Our first feature was the 1978 US-Italian film Starcrash. It was released in the US by Roger Corman's New World Pictures as The Adventures of Stella Star. I was pretty sure I hadn't seen it and after I was done I was even more sure. It's directed and written by Luigi Cozzi under the American sounding name Lewis Coates. That was very common for Italian films released in the US market. Cozzi got his start working with Dario Argento as a writer and assistant director. Luigi also wrote and directed the fairly poor Contamination and created the unique 1977 Italian version of the 1954 Godzilla. Here's what the Wikipedia says about that version:
In 1977, Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi released a modified and colorized version to magnetic band and sensurround theaters in Italy. Originally, Cozzi planned to re-release the original 1954 Godzilla without the Raymond Burr scenes but was unable to secure the rights from Toho and instead was sold the Americanized version of the film. Since the film was in black and white, regional distributors in Italy refused to release the film. In order to release the film, Cozzi hired Armando Valcauda to colorize the whole film frame by frame, using gels attached to the negative. The film's content was re-edited, removing several scenes and adding lots of stock footage of graphic death and destruction, which made it 105 minutes long. When the film was released in the cinemas, a special effect was added that shook the seats allowed each time that Godzilla took a step. Cozzi's film was a great success and received mixed to positive reviews, and some fans consider it superior to the American film of the 1957, even appearing on the cover of Fangoria no. 1. Most prints of the film were lost but some still exist. As of 2012[update], the Cozzi colorized version (also known as Cozzilla by fans) has only been released in Italy, and possibly Turkey.
Marjoe Gortner and Caroline Munroe are the main characters in Starcrash. They're smugglers and when we meet them they're on the run from the authorities. They find a small scout ship in trouble and get caught while they're stopped. They get thrown into jail only to be taken out when the missing scout ship is found to be part of a ship that the Emperor's son was commanding.
Christopher Plummer plays the Emperor and David Hasselhoff plays the son. The Emperor sends the two smugglers on a search and rescue mission with the two Imperial Space Police officers who captured them. One's a robot and the other a green skinned humanoid. The voice of the robot is provided by Hamilton Camp. The cast have some adventures as they search for the missing David. Eventually they find him and he's reunited with his grateful father. There's an evil count, played by Joe Spinell, who's gumming up the works with his plan to take over the galaxy. Now they've got to deal with that meglomaniacal asshole.
It's a poorly made low budget, everything and the kitchen sink, rehash of the highly popular and brand new Star Wars. There's a lot of other sci-fi and fantasy genre ripoffs influences on the film. The story elements are goofy, there's plenty of bad dialog to go along with the poor acting, the effects are average to poor. There's a bit of stop motion animation that wasn't too bad. The way the stop motion action is shot is highly reminiscent of Harryhausen films. The movie has become a bit of a cult favorite. You can catch it in the link above. Who knows, you might get a laugh or two out of it.
When you set yourself up to watch all the zombie films you can, sometimes you find you've gotten hold of something as rotten as the brain munchers in the movie. Stalled is supposed to be a zombie comedy but the comedy stalls out pretty much from the get go. Just saying get go out loud is funnier than the movie. It's a 2013 British movie about a maintenance man who goes into a woman's washroom to fix something. He's really an employee who's been fired. He's snuck back into the office to steal a bunch of charity auction money but his plan got interrupted by the arrival of zombies. We spend most of the 85 minute long movie in 2 of the three stalls in the woman's bathroom. Zombies come and go, escapes are tried, then the movie drags to a halt and flops about the floor waiting to die. It made that 85 minutes seem like nearly twice the running time. It's directed by Christian James and it's his second feature. He directed Freaked Out in 2004. Let's hope it's another 9 years before he works again. His other work were all shorts and Stalled has the problem of being a short that is 85 minutes long. The movie was written by Dan Palmer who also plays the main character. Dan co-wrote and acted in Freaked Out. I'm not planning to see that and I don't plan to see Stalled again either. It has some fans and the critics mentioned on the movie's Wikipedia page liked it quite a bit. It scores a 4.9 on the IMDb and that's way too high. I gave it a 2 just for making me sit through such a boring piece of shit.