Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Star Odyssey - 1979

 It's been a little while since I saw any of these weird Italian Star Wards rip offs, and one of them was on the boxset....so....yep here we go.

War of the Robots Battle Beyond the Stars War of the Planets and now this, I've watched all 4 of Alfonso Brecia's Star Wars rip offs. 

Thee movies trademark is their near incomprehensibility.  I was thinking when I was watching it of a great "pitch" or summation of the things with these movies:  This series of Star Wars rip offs might take the prize of "Films of which it matters the least if you know what is going on or not".  These flicks DO NOT matter if you're paying attention, if you know who character A B or C are, if you know who's fighting and why.  They just sort of exist, in a bizarre mishmash of color and sound.

I reread the Wikipedia article on the film just now, which goes through the plot.  Apparently, Earth is auctioned off to an evil space guy, who kidnaps earthlings as slaves.  The good guys get involved and they fight the space guy, and of course, they have force powers and glowing swords because remember after all we are ripping off Star Wars.

The 4 of these movies all have some things in common.  They all feature blond men who play robots running around willy nilly, the supposed Stormtroopers.  They all feature the Star Wars force power, which is usually unexplained.  They all feature robots, which are usually played for comedic effect just like in the regular Star Wars. 

The fun thing about these is usually what DOES work in this hodgepodge, and there's things here.  The effects are noticeably cheap, but some of them like the robot men and stuff look really cool.  The makeup and the look of everything is surprisingly entertaining as well.  

I saw a great summation on Wikipedia, which I'll second, which says it depends on your mood.  If you want to see what gets lost in translation and "what could have been" these are really interesting documents.  It also made me for one recognize just how much of a lightning in a bottle stroke of luck and genius Star Wars really was, because it contains a TON of stuff that doesn't make sense and isn't explained.

I give these generally like 2.5 stars.

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