Star Odyssey.

Review #1080: Star Odyssey.

Cast: 
Yanti Somer (Irene), Gianni Garko (Dirk Laramie), Malisa Longo (Bridget), Chris Avram (Shawn), Ennio Balbo, Roberto Dell'Acqua (Norman), Aldo Amoroso Pioso, Nino Castelnuovo, and Gianfranca Dionisi. Directed by Alfonso Brescia.

Review: 
Sometimes you just need a bad flick to truly appreciate filmmaking and movies. What can you expect of a movie featuring hypnotism, stock footage, and an assortment of other bizarre images and actions? What can you expect when the film mangles its own title sequence with its listing of actors in alphabetical order that somehow goes wrong? Star Odyssey, known as Sette uomini d'oro nello spazio (or Seven Gold Men in Space) in its native land of Italy, was directed by Alfonso Brescia, who had made three other films revolving around sci-fi in the decade, such as Cosmos: War of the Planets (1977), Battle of the Stars (1978), and War of the Robots (1978). This happened to be released the same year as another Italian sci-fi flick, The Humanoid (#930), which I covered one year ago. It's funny that I mention that film, since I actually kind of got a kick out of that film, which had a sort of charm with its mishmash of ideas and quirky casting choices. The same cannot be said for this film, which suffers from an assortment of inept and super-cheap filmmaking along with terrible dialogue. You know you've hit your peak when you show footage of an actual junkyard, complete with a crushing of a car and the rescue of a robot (resembling ducks) from said junkyard as a plot point. To mention every odd thing that occurs in this film would be spoiling the "charm" in a viewer doing it themselves, but I can't really even say that seeing this film would be worth doing that task. Just imagine the kind of film that has "robot couple bickering" and editing as haphazard as a second grader's book report. It isn't so much a Star Wars ripoff as it is just something that sure likes to take inspiration with its special effects and space battle sequences, which go as well as you'd expect. The version I am watching is the 103-minute version, which is longer than the 88-minute Italian version, since I guess I really wanted to torture myself with a version that also is dubbed. The actors look like they're doing it just for the paycheck, with a few of these cast-mates having starred in the other films by Brescia, such as Somer (who did all four) and Longo. Hilariously, I couldn't even find a cast listing that had what character they were playing, so have fun with that, although the one with the mustache is pretty amusing. In any case, the dubbing isn't so terrible, minus the editing quirks that get in the way at times.

Roughly 30 minutes in, you get to see a boxing fight between an android and a human, which I suppose was done so you couldn't call every scene a rip-off of some other sci-fi products, because nobody, and I repeat, nobody, would ever come up with that. That, or an auction for the Earth. The film is terrible enough to where ripping it off would actually prove impossible nor advisable. The film was written by Brescia, Massimo Lo Jacono (who wrote science fiction and fantasy for Italian magazines), and Giacomo Mazzocchi, with Lo Jacono having written Cosmos: War of the Planets along with co-writing Battle of the Stars with Mazzocchi. This isn't even one of those films that was made by independent filmmakers with some sort of ambitious ideas, this was a studio production that manages to be utterly terrible and utterly embarrassing to watch, being made by people who wanted to make some sort of entertainment and ended up serving up something much weirder. They can't even make a plot that's actually comprehensible, where even the final line of the movie is cut off. You would actually be better served with watching a high school play adaptation of Star Wars than this dreck. Unlike something like Starcrash or Battle Beyond the Stars, this is a pile of junk that is best laughed at, where even one's own dubbing may very well make more sense than the actual final product. Oddly enough, this world cinema film is in the public domain, but I wouldn't recommend checking the cellar for this movie, where things like Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam (Turkish Star Wars) lurk. Sometimes you just have to make sure to not look too far into the b-movie abyss, which this is a part of.

May the 4th be with you, folks.

Overall, I give it 2 out of 10 stars.