Whenever the subject of the worst movie ever made comes up you can count on everyone to have an opinion. When that discussion happens Starcrash is the film we mention. Generally people are skeptical. Everyone has their beloved favorites. Sometimes we’d have to prove our point, we’d end up renting this puppy to show to friends, and by the third reel any doubters were staring agape at the colossal implosion this movie is. It was a Star Wars knock-off, obviously, filmed in Italy and Switzerland with Marjoe Gortner and Caroline Munro in the leads, and written and directed by Luigi Cozzi working under the pseudonym Lewis Coates.
Whenever we watch this with friends the question always arises: did they mean it to be a good film? Yes. They did. But no. It isn’t. Not even remotely close. And that’s what makes Starcrash such a treasure. Not merely that it’s terrible, but that the filmmakers wrapped the production feeling good about what they’d done. They thought they’d made an exciting, visually stunning, somewhat humorous smash hit. It’s the sincerity of ambition that makes Starcrash, in our opinion, the best bad movie of all time. Worse (better) than Roadhouse, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and all the usual contenders. While Cozzi does an okay job directing, his script and budget sabotage him at the outset.
We’ll give you an example (yes, it’s a spoiler, but in a movie like this it doesn’t matter). Near the finale, with no previous indication that such a power existed, Christopher Plummer, the emperor of the galaxy, bellows this command: “Imperial battleship—halt the flow of time!” You can’t just suddenly go deus ex machina like that. It would make as much sense if Plummer shouted: “Imperial battleship—make my enemies’ dicks fall off!” He explains in a smirky aside, “You know, my son, I wouldn’t be Emperor of the Galaxy if I didn’t have some powers at my disposal.” That’s amazing. And don’t even get us started about how Cozzi forgot that space is a vacuum.
Get some friends over, get some booze flowing, get Starcrash rolling, and see if watching Gortner and Munro ham it up across a Christmas lighted galaxy isn’t one of the best movie nights you’ve ever had. One thing that isn’t terrible about it, at least, is the U.S. promo art by John Solie you see above and below. The international posters are nice too, though we don’t know if they were painted by Solie. We’ll show you those later. In the meantime you can see another beautiful Solie effort here. Since Starcrash was Italian made it premiered in Italy and West Germany before reaching the U.S. today in 1979.
This is not a light saber.
This is not like Princess Leia’s hologram.
He in no way resembles Darth Vader.
But to be fair, motifs in sci-fi repeat. In a universe of ideas, writers for some reason tend to think of the same stuff. Below are aspects of Starcrash that—suspiciously?—recurred in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back.
Han Solo’s deep freeze in carbonite in no way resembles this.
Princess Leia’s slave costume is not similar to this at all.
The ice planet Hoth is near here, but is a totally different planet.
And below are more production photos from the film. If these don’t make you want to watch it, well, you probably don’t have a pulse. Or possibly you just have good taste and think life’s too short to watch terrible films. Either way.
