Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)

Directed by: Steven Hahn

Starring: Joe Colligan, Carmen Argenziano, Anthony De Longis

Starchaser, not to be confused with Star Crash, a similar Star Wars ripoff, was apparently originally in 3-D, and according to the IMDb trivia page, was the first animated feature film to be made in 3-D. See, had I known that before watching it, I would’ve been able to pretend that it was in 3-D and gasped and oohed and ahhed at all the times the hero swings his invisible sword around, but instead I was just left wondering why.

Orin is a headstrong young man, as heroes of movies often are, and he works down in the crystal mines of some planet along with a group of other slaves until he unearths a golden sword hilt. After he digs it up, the hilt displays a message from an old guy saying that there is a surface world and that if the people just tried, they could get up there instead of working in a mine all their lives. Of course, everyone but Orin, his girlfriend, and his blind brother don’t believe it and just get back to work. Orin decides to find out and does the unthinkable: Digs UP, despite the warnings of the other slaves that he shouldn’t dig up, since “up is hell.”

Turns out up isn’t necessarily hell, but there are all sorts of things there that want to eat him or cut him apart for organ transplants or what have you. Orin meets up with Dagg, a Han Solo-type character who is Han Solo with a cigar, and they travel and have adventures and meet a lady robot and a princess and so on et cetera. It’s a pretty generic sorta storyline where the kid has to find the blade to his bladeless sword, even though it does have a blade, it’s just invisible, and they have to fight off the evil Zygon and his robot forces. The single best part of the movie is when Orin cuts Zygon’s cheek with his invisible sword and is shocked to find he’s a robot, when Zygon retorts, “I’m not A robot… I’m THE robot!” In the end the good guys win and the guy wins the princess (his girlfriend died, but he got over it pretty quickly) and the lady robot makes eyes at Dagg Solo and it’s all kinda weird.

Overall, now I want to find a damn 3-D version of this movie. Ever since I saw the 3-D version of the original House of Wax, I’ve been really interested in seeing older 3-D movies in their original 3-D, because you really don’t get the feel of what the original filmmakers intended without it, you know? I wonder why they didn’t make the remake of House of Wax in 3-D. I’d love to see Paris Hilton get stabbed in all three dimensions! Who wouldn’t?

The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989)

The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989)

Directed by: Bill Bixby

Starring: Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, John Rhys-Davies

All right, TV movie time! Made seven years after the “Incredible Hulk” TV series was cancelled, The Trial of the Incredible Hulk features a beardy Bixby meeting up with blind lawyer Matt Murdock (Rex Smith), also known as Daredevil. It’s obviously a pilot of a Daredevil series that never made it, and luckily so. John Rhys-Davies plays the Kingpin in a way completely contrary to any way the Kingpin has ever been portrayed (also, he’s awful), and Daredevil is just a guy in black sweatpants with a hood over his eyes who constantly made “lol I’m blind” jokes. It would’ve been a much worse series than the Incredible Hulk, but then again, what isn’t? Haha, I’m kidding, the show was awful too.

I knew I was in for a treat when the DVD menu consisted of six screen shots and a block of text inviting me to “Strat Movie”. Once it had stratted, we’re introduced to David Banner, still on the run from himself, moving from town to town in hopes that he won’t turn into Lou Ferrigno too many times and kill too many people. Once he makes it to the city (which is never expressly stated what it is, even to the point of awkward dialog), the focus switches over to Murdoch and his team of broad characters. Seriously, the Hulk pops up like twice and Banner is himself in less than a third of the movie. I guess he was spending more time behind the camera directing or something. Because when actors direct, they just HATE having to act, too. Pfft.

Banner gets accused of assaulting this lady on the train when he actually saved her (turning into a beardless Hulk as he did so. The Hulk is too angry for beards), and Murdoch tries to get him out to convict the real assailants, men working for the also beardy Kingpin. There’s a lot of TV movie drama stuff and blah blah the good guys win and they tell the backstory of Daredevil and it’s all really bad. As always, the action scenes with Ferrigno all painted green and throwing plastic girders around is the highlight of the movie, but with two appearances in more than an hour and a half of movie, it just can’t stretch to make it all worthwhile. Then again, if anyone expected a good movie you could get at the grocery store for a buck fifty and you had to strat it, they should go to Uranus or something. I wonder if Lou Ferrigno likes tortillas. He better.

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)

Directed by: Sidney W. Pink

Starring: John Agar, Carl Ottosen, Peter Monch

Ooh, the Seventh Planet! That sounds so mysterious and… Wait, that’s just Uranus. What the hell are you trying to pull here, movie? Then again, I guess “Journey to Uranus” wouldn’t look that good on a poster… or maybe that was already taken by the porno they made after this one. Did they make spoofish pornos in the early 60’s?

In Journey to the Seventh Planet, a group of astronauts go to Uranus. When they land, they find themselves strangely in a forest and not at all on the freezing and toxic surface of Uranus. After they get out of the ship and wander around for a bit, they notice that places from their memories start popping up around them and that the entire forest appears to be surrounded by a sort of force field that separates their oxygenated fantasy forest from the cold harsh surface of Uranus. While exploring a newly created barn, they find a woman from the captain’s past and ask her about her… I mean, about Uranus. Well, not really, I’m just trying to see how many times I can say “Uranus” in this review. Tee hee.

No, instead of asking the obviously fake woman about what’s going on, they all run back to the ship for no reason. On their way back, man about town John Agar meets another two women from his past and refuses their sexual advances, though he also fails to even ask why they’re on a different planet and/or appearing out of nowhere. The astronauts suit up and explore outside the force field where they run across a blob of green goop that keeps narrating about how he’s going to do stuff but then never really follows through, and apparently only the audience could hear it because our stalwart crew of idiots never notices. When they get attacked by an admittedly cool stop-motion giant cyclopean rat, they finally realize that something is reaching into their brains and coming up with their darkest fears (apparently one guy has pretty cool fears)… and their deepest fantasies! Which is, to anyone of sentience, incredibly obvious, and has been for the last thirty minutes.

Finally the crew of morons design a large acetylene torch with which to destroy the evil brain that their laser guns don’t effect. Of course, the evil brain creates a woman to distract them while it replaces the torch with an imaginary one and the guys fall for it hook, line and sinker. When they get to the brain and their weapon disappears, they just throw the tank of liquid oxygen that they were using as fuel at it and run away. On their way back, one of the imaginary women meets them and they bring her with them as they escape the planet. So even after they’ve FINALLY realized that these women aren’t real and that they’re constructs of the thing they’re trying to kill, they still rescue one of them as they go back to Earth. If there is a message to this movie, it’s that men are INTENSELY STUPID, and if people actually were that easily duped, then evil space brains pretty much deserve to rule the world.

This was a tough one to rate, since just by the caliber of the writing and the strangeness of the poor dubbing and the terrible love song at the end about Uranus… well, all that and more would lead me to rating it a one. But some of the effects were actually pretty cool, and very surprisingly so. Average out everything awful with some cool effects, I guess it gets a two. It’s almost worth seeing just for how terrifically thick the main characters are, and of course the song over the end credits. Never heard a love song about Uranus before. Don’t make any jokes about that.