Starcrash (1978)

aka The Adventures of Stella Star

Intergalactic smuggler Stella Star (Caroline Munro) and her weird-ass partner Akton (Marjoe Gortner) have been giving the forces of Law and Order quite the run for their money. Finally caught and sentenced to a quintillion years of hard labour, Stella stages a daring escape which is rudely interrupted by a plea for help from the Emperor of the First Circle of the Galaxy (Christopher Plummer) – whatever that is - himself. Apparently, the evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell) - not Sa Tan, alright - has developed a planet sized secret weapon of horrifying destructive power.

All attempts at actually locating the planet where this weapon is hidden have come up empty and even resulted in the disappearance of the Emperor’s only son Simon (David Hasselhoff) while looking for it. Stella’s superior piloting and Akton’s excellent navigational skills are the only hope left to the forces of good. They are to be supported by one Chief Thor (Robert Tessier) and the law robot who caught them, one Elle (the voice of the fittingly named Howard Camp in the body of Judd Hamilton). Obviously, the bad guys aren’t going to make things easy for them.

Fortunately, Stella has more luck than a Corellian smuggler, and Akton gets a new superpower whenever the plot needs it.

Among the various attempts at ripping off Star Wars on the cheap, this US-Italian co-production directed by the great Luigi Cozzi is one of the most entertaining. Nobody’d ever confuse it with one of those boring “good” films, but it certainly is a great one, a triumph of crass commercialism somehow turning into a feast of childish/child-like imagination, barely suppressed horniness and a love for the joys of pulp science fiction.

The films production design often suggests Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off, full of shapes and constructions that look sort of like the real thing if you squint but never quite so much as to invite a law suit. Every space ship interior, space(!) cavern and mine looks cheaper, weirder and more improbable than in the movie’s guiding light, but little of it looks carelessly thrown together. This may be the tackier, cheaper version of what George Lucas did, but it is a tackiness and cheapness somebody has clearly worked hard at, so it feels personable, alive, and exciting in a deeply goofy yet undeniable way.

Also palpable, and very typical of Cozzi as well as Italian SF cinema as a whole, is a sense of enthusiasm when it comes to hands on special effects. The stop motion robots may be ill advised, what with them looking as if they come right out of a peplum, yet they are also lovely, silly and exciting. The same goes for miniature effects that hold up to little scrutiny while exuding a sense of sheer joy. I can’t help but imagine Cozzi (who is a genre movie nerd in the best meaning of the phrase) looking at what he has wrought grinning from ear to ear.

The script does its very best to hit all of the pulp science fiction tropes, not just those Star Wars used, so the plot evolves/devolves into a series of encounters with everything from evil space amazons to space cave men, environmental dangers our heroes survive via random magical space powers, and only from time to time touches base with more direct, usually preposterous moments trying to evoke light sabres and Jedi.

On the acting side, Starcrash is a series of inexplicable yet awesome casting and acting decisions. See Joe Spinell as the awkwardly overweight big bad from what I can only assume to be Space New York! Be astonished at the way Caroline Munro goes through most of the movie in what amounts to fetish gear (particularly the colour-changed Vampirella costume is quite the thing, what little there is of it) and makes the costumes look like clothes a woman would actually wear! Puzzle at whatever Marjoe Gortner is doing in his role as Han Skywalker Wan, and at whatever any of his facial expressions mean! Gaze in awe at Christopher Plummer’s heroic attempts at suppressing the giggles by speaking very, very softly, attempting to project great personal charisma and sleepiness at the same time (whose flow he can hold, by the way, because of course he can)!

There are glories to behold in Starcrash.

Past Misdeeds: Paganini Horror (1989)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


The career of 80s synth rock monstrosity/siren Kate (Jasmine Maimone) seems to come to its natural end. At least if you ask her producer Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli), who has turned into quite a bitch from suffering through hours and hours of Kate's "music" during the years, and so really doesn't mind telling her charge how much she sucks. To make a long story short - Kate really needs a hit, and she needs it soon. Fortunately, her drummer Daniel (Pascal Persiano) knows a simple solution to his friend's complicated problem, and buys a lost, never published and never publically performed song of possible devil dealer Paganini from a certain Mister Pickett (Donald Pleasance). The song, obviously being called "Paganini Horror", just happens to be a really crappy 80s synth rock of the sort Lavinia deems a surefire hit.

Now Kate and her partners in crime just need to make a video ("just like Michael Jackson's fantastic Thriller"). For that, they hire famous horror director Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi), who works alone, just like Wolverine. But where to shoot? Oh, right, in a derelict house in Venice that once belonged to Paganini where he supposedly made his pact with the devil and made violin strings from his girlfriend's guts. It's going to be quite a cost-efficient shoot - apart from Singer, Kate and her three co-musicians and Lavinia, there's only the house's owner, Sylvia Hackett (Daria Nicolodi), on set. Soon enough, the mandatory horrible things (and I don't just mean Kate's music) start happening.

The house is caged in by a cartoon lightning forcefield, and Paganini (he of the golden mask and the golden violin with the in-built blade) does a bit of killing and time-and-space-bending. Lots of running around in the dark, splitting up, and screaming ensues. Who will survive until the twist ending?

After experiencing the major ecstasy of his The Black Cat/Demoni 6/etc., I couldn't help but pounce on this other late-period horror film directed by Luigi Cozzi as soon as possible. Now, I'm even more convinced that I underestimated Cozzi quite heavily. When the man was on, he was quite capable of making a film of the sort of nonsensical beauty and intense, lovingly presented stupidity more typically found in the works of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso. Paganini Horror isn't quite the mind-blowing experience that other movie (which may or may not have been produced in the same year) turned out to be, but it is still chockfull of the sort of insane delights I always hope for in Italian horror movies.

Apart from the obvious (and pretty wonderful, of course) dumbness of the film's set-up - and the charming idiocy of its twist ending (note to directors: nobody will complain your twist ending ruins your whole film when your plot never made any sense anyway) - there's at least one excellently stupid thing a minute on screen, starting with Paganini's (whose violin quite expectedly sounds like a synthesizer and not like a violin) hobo-Phantom of the Opera outfit, and the violin knife and most certainly not ending with one of the best deaths in crappy horror cinema - death by "special fungus". Connoisseurs of this sort of thing can also look forward to some drunkenly rotating camera to visualize moments of disorientation and a very funny blood fountain when Lavinia is pressing her face against a piece of glass, um, is squashed to death by an invisible Paganini, I mean. Not to mention Kate's "music" (or the fact that the song that is supposed to be Paganini's when they shoot the video sounds nothing like the song Daniel played to them), the "dancing" and the eye-destroying costumes.

Visually, the film's all blue, green and red lights and rather shaky camera, with Cozzi doing everything in his budget to let the audience forget most of the film is taking place in the same five or so rooms (to be fair, there are also a handful of scenes taking place in Venice). I most certainly didn't forget, but I was much too occupied with giggling about the director's shrugging disregard of the nature of time and space (that's even a plot point), characters (that's not really a plot point), or plot (naturally, there isn't much of one).

I don't think I was the only one giggling about the whole affair, either. At least the always wonderful Donald Pleasence (in his "one day of shooting only and a trip to Venice, please" phase) looks for most of his sparse screen time as if he could barely hold his amusement in, making his devil (oops, spoiler) intensely endearing, like one's favourite uncle. Amusement is of course the natural reaction when one's biggest scene in a movie sees one throwing down money from a high balcony in Venice, shouting "Fly, my little demons!".

The rest of the actors don't seem of one mind about how to take on their roles. Daria Nicolodi goes for a quiet dignity that is completely at odds with the merrily deranged tone of the film - which is a bit ironic given that she's also billed as the screenplay's co-writer - while Maimone and Mastrangeli seem to be caught in a competition concerning who is better when it comes to hysterical overacting; Maimone's probably slightly more consistent there - her facial contortions when she talks about Michael Jackson and Thriller alone would be worth the price of admission. As you can imagine, these quite divergent acting approaches in combination with the incredibly loopy dialogue only add to film's very special (quite like the fungus, yes) charms.


As a whole, Cozzi's movie feels like one of the last great "hey, I have a thousand dollars, a script written by a semi-cult actress, an old house, and one day of shooting time with Donald Pleasence, so let's make a horror movie and get rich!"-films the Italian exploitation film industry popped out. As such, Paganini Horror not only produces tears of laughter and delight, but also leaves one with the melancholic feeling of witnessing the end of an era of the right kind of shoddy, somewhat desperate, yet weirdly enthusiastic filmmaking.

Past Misdeeds: Il Gatto Nero (1989? 1991? Always?)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow. Though I have to say I have seen even more Cozzi films, and do now expect the insanity rather than the boredom.


Not to be confused with all those other films about black cats, which comes especially easy in this case, because the black cat isn't important here at all.

Plot? Oh right, there was something kinda-sorta plot-like hidden away in here somewhere. Ah, there it is: Director Marc Ravenna (Urbano Barberini) is trying to re-ignite his faltering career by making a semi-sequel to Argento's Suspiria (wouldn't that actually be a semi-sequel to Inferno at this point in time?), based on a witch named Levana from an essay in De Quincey's Suspiria De Profundis. If you just ignore that Levana isn't actually a witch but a goddess and wasn't invented by De Quincey, you'll be as surprised as I was by the realization that someone working on the script for this one might have read the book the film's talking about (and, going by the inclusion of an actual quote from Poe, even more than just a single book; Italy sure ain't Hollywood). You can also be sure someone had seen Suspiria, what with parts of that movie's theme playing on the soundtrack whenever someone mentions it or De Quincey's book.

Anyway, Marc plans on giving Levana's role in his planned movie to his wife Anne (Florence Guerin), a big horror star right now playing in an adaptation of Poe's The Black Cat (this, like everything else, is not going to be important later on). Unfortunately, Levana is real and disagrees with Marc's casting decisions, so she begins to threaten Anne, first by going all green and red light on the couple's house, then by jumping out of a mirror and vomiting green goo in Anne's face, exploding the fridge, materializing a non-threatening fridge repairman and a slightly more threatening pale teenager. She also seems to induce random dream sequences, although - given how the film is structured - I'm at a loss to decide if any given scene is supposed to be a dream sequence.

Levana has plans for Anne's and Marc's baby, too, it seems. Something about possessing it and the end of the world. I think. That might just be a fake plan, though. Or not. Other stuff happens. Caroline Munro in her "big hair, unwilling to act, keep me away from the tanning bed, please" phase plays an actress sleeping with the film's scriptwriter who wants Anne's role. Cozzi lets the movie's camera leer on her legs so often even I'm getting uncomfortable with it. Brett Halsey appears as a producer sitting in a wheel chair, glaring angrily and demanding TOTAL COMMITMENT. Anne talks to the fairy girl that lives in her TV (or in her head; matters are confused, and so am I). Hearts explode. Cartoon lightning is shot from hands. Even weirder shit happens. Shots of something that might be a mouldering plastic doll appear. There's some sort of plot twist about mutants as not seen in the X-Men. And of course, any horror film containing a baby must end with the classic "baby with glowing eyes" shot.

Usually, when I sit down to watch a film directed by Luigi Cozzi, I expect one part shoddy directing and one part refined boredom, so the full-grown, random what-the-hell-is-this-ness of Il Gatto Negro (or whatever the film's title is supposed to be) hit me as a complete surprise. Starting with the insanely ambitious ploy to rip-off Argento's Suspiria and his and Lamberto Bava's Demoni and Poe's Black Cat in a single film without said film having anything to do with its supposed predecessors apart from stealing parts of their soundtracks, Cozzi uses every technique from the handbook  of Italian exploitation cinema: there's the crude yet hilarious dialogue, acting perpetually swinging between sleepwalking and hysteria, the chopped editing that again and again does counterintuitive stuff like intercutting random (and I mean random) shots of houses while people inside those houses are having a conversation for no good reason at all, the special effects of the rubbery yet gooey kind, and plotting so wavering and random one can't help but imagine someone playing scene roulette. Or, as it might be, the film being completely improvised. Obviously, on any sane level, Demons 6 is an abomination barely fit to even be called a feature film. On a less sane level, it's perhaps one of the most successful films I've ever had the honour to experience.

What makes De Profundis such a great success - at least, if you measure a movie's success by the number of times it drives you into fits of giggling and the shouting of "what the fuck!?" - I might also have thought of throwing food at the screen just for the love of it - is how completely it gives itself over to being a structureless mess consisting of one weird-out moment after the other. There's not a single second in the film's running time to suggest Cozzi was trying to tell a story, or make what boring people call "a proper movie", not even an illogical or boring one. Instead, narrative logic gives way to whatever the hell Cozzi ate when he wrote the script (apple pie?). Coherence has left the building long ago; viewers are left in a state of confusion and with a blissed-out feeling only a very few films can produce.


And here I always thought Luigi Cozzi was a bit of a bore; in truth, all the boredom of his other movies was only proof of a director saving his true powers for a magnum opus that would show humanity a) the blind idiot god at the centre of the universe b) what a man can create when he just lets go of all his mental faculties c) the last fanfare for the era of Italian movies that were more dream-like than dreams themselves.

On WTF: Paganini Horror (1989)

After the excitement Luigi Cozzi's Il gatto nero provided me with, it was only a question of time until I'd revisit the director.

Turns out the director's Paganini Horror is nearly as glorious as the other film. Listen to me swoon in my weekly appearance on WTF-Film.com.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: luigi cozzi,reviews,horror,wtf,daria nicolodi,jasmine maimone,maria cristina mastrangeli,donald pleasence,other places

On WTF: Il Gatto Nero/Demons 6/De Profundis (1989? 1991?)

Did you know that La Terza Madre isn't the first third part of Dario Argento's Mothers Trilogy? And that the first third part was directed by Luigi Cozzi and is also a Poe adaptation and the sixth part of the Demons movies? And would you expect that not to be the most insane aspect of the resulting movie? Read my madly excited rambles about the film on WTF-Film!

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,horror,reviews,other places,wtf,luigi cozzi,florence guerin,urbano barberini,caroline munro,brett halsey