"We must be very careful - we are in the evil Count's domain!"
Finally! The DVD release of Starcrash, one of my all-time favourite movies (now available from just about any online outlet)! Okay, it's not the best movie ever made, and yes, it does have D*v*d H*ss*lh*ff in it, but Caroline Munro looks stunning in this, especially in the prison and Amazon planet sequences, and that is what really matters.
The movie itself isn't entirely a Star Wars rip-off, although there is an evil empire, a missing member of a royal family, some not entirely law-abiding heroes (substitute Stella Star for Han Solo) and a valiant final battle with the enemy centred around their space station. There's a "heroic" robot, but Robot El kicks the ass of Threepio and Artoo - and he delivers one of the best lines in the whole movie (the title of this post)...
...oh, okay - it's probably more Star Wars than it isn't, but there's an endearing streak of Barbarella in it. It could probably do more with that, and I don't know if they do that in any of the "sequels", but as far as I'm concerned, if it doesn't say "Caroline Munro" on the tin, it simply isn't Starcrash! Anyway, back to the movie...
The performances aren't exactly first-class - even card-carrying thespian Christopher Plummer struggles with lines like "Imperial flagship, I command you to halt the flow of time!" - and the effects are pretty dire for even a film pre-Star Wars, such as stop-motion animation that would make the master Ray "Jason And The Argonauts" Harryhausen choke; the best you can expect from a low-ish budget Italian production. If you want a better Star Wars era space-opera, you should definitely check out Roger Corman's Battle Beyond The Stars (another big favourite of mine).
See Starcrash at least once. Don't expect a masterpiece, but if recent fare is anything to go by, sometimes you can "do more with less". Score: 10/10!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch this gem...