Beast in Space

Relatively young and uncontrollably horny space fleet commander Captain Larry Madison (Karis) takes a break from seducing bar-girls and getting into drunken fistfights with rivals to actually do his job i.e. a space mission.

On the mission to an unknown world he particularly notices amongst his new crew is one Lt. Sondra Richardson (Sirpa Lane), (a woman who looks like Radha Mitchell with a hangover). He enjoyed a brief tryst with her after a bar pick-up and didn't call. Now things are awkward especially since they have to work together on a potentially dangerous mission.

In real space missions, crews train together for years and form bonds of professional trust which limit the possibility of one of them running into a casual encounter and having to get past personal stuff that has no place on a mission.

They are seldom captained by guys who get into drunken bar fights and use their status to pick up women or staffed with female crew who bed down with a potential crew-mate. But the crew seen here just meets and takes off together right after making introductions.

The captain's unprofessional adventures in bars have not only caught up with him as it relates to his work colleague. No sooner are they off into the cosmos than a ship with some of the guys he beat up in a bar attack the vessel and damage it to the point where it has to go on a unscheduled emergency detour to an uncharted planet.

On the planet they are hosted by a seemingly benevolent raconteur (Hundar) who treats them to a sumptuous dining experience after which they engage in frottage then full on coitus.

Low-budget sci-fi from around the same time like the infamous Inseminoid (1981) are similarly hastily assembled malignant crossbreeds of the respective Star Trek and Alien franchises.

You get the typical depiction of computerized instrumentation that the screen gave audiences of the time. Metallic boxes with lots of flashing lights and phony levers and gauges and instruments that look like they are doing something but are in fact just flashing on and off. The sets were less important than the acting.

But the inexplicable pornographic tangent this particular title goes on, while not unexpected given the opening scenes, does start rather abruptly and without much subtlety or proper pacing by showing the crew watching a couple of horses having sex and then begin touching themselves. Quite frankly it was more than the tackiness of it all that made me feel slightly nauseous.

I can only wonder if the actors knew they were going to be in a production with a pornographic tangent. The cast assembled here has people who were, in several notable cases, generally known for soft-core sex films even though this looks like, for the most part just typical b-movie sci-fi.

This cheesy slice of Italian B-movie schlock has all the production value and style of a trashy 80s sci-fi series rapidly approaching cancellation (think Buck Rogers in the 25th Century at the end of its second season), with cheap and nasty costumes, crappy set design, terrible special effects, two-dimensional comic-book heroes, dastardly villains and attractive women in sexy but impractical outfits. But where the titillation in a programme like Buck Rogers always ended with just a tantalising glimpse of cleavage or thigh, Beast in Space goes much further, punctuating its silly space fantasy action with bouts of porn, starting off soft-core, but eventually progressing to the harder stuff.

The risible plot sees Vassili Karis as starship captain Larry Madison, who leads a mission to the remote planet Lorigon where there reputedly exists a sizable deposit of the rare element Antalium. Once on the planet, Madison and his crew (three of whom are sexy blonde women) explore a castle where they are welcomed by the planet's ruler Onaph (Claudio Undari), who takes a keen interest in the female crew-members, particularly the insatiable Lt. Sondra Richardson (Sirpa Lane).

In the relaxing atmosphere of Onaph's castle, the crew begin to enjoy themselves, perhaps a little too much: after witnessing two horses mating in a stable, they begin to get fruity with each other and give in to their desires, participating in an orgiastic display of wanton carnal lust (phew!). Even Onaph joins in on the fun, revealing himself to be a well-endowed faun like creature and pursuing Sondra through the woods with the intent of getting busy. It's not long before the woods are alive with the sound of humping.

However, all is not as it seems: In reality, Onaph is the physical manifestation of a powerful supercomputer named Zocor, which protects its Antalium supply by controlling the minds of anyone who should visit the planet. Luckily, roguish merchant Juan Cardoso (Venantino Venantini), who is also after the valuable mineral, is immune to Zocor's mind control thanks to special tablets that cancel out the computer's hypnotic effect; after dosing up Madison and his crew (who actually seem grateful to be released from their endless ecstasy), Juan joins forces with them to destroy Zocor and steal its Antalium.

As a big fan of both garish disco-era sci-fi and exploitative Italian trash cinema, I found Beast in Space a rather enjoyable way to pass the time, the nutzoid script, naff set design, dreadful acting, gratuitous nookie, and blatant steals from Star Wars (check out the dreadful laser swords wielded by Zocor's golden robot guards) being just the sort of nonsense I look for in my Z-grade entertainment. Obviously, this kind of thing doesn't qualify for a ridiculously high rating, but I certainly had enough fun for it to warrant a 6/10.

Wow. Thanks to Severin Films & Ryko Distribution, fans of schlock Italian B grade genre cinema can finally get to revel in the supreme awfulness that is Alfonso Brescia's BEAST IN SPACE, the "adults only" capstone on his Italian STAR WARS ripoff epics: BATTLE OF THE STARS, COSMOS - BATTLE OF THE PLANETS, WAR OF THE ROBOTS and last but not least STAR ODYSSEY. And while they aren't particularly "good" movies they have a certain special something about them that fans of this kind of junk will feed on like a fat guy at Wendy's.

The premise behind the quintuplet of films is simple: Take the look of STAR WARS, cheapen it down to the production design standards of community theater, come up with four or five scripts that make provisions for recycling the same sets, costumes, props, actors, and special effects sequences (usually consisting of poorly made models being swung across a star field with odd sound effects), get Marcello Giombini to compose a couple hours of seemingly random yet listenable synthesizer music and audio washes, then edit the results together into segments of about 90 minutes, each with it's own title so that audiences know which installment they are watching. Presto.

BEAST IN SPACE can be properly referred to as the porno one, and does indeed exist in both standard and full-blown XXX versions that literally does go where no man has gone before. Even FLESH GORDON looks sophisticated compared to this lovable mess which exists not so much to be "enjoyed" as to be marveled at. You sort of wonder what the heck they were thinking, as the film apparently has no specific intended audience: Since the emphasis often revolves around space couples having space sex in their space beds the film is removed from the kind of juvenile dreck that excused the other four films from the "series". You can't just plop the kids down in front of this and let the laser beams and disco space costumes wile away a rainy afternoon. But since the production design is so schlocky and minimalist, grown-ups used to a higher layer of gloss on their disco era science fiction craptaculars will find the results laughable at best.

So that leaves us with the porn, which manages to be even less erotic than such contemporaneous Italian excesses as "Emanuelle in America" or everybody's favorite, PORNO HOLOCAUST, which were at least sick enough to engender a bad laugh every once in a while, and which are about the only things that BEAST IN SPACE can be accurately compared to. Other than it's namesake of course, Walerian Borowczyk's THE BEAST, which apparently was part of the inspiration for the film since we are likewise treated to extended sequences that feature horses copulating. Gee.

Just how such a spectacle is worked into an ultra low budget Italian STAR WARS ripoff is just something you'll have to figure out for yourself -- I am more interested in the "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" era disco space fashions, the clunky production design, the absolutely meaningless plotting and over-use of blended color schemes. These films exist as sort of visceral experiences to be witnessed rather than discreet stories to be digested, and if anything can be said about the new DVD versions is that they look spectacular. ALL of the Alfonso Brescia STAR WARS ripoffs deserve this kind of treatment, and it is perhaps a sad testament to the state of today's DVD industry that the only one some reputable company thought worthy of restoring to it's anamorphic glory is the one with the tits.

If anything here is yet another culmination of the Italian B grade genre cinema years when they pulled out all the stops of pretending to be anything but sex films and went straight for the gutter. The results will be amusingly refreshing to any fan of European cult cinema, though the non initiated might want to think about trying these out as a rental first. Bring your own towel.

4/10

Good movie, very 70s, you can not expect much from a film like this,, Sirpa Lane is an actress of erotic films, a nice body but nothing exceptional savant to a pornographic actress from the body disappears, but the '70s were characterized a small breasts and a simple eroticism. Not demand a lot from these films are light years away from the movies today, the world has changed incredibly. The plot is simple and the actors not extraordinary. And the brunette actress has a single body, has one breast slightly bigger. Be satisfied. Papaya also is not great but at least these films have a certain charm ... Download them again but then again who knows what you pretend not to them.

A starship captain is sent on a mission to a distant planet to find a rare element called Antalium. He is accompanied by a team that includes a disproportionately high number of sexy women. When there they encounter Onaph, the planet's overlord, and his servants, all of whom resemble Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones. It seems that the planets true ruler though is a giant ancient computer.

But mostly it's about people having sex.

The Beast in Space is directed by Alfonso Brescia who seems to have been a bit of a specialist in cheap Star Wars clones, such as War of the Robots (of which I am sure it shares some footage, specifically the scenes of the Brian Joneses fighting with laser swords). This one is another in this genre, except it is a porn version. George Lucas certainly never went here before. It stars vixen Sirpa Lane, who also starred in Joe D'Amato's ultra-trashy Love Goddess of the Cannibals. This one is quite good fun for the most part but it does do that thing that most of these sexploitation films from the era do and that is that it features seemingly endless soft-core fumbles that get tedious quite quick. Bizarrely, you actually want more of the actual plot. Having said all that, this one really goes into hyper-drive with the scene where Onaph reveals himself to be a space-satyr with an enormous erect penis. He then engages in an animalistic sex scene with Shirpa Lane. It's certainly memorable and it's what ultimately sets the film apart from others of its genre.