The 1978 Star Wars Knock-Off Starcrash Has Sex, Country-Fried Robots, Christopher Plummer and a VERY Young David Hasselhoff
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
For his The Joy of Trash Kickstarter Control Nathan Rabin 5.0 choice, a much appreciated patron gave me a choice between John Boorman’s legendarily bonkers mind-fuck Zardoz and the 1978 Star Wars wannabe Starcrash.
It’s hard to say no to a movie like Zardoz, if you’re me at least, but thanks to chapters on both seasons of Baywatch Nights, the silly one and the really silly one, David Hasselhoff is one of the breakout stars of The Joy of Trash so it seemed appropriate to write up his first major film role.
Starcrash was not Hasselhoff’s cinematic debut. He is credited as a “costume model” in a promotional short for MGM called The Lion Roars Again and portrayed the role of Boner in 1976’s Revenge of the Cheerleaders. I am not familiar with that particular motion picture but if you were to choose it for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 I would happily write it up because it is a movie where Hasselhoff plays a character named Boner.
Starcrash is generally lumped together with the wave of spectacle-heavy space operas that flourished in the wake of Star Wars’ zeitgeist-capturing success. But the filmmakers were quick to point out that the film was in active development before Star Wars changed blockbuster filmmaking forever.
In a sense it does not matter whether the similarities between the two films are the product of parallel thinking from two very different filmmakers or the lesser-known film flagrantly ripping off George Lucas’ franchise starter.
What matters is that Starcrash sure feels like a shameless, unapologetic Star Wars rip-off executed with a level of flamboyant incompetence seldom seen outside the films of Ed Wood.
It’s appropriate that I am writing about this in connection with my amazing new book The Joy of Trash because for much of its first two acts, Starcrash embodies the seedy but potent allure of pop culture at its most transcendently terrible and guiltily enjoyable.
The fascinatingly terrible decisions begin with the casting of Marjoe Gortner as Akton, the male lead. Akton is a painfully white-bread combination of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.
Like Han Solo, he’s an ostensibly charming and rakish badass, a devil may care smuggler with the fastest ship in the galaxy. Yet he’s also a figure of destiny who has preternatural powers, almost is he’s some manner of Jedi.
Gortner was a real-life maverick who first rose to fame as a charismatic child preacher before exposing Pentecostal preaching as flimflammery in the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary Marjoe.
Alas, the charisma and magnetism that distinguished Gortner as a preacher is entirely absent from his wooden turn here. With his giant perm, Gortner looks more like Slim Goodbody than a dashing hero and delivers his lines in a robotic monotone.
Caroline Munro does not fare any better as Stella Starr, a young smuggler habitually clad in a space bikini with vampiric accents. The unrelenting smuttiness of Starcrash makes Star Wars seem downright prudish by comparison and one of its core pieces of iconography is Princess Leia in a metal bikini.
One dangerous evening these two smugglers are caught by exposition-happy space police, who inform them that they’re under arrest after helpfully identifying themselves and their jobs for the benefit of the audience as well as Stella and Akton.
“As Thor, chief of the imperial police, I order you to surrender at once!” Insists a bald, green-skinned alien named Thor, who I ascertained is the chief of the imperial police.
Next up a police robot named Elle sneers, “Stella, you cheap smuggler, I am police robot Elle! You have the right to remain silent.”
We never get to see the robot from outer space read Stella her complete Miranda rights because we skip gingerly ahead to their sentencing by some weird-looking tentacle monster who is also apparently a space judge.
In words that can’t help but recall the glorious over-writing of Ed Wood, the judge thunders, “Having considered all the arguments, studied all the video tapes and the accusations, we condemn you to forced labor for life!”
It’s crazy that in this fantastical world, which I can only assume happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, they have video tapes and Miranda rights. I suspect that they also have 8-tracks, sweet-ass vans and Pong arcade games.
Stella Starr’s stint doing forced labor ends up being mercifully brief, as she escapes her prison planet and then learns that her sentence has been cancelled.
The space vixen is reunited with Akton. The smugglers are approached holographically by the Emperor of the Universe (Christopher Plummer), who wants them to find a powerful secret weapon controlled by the villainous Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinnell).
Adroitly cast in the Alec Guinness role of the revered thespian who classes up the proceedings through his presence alone, Plummer delivers a master class in how to hold onto your dignity in the dark depths of utter trash.
Looking good, Christopher P!
Plummer may be slumming it for a paycheck in a movie that would be remembered solely for its flamboyant, entertaining awfulness, but that does not keep him from giving it his all.
The Sound of Music star treats the nonsense he’s being forced to recite like a goddamn Shakespearean soliloquy. This stupid space nonsense is infinitely dumber and more humiliating than anything Guinness was asked to do but Plummer treats it like King Lear.
Plummer is a star even in the abysmal likes of Starcrash. He understandably disappears for much of the film but reappears in the third act as its elegant English deus ex machina.
Just when it seems like all is lost and the wannabe Rebel Alliance is doomed The Emperor of the Universe returns and, with a kindly twinkle in his benevolent eyes, asserts that there are, in fact, advantages to being The MOTHERFUCKING EMPEROR OF THE UNIVERSE.
To give the good guys an opportunity to triumph over pure evil, The Emperor of the Universe climactically and hilariously declaims, “Imperial battleship: HALT the flow of time!”
Plummer delivers this iconically idiotically sentiment with great relish and authority, almost as if it were not literally the stupidest words ever committed to film.
The Emperor is only able to halt the flow of time for a few minutes but that’s all it takes to give the heroes a fighting chance.
Elle ends up serving as Stella’s loyal and perversely polite sidekick. Judging by his thick Southern accent, Elle apparently hails from the Alabama part of outer space. He’s the exact cross between C-3PO and Slim Pickens we never knew we needed.
When Stella and Elle are in danger of starving to death on an inhospitable planet, the country-fried robot drawls, “Now, maybe, is time to use your ancient system of “prayer” and hope it works for robots as well!”
Our heroes end up finding Count Zarth Arn’s deadly weapon on a planet inhabited by Space Cavemen. Yes, Space Cavemen. Just when it seems the movie can’t get any dumber it plunges defiantly to a new low.
We also end up meeting the Emperor’s handsome son, Prince Simon, played by a baby-faced Hasselhoff, who was still a regular on The Young and the Restless when he was cast here.
Hasselhoff emerges from the proceedings relatively unscathed. Even at the very beginning of his career, Hasselhoff was almost suspiciously at home in this kind of convoluted nonsense. He more or less takes over as male lead in the third act and, at the risk of giving him some very faint praise, is much more compelling than Gortner.
Starcrash is a goddamn hoot of the so bad it’s wonderful variety. It’s an egregiously awful, singularly misguided endeavor distinguished largely by Plummer’s regal presence and a score by five-time Academy Award winner John Barry that makes the movie sound and seem far more competent and professional than it actually is.
Hasselhoff’s first big movie fucking sucks. That’s what makes it so great!
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