I'll Have a Blue Harvest Without You...

Note: Writer Mike White, who is the editor and a contributor to the book "Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection," will appear at the B-Movie Celebration in the Historic Artcraft Theatre (57 N. Main St.) in Franklin, In Sept. 24-26, signing copies of his book.

In honor of the B-Movie Celebration, Mike wrote the following piece on late 1970s Star Wars rip-offs for The Film Yap.

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While Star Wars isn’t the most original film itself—based heavily on Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and John Ford’s The Searchers—it tapped into the Jungian collective unconscious and trod ground defined in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. From there, the film became something of a cinematic sandbox from which elements were openly pilfered by filmmakers far and wide. The open desert, the kidnapped princess, the masked villain, the larger-than-life creature, the cute sidekick, the bar full of strange creatures—all of these archetypes were reworked by Lucas and subsequently reappeared in over a half dozen rip-off films (and countless parodies).

Star Babe

Not surprisingly, it was the porn industry who first cashed in on Star Wars phenomenon. Known for quickie knockoffs of current hits, Star Babe was helmed by Anne Perry-Rhine and stars a trio of comely lasses—Star Babe, Milky Way, and Twinkle Toes—as members of the United World Space Agency. They’re on a mission to find secret plans for a weapon that could destroy the Earth. This takes them through a universe comprised of old film reels from a high school astronomy class painfully narrated by Star Babe. Between these clips, there’s a great deal of fellatio with guys wearing questionable costumes boasting human genitalia and annoying celebrity-imitation voiceovers (W.C. Fields, Richard Nixon, etc.). Picking up these aliens at The Anus Bar, Star Babe discovers the secret plans, while Twinkle Toes is kidnapped by a couple of guys—one wearing a bed sheet and Storm Trooper mask, the other sporting a Darth Vader knockoff ensemble.

While Darth Vadar and his minion are cleverly defeated by Loogie, a guy in an ape suit, the gals manage to take out the secret weapon—a giant phallus that shoots sperm missiles. Star Babe took the idea of an interplanetary cantina, secret plans, and Darth Vadar for this hackneyed no-budget flick. Otherwise, this costume drama is purely a by-the-numbers skin flick that doesn’t boldly go into any new or interesting sexual frontiers.

The Tramps in Planet Wars

of a long series of films starring the Trapalhões, a Brazilian musical comedy troupe, Os Trapalhões na Guerra dos Planetas/The Trapalhões in Planet Wars has the group helping Prince Flick (Pedro Aguinaga) find the other half of a brain computer to defeat the evil Zuco (Carlos Kurt wearing a Darth Vadar-meets-Leatherface outfit) and retrieve Princess Mirna (Maria Cristina Nunes). They’re helped by Flick’s copilot Bonzo (7’2” basketball star Emil Assad Rached, looking like Jojo the Dog-faced Boy) as they fight giant spiders, invisible attackers, and Tusken Raiders.

Feeling like a long episode of Sid and Marty Kroft’s Far Out Space Nuts, the movie is definitely a product of its age. More than just ripping off the general plot and characters of Star Wars, the obligatory cantina scene takes place on a soundstage where it looks like a variety show might break out at any moment. While disco dancing with aliens, Luke Skywalker stand-in Flick does some awesome karate against his foes.

This shot-on-video epic looks like it was made by a group of junior high students learning their way around cast-off cable access equipment. Utilizing fast motion, repeated shots, backwards footage, incredibly bad chromakey effects, and slide whistles galore, these nasty gimmicks only emphasize how painfully poor the antics of the Trapalhões translate into English. Acting like a cross between the Monkees and the Three Stooges, the Trapalhões’s broad comedy probably appeals to preschoolers or dorm room pot smokers.

War in Space

Released in 1977, Jun Fukuda’s Wakusei Daisenso/War in Space. is more closely related to Ishiro Honda’s Uchu Daisenso/Battle in Outer Space than to George Lucas’s film. In Wakusei Daisenso, a team of United Nations astronauts climb aboard the Gohten and head to Venus to rescue June (Yûko Asano), who’s been outfitted in a pair of leather panties and bustier while held captive by self-proclaimed Emperor of the Galaxy Commander Hell and his oversized wooly space demon. With his green skin and Centurion helmet, Hell is a dead ringer for Marvin the Martian, and proves to be about as much of a threat (even without a Uranium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator). Apart from the horned, axe-wielding creature that might be mistaken for a Wookiee at fifty paces (and one character bemoaning, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”) the similarities between Wakusei Daisenso and Star Wars are tenuous at best.

The same can nearly be said about the 1978 Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale) film Uchu Kara No Messeji/Message from Space. Closer to Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, the hapless Jillucians are suppressed by the steel-skinned Gavanas. In a desperate bid, eight magical walnuts (!) are cast into space to seek out a group of heroes that might save the peaceful aliens. The walnuts are found by a group of annoying twenty-somethings and General Garuda (Vic Morrow)—a drunken soldier with an unnatural affinity for robots.

After some painfully tedious longueurs, including a hunt for space fireflies, the movie seems to reset itself with the rediscovery of the walnuts, as if the filmmakers had been so bored with their own film that they had forgotten the earlier scenes. Things finally get in gear over an hour into the proceedings with the introduction of Prince Hans (Sonny Chiba). He’s got an acorn around his neck and an axe to grind with Gavanas leader Rockseia XLL (Mikio Narita).

Apart from General Garuda’s robot pal, Beba, and a spaceflight down a narrow passage to destroy the Gavanas’s power source (which, in all fairness, looks like the finale of Return of the Jedi), the likenesses between Message from Space and Star Wars generally end at the opening credits.

Star Crash

For the production of Luigi Cozzi’s 1978 film Starcrash, more money was spent on eye makeup than for special effects. The film’s protagonist, Stella Star (Caroline Munro) wears gobs of mascara and not much else. And in each scene, she’s wearing a new collection of not much else. She and her navigator, Akton (Marjoe Gortner), are recruited by The Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe (a slumming Christopher Plummer) to find the phantom planet of evil Count Zarth Arn (an overdubbed Joe Spinell stuffed into an unflattering outfit) and the weapon he’s created that could destroy worlds. Accompanying Star and Aktor are the green-skinned Thor (Robert Tessier) and annoying southern-fried robot Elle (Hamilton Camp).

The troupe encounters a wide array of improbable hazards from Amazon warriors to Troglodytes to stop-animation automatons that would make Ray Harryhausen snort and say, “How cheesy!” They narrowly escape each tribulation with a lot of help from Akton’s spiritual attenuation and his light saber—er, laser sword. They also get aid in the last act of the film from the Emperor’s son, Simon (David Hasselhoff).

With its obtuse dialogue, knockoff plot, and poor special effects Starcrash has been likened to Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, for good reason.

The Humanoid

The following year, the Italians would strike again with another Star Wars rip off, L’Umanoide/The Humanoid. Directed by Aldo Lado (under the name George B. Lewis), the obligatory opening scroll states, “Metropolis, known long ago as planet Earth, now faces its gravest hour. Lord Graal has just escaped from the prison satellite where his brother, ruler of the peaceful galactic democracy has exiled him. Malevolent and power-hungry, Graal has plans of vengeance that might forever alter the destiny of mankind.”

Wearing a ridiculous Darth Vadar helmet aboard his Star Destroyer ship, Graal (Ivan Rassimov) is but one of a trio of baddies that also includes Lady Agatha (Barbara Bach in cleavage-focused garb) and Dr. Kraspin (Arthur Kennedy). Kraspin is a mad scientist who has kept Lady Agatha young via a contraption that sucks the life essence out of young topless girls. With a supply of Kappa Element, he’s promised to make an army of zombie-like humanoids for Graal to use against the peaceful Metropolans and their leader, Great Brother (Massimo Serato). Kraspin is obsessed with one Metropolan in particular: Barbara Gibson (Corinne Clery), his former assistant. He takes great pleasure in saying her name, Barbara Gibson, more times than necessary, and has his first humanoid go after her even before Great Brother.

Minding his own business, the cocky pilot Golob (Richard Kiel) and his cute robotic dog sidekick, Kip, find themselves on the deserted landscape of Metropolis. “Just the human I need,” says Kraspin before bombing the gigantic Golob with Kappatron bomb, which converts him into a beardless killing machine. He’s only stopped by Tom Tom (Marco Yeh), a prepubescent mystic who dresses like Luke Skywalker and communes with spirit guides in the desert.

Eventually Barbara Gibson is captured by the forces of evil. While the leaders of Metropolis wait in their “Moon of Yavin” control center, Golob, Tom Tom, and the drably heroic Nick (Leonard Mann) venture to save Barbara Gibson and retrieve the Kappa Element. Is there any doubt they’ll succeed after a series of swashbuckling fights through the halls of Graal’s lair?

The Humanoid is the most like Star Wars in its reuse of characters. Golob is Chewbacca, Kip is R2-D2, Nick is Luke Skywalker, Tom Tom is a pint-sized Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Barbara Gibson is Princess Leia. The focus on Golob as the hero and the addition of some T&A makes The Humanoid one of the few satisfying Star Wars clones.

The Man who Saved the World

The most blatant of the Star Wars rip offs, Çetin Inanç’s work actually uses clips from Lucas’s film in the opening sequence of Dünyayi kurtaran adam/The Man Who Saves the World. The clips are run forwards, backwards, and even upside down as they’re intercut with shot of our heroes Murat (Cüneyt Arkin) and Ali (Aytekin Akkaya)—two great Turk warriors—protecting the Earth. Strangely, Murat and Ali seem to be piloting TIE Fighters and shoot down X-Wings with glee!

The longwinded voiceover narration posits that the Earth has broken apart but now is protected by a mental force field, showing how powerful the minds of men can be. Somehow, Murat and Ali end up on one of these old chunks of Earth after their battle. Here they find that things are being run by an evil magician who wears a cardboard mask. He has an endless horde of skeleton horseback riders, red carpet monsters, and mummies. All of these Murat and Ali fight, with explosive results.

The Man Who Saves the World is bottom-barrel filmmaking at its best. There’s scads of stock footage, pilfered soundtracks (action sequences are usually set to the themes from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flash Gordon, or both), and truly bizarre plot devices such as a plywood sword and golden brain. While the filmmaking prowess of Çetin Inanç can often leave viewers wondering how he even managed to take the lens cap off the camera, it’s the editing that is truly astounding. It’s as if someone took an early version of the film and threw it into a blender before final release.

By 1982 the steam had gone out of the once-thriving Turkish film market. Known for his stuntwork and physical prowess, writer and star Cüneyt Arkin looked about as run-down as the cinema he represented. Despite his skillful use of hidden trampolines and kung fu, The Man Who Saves the World is jaw-droppingly awful, to the point of being bizarrely delightful. The recent addition of subtitles to some DVD bootlegs of the movie only adds to the confused charm of this cinematic refuse.

Sex Wars

The verbose Brinker Duo (Paul Thomas) and his seldom seen sidekick Mark Starkiller (Richard Pacheco) are two down-on-their-luck losers who can’t even afford to pay for intergalactic nookie. At the local pub, our heroes come across Princess Layme (Robin Cannes) who tries to hire them to help find her sister, Princess Orgasmo. This quest would take them into the Tyros (in the region of Lesbos)—a veritable Bermuda Triangle of space, as the Orson Wellesian narrator informs us. Being chickenshits, our heroes decline the offer until Princess Layme boozes, screws, and shanghais the pair.

The merry band’s ship is drawn to a planet courtesy of a tractor beam and some cheap model effects. Once landed, they find themselves the prisoners of Lord Balthazar (Howard Darkley), a limbless, gold-skinned pervert who controls the minds—and bodies—of everyone he’s captured. In a display of his power, we see a hapless spaceship commander (Billy Dee) being molested by three vixens and Princess Orgasmo. The scene is narrated by a breathy female computer voice that chants, “You are required to concentrate on elongation” without cessation.

After a run-in with a couple of Asian gals in whiteface, Brinker and his cronies devise a plan to overthrow their captor. The plan seems to consist of Princess Layme and Princess Orgasmo making hot monkey love in front of the practically drooling Balthazar while Brinker and Mark search for the source of Balthazar’s power. Even this version of Star Wars isn’t free of incestuous themes.

Other parallels between Sex Wars and Star Wars include a flatulent robot named 4Q (a joke name recycled from Hardware Wars) and an over-extended pair of cantina sequences filled with lots of weird creatures. However, the film’s narrative shares more elements with the old Star Trek episode, “The Return of the Archons,” than Star Wars.

Epilogue

Perhaps imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery after all. The phenomenon has netted some truly outrageous bouts of cinematic tomfoolery, from the inane (Star Babe) to the sublime (The Man Who Saves the World). Not everything that has borne the label Star Wars Rip Off is truly worthy of such a distinction. While other masked villains, creature-filled cantinas, and religious hokum linger in other post-Star Wars works, the above are most often cited during discussions about the ramifications of Lucas’s 1977 hit film. For the most part, these stemmed from film industries that couldn’t compete with the panache of Hollywood.