunyayi kurtaran adam - aka: Turkish Star Wars (Turkey), Os Trapalhões na Guerra dos Planetas - aka: Brazilian Star Wars (Brazil), StarCrash (Italy), H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come (Canada - what?? It's another country...), Message from Space (Japan), Star Odyssey (Italy), and how about...

Uh, hold on here...wait a sec....

Okay, Italy: looks like someone's been double-dipping.

Guess I can't really blame Italia for visiting the well more than once. If you're gonna try and make a few bucks, might as well try it as many times as you can. Star Odyssey is an odd duck, though, in the respect that it fails outright at everything it does. It's not a good science fiction movie, it's not a good ripoff, it's not a good special effects extravaganza, it's not a good character study, and if it was trying to be a spoof of Star Wars and/or science fiction in general, it sure failed at that, too.

This movie failed so badly, in fact, that it more than invites humanitarian aid packages for everyone involved - if just out of pity.

Okay, (deep breath) the plot:

An evil Darth Vader-wannabe whose most evil feature is that he looks like he fell asleep in a waffle iron (so we'll call him WaffleFace) buys Earth in an intergalactic auction populated by "aliens" in Don Post masks and long flowing robes. WaffleFace plans to enslave all of humanity to do his bidding, like any right-thinking villain who looks like the breakfast special at Denny's would. The only way he can succeed, however, is to kidnap a bald scientist (in long flowing robes) by using his hundreds of gold androids in Dutch Boy haircuts. Mwah-ha-ha-ha, indeed.

Clearly, WaffleFace must be stopped and the only way to do so is by gathering the bald scientist's ex-team to protect both him and the earth. And not just any team; we're talking about a team that consists of Lyle the Effeminate Heterosexual, Sigourney Weaver with four levels of hotness removed, a ballet-dancing thin guy who boxes robots and jumps all over the place, a gambler who wants for everything to channel Vic Morrow and likes to wear his special-made Spider-Man 3 shirt, a husband and wife scientist team who play it like bored New Englanders and two duck-faced robots with suicidal tendencies.

This isn't a motley crew of heroes; they're just motley.

That's the premise and, just maybe, this might have worked. Many things were against it already, though, and not the least of them was having a director at the helm the likes of Alfonso Brescia. This guy - he's the Italian equivalent of Ed Wood. he directed Italian westerns, Italian superhero flicks, Italian gladiator movies, several Italian skin flicks and a handful of Italian sci-fi. He's choppy, inconsistent, blocks poorly, never follows through from one shot to the next and STILL had a career that spanned three decades.

Brescia co-wrote this beauty with Massimo Lo Jacono and Giacomo Mazzocchi, whose only other collective writing effort was in the 1977 sci-fi tragedy Battle of the Stars, which ironically was also co-written and directed by our boy Alfonso...along with some chap (or paisano, in this case) named Aldo Crudo (Crude-o? Cruddo?). Same difference; that movie sucked too.

Back to Star Odyssey; like most every other movie on this blog, it has a few alternate titles: Sette uomini d'oro nello spazio, Captive Planet, Matka tuntemattomaan, Metallica, Odissea solitaria and Space Odyssey...just in case they could get the same poor stupid rubes to watch the same movie twice, just under a different name. It happens.

A word about the editing in this movie. It sucks. Okay, that's two words. Mariano Arditi is someone else who had a long career in Italian film, but apparently it's who you know. Not only are some scenes so choppy and disjointed that an outer space dogfight cuts to a gathering of aliens then to a credit sequence in a manner that puts the viewer at risk of whiplash, but others are so long and dragged-out that you find yourself begging for some interesting cutting, just to spice things up. The only thing worse than overactive editing is NO EDITING. In Star Odyssey, you get both.

Oh, and don't expect light sabers; just aluminum sword cutouts with fluorescent paint on them. That's all you get. Thought I'd better point that out ahead of time so you don't get disappointed.

I'll take a guess that this was supposed to be a spoof of the Star Wars school of storytelling, if only because of the acting. I refuse to name any of the actors, if only so they can somehow come forward and humiliate themselves by admission to their association with this lumbering dollop of waste.

With the blue-suited heroes in black turtlenecks planting their fists on their hips and standing with legs apart to spout off ridiculous lines like "The electro-magnetic discharge won't be violent enough!" - the waddling duck-bots who bicker like an old married couple then compose love poems to each other like "Passion in a Printed Circuit" - the bald scientist who grabs his head and tries to mentally battle WaffleFace in terms of facial overacting (and wins on points, at least) - topped off with an outer space dogfight that seems to last twice as long as everything else we've just witnessed, you have the top vote-getter in the absolute most incoherent, poorly-staged, badly-acted and dismally photographed film ever put on a theater screen since...well...ever.

Do our intrepid fighters (please don't make me call them "heroes") defeat WaffleFace? Will Earth be saved? Will there be a twist ending that isn't so much of an ending as it is just twisted? Do the duck-bots follow though on killing themselves? Will anyone else appear wearing long flowing robes? Were you really paying attention to the plot? Does any of this matter? Why the hell am I reviewing this thing?

Look, this movie is bad. Let's just leave it at that. If you insist on watching Star Odyssey after being warned away so heavily, then you have no one to blame but yourself for all the anguish you're about to unleash. Period. Go ahead; watch it and consider yourself cursed.

I see that Italy also released another Star Wars ripoff around the same time called The Humanoid (L'umanoide), which starred Barbara Bach and Richard Kiel.

Triple-dipping now, huh Italy?

I've tortured my brain enough for one night. If you want to experience any more of a movie the likes of Star Odyssey, eat pickles and ice cream then bang your head against a wall - same results.