Director: Bitto Albertini
Writer: John Thomas
From: Sci-Fi Invasion
A princess and captain, fleeing a despotic intergalactic warlord, set off across the galaxy to rally forces to their side. They land on a primitive planet with strange customs, a planet called… Earth?
A film that’s more interesting for its production choices rather than any narrative or creative element. It’s a post-Star Wars, post-Battlestar Italian sci-fi cheepy, and even that sets the bar too high. I’ve just watched it, but I’ve already forgotten the names of the characters. Apparently those names weren’t particularly important, though since even IMDB doesn’t list all the actors or give the characters’ full names.
Anyway, the story is this peaceful group of people is being threatened by an evil galactic overlord. He looks like George Clinton with a trimmed and glitter-bombed beard. While it’s easy to read racial overtones into the evil black villain attacking the peaceful white people, it comes across more as the Mothership delivering funk to a planet that keeps insisting on broadcasting Pat Boone.
As our funk overlord blows up the planet and all the people, a Princess and a Captain escape to contact the other kings of the galaxy to unite against the galactic overlord. Their ship gets damaged in the escape and they end up landing on a planet unlike any they’ve seen before. It’s all green and blue and… it’s Earth. This comes up later, but it’s Earth. When the funk overlord tracks them there, he says it’s Earth and that it destroyed itself centuries before in a nuclear war. [psst! Do you get the subtext? It’s the text]
So the pair land on Earth to repair their ship and return to their mission of uniting forces against the funk. Only they run into the primitive people of Earth, amaze and terrify them with alien technology, and get fascinated by water. Yeah. Water. The Princess had read about it, but never encountered it.
The pair get captured, sentenced to death, then forgiven when the Captain saves a child. They get introduced to sex by the people, cause apparently they don’t have that elsewhere in the universe, and spend the rest of the movie trying to figure that out. I mean, “erotici” is in the original title. What did you think the movie was going to be about? Sure, they’re on a mission to defeat intergalactic tyranny, but, hey, humpy-humpy.
Funklord returns, captures them, but is destroyed by the powers granted to them by sex. All the peoples trapped under his funky thumb are freed and the pair return to Earth to screw as many people as they possibly can. THE END.
I mean, if you want Star Wars but more fucky, fill your boots. Just do it, though. Don’t go through all the contortions of getting there. You have the funk overlord, the chase across the galaxy, crashing on a planet, and then it all grinds to a halt. Suddenly the characters aren’t concerned with saving their planet or people, finding the other kings, or even repairing their ship. Instead, they’re amazed by water and have to learn what kissing is. It’s real stupid.
On top of that, a lot of the movie looks familiar because all the model and spaceship shots were taken from Starcrash. You may be familiar with that movie from season 11 of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s not a great flick.
So you have a sci-fi movie that’s ripping off a sci-fi movie that itself is a rip-off of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. AND is trying to be a softcore porno.
How can I not recommend a trainwreck like this?
Well, part of the reason is that it’s pretty boring. Not only do the various plots get introduced and dropped, the movie keeps throwing in details for no apparent reason. We randomly learn in the middle of the movie that the Princess and Captain are immortal, but will lose their immortality once they taste the pleasures of living. You could say there’s an Adam and Eve allegory at play there, but nothing’s done with it, and “the pleasures of living” include eating and drinking. These interstellar immortals literally don’t know how food works and you can bet that's played for laughs!
It turns out, though, that it’s not sex or eating that will cost them their immortality—indeed, it’s the fucking that makes them truly super-powered—but living outside the confederation of galaxies that they were a part of. If they don’t go back to Earth, which is some mix of stone-age and ancient Greek culture, they can live forever. But they still go back. Because reasons?
By the way, the superpowers they get from sex come up at the very end. Lord Funk of the Funk Reich claims the Princess as his slave. She kisses him and the Captain, somehow, is able to shoot lasers from his eyes and the combination turns Emperor Funk into a pile of ash.
What even is this?
While it’d probably be great fun to riff and watch with others, solo, it’s a confusing sci-fi rip-off of a rip-off that decides to almost try to be a softcore movie in its final third. The insistence upon the lead pair’s innocence and ignorance is immediately tiring and just makes you wonder how easily distracted they’re supposed to be. This can be a lot of fun if you have the right people with you, otherwise give it a pass.
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