Battle Beyond The Stars (1980)

Let's talk for a moment about how not to pull off an evil scheme. In 1980, Nick Perry had been the host of the nightly Pennsylvania Lottery drawing for three years on WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Along with the Maragos brothers, Peter and Jack, with whom Perry was in the vending business, Perry hatched a plot to exchange the official lottery balls for ping pong balls, all of which were weighted with the exception of the numbers 4 and 6. Ergo, the winning numbers would have to be any of eight combinations of the two numbers. On the evening of April 24, 1980, the winning number for the lottery was 666 (yes, really). This, of course, set officials' and authorities' bullshit-meters into the red. 

On the day of the drawing, the Brothers Maragos (proving themselves to be more like the Brothers Malachi than anything else) traveled around Pennsylvania, buying lottery tickets using the eight number combinations. At one of the ticket sellers' establishments, one of the brothers made a phone call and even held the receiver up, so the listener could hear the sound of the tickets being printed. Naturally, this call was traced back to the studio where the drawing was shot. Needless to say, the three were caught and Perry served time after the Maragos brothers testified against him. Even if the winning number wasn't statistically highly improbable, the fact that these three yutzes ran around, all but announcing their scheme (and sometimes flat-out announcing it) insured its eventual failure. So when Sador's (John Saxon) holographic head appears over the populace of the planet Akir in Jimmy T Murakami's Battle Beyond The Stars, you just know he's going down for the count. After all, according to Aleister Crowley, "It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth."

Anyway, after the aforementioned giant Oz-esque head appears to the Akira, Sandor orders his minions to open fire just to keep the natives on their toes. The vile warlord (is there any other kind?) declares he will return for the planet's crops in seven days time. Young Shad (Richard Thomas) affirms to the people's council that he will go into space and find warriors who will fight Sandor on behalf of the Akira. Setting off aboard the sentient starship, Nell (voiced by Lynn Carlin), Shad wends through the universe assembling a ragtag team of spacefarers which winds up numbering seven (there's that pesky number again). But can even the likes of Gelt (Robert Vaughn), Space Cowboy (George Peppard), and Saint-Exmin of the Valkyrie (Sybil Danning) stand up to Sandor's ultimate weapon, the Stellar Converter? What do you think?

After Star Wars sealed the deal on summer blockbusters begun in 1975 with JAWS, Science Fiction became big business in Hollywood (to be certain, it had been so beforehand as well, but normally this sort of genre picture was more often than not the province of the B-movie producers of the day). It also didn't hurt any when The Empire Strikes Back was released earlier in 1980 and reinforced the franchise's stranglehold on the youth of the day's disposable income. And so it was that Roger Corman got in on the act, but just as Lucas was influenced in his original movie by Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, Corman decided to borrow the plot structure of John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven, the American retelling of Kurosawa's superlative Seven Samurai. And just to be sure that gormless audiences wouldn't be able to tell the difference between his film and Kershner's (though I have yet to encounter anyone who ever mistook the two for each other), he also took elements from Lucas's original film and put his own twist on them. So, the Stellar Converter is like Murakami's Death Star. Shad visits a planet which mirrors the Mos Eisley cantina, but this one is scary and deep underground. The Akira create a series of precise canyons in their planet (like, say, the trench on a certain Death Star), but the fighting that takes place in this ditch is strictly on the ground level. None of the correlations are exactly direct, but they are just non-specific enough that the viewer gets the idea loud and clear. 

Along this same thought process, the filmmakers still use the Assemble The Team aspect of the Kurosawa/Sturges films, but not all of the characters remain true in spirit to their forebears. For example, Shad the boy farmer is now as much a fighter as any of the others (he is included in the seven and at least partly fulfills the Katsushiro Okamoto character). The lizard man Cayman (Morgan Woodward) has a personal grudge against Sandor and is aided by the Kelvins (Lawrence Steven Meyers and Lara Cody). Peppard's unlikely Space Cowboy (some people call him) is the Tanner/Katayama stand-in. The role of women is also far more prominent in this film with the inclusions of Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel) and Saint-Exmin. Of the two, Saint-Exmin is the more intriguing, because she not only partly fills the Kikuchiyo/Chico role of the brash, frank warrior, but she also is a character straight out of Norse mythology (the Valkyrie, of course, being the escorts of the worthy dead into Valhalla). It goes without saying that Vaughn is more or less reprising his role of Lee from the Sturges film, even sort of playing it as the same character years into the future (and in a galaxy far, far away). He has scads of money from the killings he has perpetrated (his name is even synonymous with money), but he seeks a place to hide out from the innumerable enemies he has amassed.

In essence though, Battle Beyond The Stars plays very much like an epic fable, and it is geared toward a family audience. Yet there are still exploitation aspects that the filmmakers threw in just to be sure and have some slight semblance of sleaze. Hence, we get a spaceship with boobies on the front. The planet where Gelt lives has such amenities as Dial-A-Drug and Dial-A-Date (the results of the latter proving especially dispiriting). Two of Sandor's cronies crash a wedding and kidnap the bride (Julia Duffy), who it is then heavily implied they rape. The very presence of Danning in skimpy outfits is enough to get any adolescent male's mind wondering about space exploration. There is even some mild gore when Sandor's sonic weapon makes its victims' ears bleed profusely. And yet, many of the story elements are depicted so lightly, so offhandedly, it detracts from the impact that the brave heroes' deaths have unlike in the Sturges/Kurosawa films. The film is still a fast, fun adventure romp, but compared to the films it's based on(perhaps unfairly, perhaps not, seeing as it's so heavily pervaded by them), this one's not going to touch you on the same core level. But have fun, anyway.

MVT: The special effects (especially those involving the spaceship shots) are highly effective and are on a level with the best Hollywood could put out on budgets much higher than the one for this film.

Make Or Break: The first shot in outer space displays the attention to detail, craft, and care that the filmmakers put into this film (or at the very least, its special effects). Despite the derivative nature of just about everything in it, the filmmakers still took their work seriously, and it shows.

Score: 7.25/10
 

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Damnation Alley (1977)

Up until recently, I have never owned a four-wheel drive vehicle. Funny thing that, since I live in a mountainous area with notoriously crappy winters (it's often said we only get two seasons, Winter and August). No, my first vehicles were of the big sedan style (one nicknamed the Deerslayer after nailing said animal on the way back to college the day after my twenty-first birthday and one nicknamed the Fenceslayer for equally calamitous [but far less hungover] reasons). But I have always wanted one of the many fantastic vehicles that cinema has given us over the years (a desire no doubt shared by many of you out there, gentle readers). Who wouldn't want to fly around town in the Batmobile (1966 version, please)? Your daily commute would be ten times more enjoyable, I'd wager, if you owned a Land Speeder (never mind the hovercraft you could build yourself using old vacuum cleaner parts). If I ever learned to ride a motorcycle, I'd give my eyeteeth (okay, maybe your eyeteeth) for Kaneda's gorgeous bike from Akira. But if it's power and versatility you desire, look no further than the Landmaster, as designed by Major Eugene Denton (George Peppard) in Jack Smight's Damnation Alley (aka Survival Run). Me? I had to content myself with a Jeep. 

Major Denton and fellow soldier, Tanner (Jan-Michael Vincent) work at a missile base, where they are the guys in charge of firing The Big One. When incoming missiles are detected over American air space, the men do their duty, but sixty percent of the enemy rockets still hit their mark. The Earth's axis is thrown off, and the planet's environment turns to shit (as evidenced by the perpetual light show in the sky). Denton and Lieutenant Perry (Kip Niven) build two Landmasters in an effort to go cross-country to Albany, where radio signals have been detected. But after their missile base meets with an ignominious end (damn bed-smokers), Denton recruits Tanner and Keegan (Paul Winfield), who have both decided to eschew the military lifestyle now that the planet is seemingly doomed, to join in the quest. To reach their goal however, the quartet must first negotiate what Denton has dubbed "Damnation Alley."

The film, adapted from a novel by late science fiction and fantasy author Roger Zelazny, is first and foremost a Road Movie. That it is set in a Post-Apocalyptic milieu is almost tangential. The point of the film is the journey and the encounters that happen along the way. Like Stagecoach and so many before, the emphasis is on forward movement and what happens next. Unlike Ford's deservedly legendary Western, though, Damnation Alley never develops its characters for the most part, and a major portion of the objective of a Road Movie is the arc of its characters. The road (or dirt path or space flight or whatever) is only a metaphor which provides the characters seemingly transitory venues and obstacles by which they evolve. Keegan is only ever a non-conforming artist from the start of his journey to the end. Denton is a military man with a mind toward order and rules. By contrast, Tanner is a wild card who openly defies Denton at every opportunity, even though his disobedience is never proven to be the correct choice. By the film's end, they are essentially the same people. The trek has not changed them at their cores, and it takes away some of the resonance the film could have had.

This extends to the film's treatment of the military. We would expect Denton to be an overbearing, even brutal man whose tactics are not only misguided but outright perilous. Tanner, his opposite number, we expect to be the one whose unconventionality to be the key to successfully completing the mission. This is not so. The soldiers are good, competent, and even get the moral high ground at several points ("it doesn't mean you're right, and I'm wrong. It means [he's] dead."). In fact, it's the capricious actions of Tanner that land him in trouble more than anything Denton orders him to do. This is an intriguing aspect of the film, considering when it was made. Only a few years after the Watergate scandal and the end of the Vietnam War, the public's view of authority and the military was not exactly soaring. Yet, the filmmakers never overtly state that one side is superior to the other or the correct path to follow. Whether this was a conscious choice or simply the producers wanting to appeal to as broad an audience as possible without alienating either, I cannot say, though I personally would suspect the latter. The end product is too light in approach to suggest the creators wanted to inspire deep discussions (and yet, here I am).

The film also centers on the reformation of the family unit, and the attempts by the characters to reconnect to humanity in various ways. So, Denton becomes the "grandfather," Tanner the "son," Janice (Dominique Sanda) becomes the "wife" to Tanner, and Billy (Jackie Earle Haley) becomes the "son" of Tanner and Janice. While there are, of course, other characters, these are the four who constitute the film's focus, and though not formally a family, their interdependence emphasizes the theme of reconnection. In the worst of times, people will cling to the most tenuous of things to make themselves feel like they still exist, they still live and matter. Keegan paints his dwelling with a mural. In Las Vegas, the group happily plunk coins in the remaining one-armed bandits, and even though the thrill of gambling is hollow (money meaning nothing here), it still reconnects them to who they were (emphasized by the use of crowd sounds over this scene). Both Denton and Tanner want to teach Billy different things, not only so that he can help, but so that they can pass down knowledge to the next generation, to perpetuate the species. At a gas station, one of the Mountain Men (Robert Donner) wants to hear Janice play the piano. He needs to feel human again, even if he intends to commit some heinous acts in the immediate future.

The film is also biblical in several ways. There are floods that come up out of nowhere, mirroring the story of Noah's Ark. Billy gets the chance to act out the climactic showdown of the tale of David and Goliath. Las Vegas stands in for Sodom and Gomorrah, though Janice never turns into a pillar of salt (for good or ill). Regrettably, the film then culminates with a Deus Ex Machina that takes much of the steam out of the pilgrimage that has come before, and feels far too neat and easy to be plausible. And that's the thing about Damnation Alley; it poses some interesting questions and sets up some interesting relationships and then leaves them completely uncomplicated. Despite this striving for a surface-only experience, the movie still manages to be thoroughly entertaining, almost daring us to not ask any questions of it. I still did, but that's just me.

MVT: Peppard? Landmaster? Peppard? Landmaster? Since I already went on about vehicles enough in my introduction, I'm going to give my MVT to the late, great Mr. Peppard. I have been a huge fan of his, whether he was snarky insurance investigator Thomas Banacek, snarky Colonel-on-the-run Hannibal Smith, or any character in between. And as always, he puts his all into his performance and pulls out a likable character that could have easily been just another straitlaced, cantankerous career soldier.

Make Or Break: The instant that the Landmasters roll out, your first thought has nothing to do with whether or not these things would actually be practical. Your first thought is, "I want one." I still do.

Score: 7/10
 

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