Monday Movie: Battle Beyond the Stars, by Kyle Anderson

Every Monday, we’ll highlight a piece of writing from our vaults. This review of Battle Beyond the Stars originally ran as a home video review.

There’s a certain art to making low-budget films.  It’s very easy to not know what you’re doing and make utter garbage, but occasionally something remarkably enjoyable can come out of it.  Roger Corman has made a very long and lucrative career of straddling the line between sucky and sublime by producing exploitation gems like Death Race 2000 and the original Little Shop of Horrors.  Today he produces a lot of those laughable SyFy (nee, Sci-Fi) Channel outings such as Dinocroc, Supergator, Dinocroc vs. Supergator, and the nefarious Sharktopus. However, in the late 1970s, to try to capitalize on the public’s love of Star Wars, Roger Corman funded his most ambitious and most expensive to date, the sweeping space opera, Battle Beyond the Stars.  Costing somewhere between $2 and $3.5 Million, depending on which report you read, Battle Beyond the Stars was Corman’s unabashed attempt to cash-in on George Lucas’ success by making what he described as “The Seven Samurai in outer space.”The quiet farming planet of Akir (a none-too-subtle homage to Akira Kurosawa) is suddenly under siege by the evil conqueror Sador (John Saxon), a villain who tries to achieve immortality by harvesting body parts from other species and grafting them onto himself time and again.  He tells the peaceful Akira that they have one week to agree to his terms or the entire planet will be obliterated by his Stellar Converter, a beam powerful enough to make a planet go supernova.  As Akir has no weapons or people who know how to use them, one brave young boy, Shad (Richard Thomas), volunteers to go out into the cosmos and find some help.  He gets aboard Nell, the living ship that resembles the form of a human female (there are even breasts on it…seriously) and the two go off to find help.Shad’s first stop is to a space station to get weapons from brilliant Dr. Hephaestus only to find that he’s now just a head attached to machinery and the base is completely populated by androids.  The doctor wants Shad to marry his beautiful daughter Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel), who is in charge of keeping the androids running smoothly. While this doesn’t seem like too bad a prospect, Shad does insist on leaving to save his people and persuades Nanelia to come with him. Together they recruit a ragtag bunch from all over the universe including the universe’s most famous, and most wanted, assassin (Robert Vaughn), a busty, war-hungry Valkyrie (Sybil Danning), a reptilian smuggler (Morgan Woodward), and a space cowboy named, fittingly, Space Cowboy (George Peppard). Together, the ships all return to Akir to aid the poor people and stop Sador once and for all.It’s an incredibly simple story, in fact one that’s been told several times, but for within its basic frame there’s room for some fun and interesting characters and adventures.  I have a very warm place in my heart for B-movie science fiction so I was likely to enjoy Battle Beyond the Stars anyway, but I was really surprised at how much I liked it.  It’s a script that doesn’t take itself too seriously and the cast has their tongue planted firmly in their cheeks the whole time. They all know what kind of movie they’re making and they’re having fun.  There are a number of references to other movies peppered throughout, not the least of which is Robert Vaughn playing a futuristic version of the character he played in The Magnificent Seven, another film based on Kurosawa’s epic.Corman was a master of getting new and untested talent together to work on his films on the cheap and this film is a pinnacle.  Directing the film was Jimmy T. Murakami, who had never directed before but had been an animator and art director.  The script was written by John Sayles, the score was composed by a very young James Horner, and the art director/special effects supervisor was none other than the director of Piranha, James Cameron, whose contribution cannot be overstated. A huge part of why the film works is the look of it.  The special effects shots, comprised of models in the same vein as Star Wars, look spectacular and the only way you’d tell it was a low-budget affair is by counting the number of times shots are repeated (some up to five times).  The sets and costumes are similarly very rich and lived in and you don’t really notice that it’s basically just egg and milk crates glued to the wall.  Cameron and co get the most out of the very limited funds they had and create effects that, I think, still hold up today.Where the film falters is, interestingly, in its brevity. It’s a brisk 104 minutes and for a movie that introduces so many characters, they aren’t really given a chance to grow like they should.  And when each of the mercenaries meets their inevitable end, they all seem to happen in pretty rapid succession and not for any particular reason.  This might have to do with Sayle’s original script being 165 pages and having to scale it back to fit the budget. These things aside, Battle Beyond the Stars is an immensely fun B picture and one that deserves the attention that a 30th Anniversary DVD might bring.  And in case you’re interested, Roger Corman’s $3-ish Million investment earned just over $14 Million domestically. Not too shabby.