La bestia nell spazzo / Beast in Space

Beast in Space is a title that raises a question: Who, or what, is The Beast?

Well, to explain: The Beast was a 1975 film by Walerian Borowczyk, an offshoot from the previous year's Immoral Tales. It presented a distinctly adult version of the beauty and the beast myth, in which a young heiress fantasised about an 18th century French noblewoman Romilda de l'Esperance's dalliances with a prodigiously endowed bear-like creature, with these encounters then proving to have placed a curse on the noble family, including her feeble-minded, be-tailed husband to be, Mathurin de l'Esperance.

It is not exactly an obvious piece of material to combine with space opera, even if the form does affords the possibility by virtue of going "to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations [...] where no man has gone before," just as the presence of The Beast's Sirpa Lane explains the thinking behind the title.

Beast in Space could perhaps have just about worked worked as a parody or a sex film, as the two options its model presents. It is neither. Instead it's a space adventure that's played essentially straight, even when the most ridiculous pseudo-scientific dialogue is being spoken. But it definitely isn't suitable for children on account of the nudity and sex scenes. These scenes themselves present an odd combination of softcore and hardcore material to further distancing the film from mainstream audiences whilst probably being insufficient for their raincoater counterparts.

Though the DVD of the film presents two and a half minutes of generally harder material as deleted scenes, these images are largely indistinguishable from what appears in the film itself, being close-up of genitalia and mouths that are never re-attached to a specific body via pans, only cuts, in that time honoured inserts manner.

Beast in Space might also have worked had Lane had the kind of name and recognition value that could be used to actually sell it, a la Laura Gemser or Sylvia Kristel.

But in The Beast Lane played the noblewoman without dialogue and in the kind of 18th century wigs and underwear that don't really allow for making any immediate connection to her character here, whether she's wearing a flimsy about-to-come-off dress or a figure-hugging space/jump-suit and helmet. True, Lane had been more exposed as herself in the likes of Nazi Love Camp 27 and Papaya of the Caribbean in the interim, but these were hardly productions with the same kind of profile as The Beast and her debut film, Roger Vadim's 1974 The Assassinated Young Girl.


The poster

The plot, that thing which provides an excuse for the inanity and the sex, sees the crew of the MK31, led by Captain Larry Madison (Vassili Karis) being sent on a mission to the planet Lorigon where a rare and strategically vital metal, Entalium, is to be found.

Rivalling them in the race is the Han Solo-esque rogue Juan Cardoso (Venantino Venantini).

A personal edge to the rivalry is provided by the fact that Madison and Cardoso have already come to blows with one another over their rival positions - Madison doesn't like civilians and Cardoso doesn't like the space navy - and sexual possession of the beautiful Sondra Richardson, a lieutenant aboard the MK31 (Lane).

Lt Richardson finds herself plagued by strange dreams - some culled from Borowczyk's film, including the horse copulation footage - in which she encounters a giant robot, has sex with a hairy man-beast in some woods, and generally sees the crew of the MK31 (who also include Marina Frajese) going at it like their lives depended on it...

The MK31 is drawn towards a mysterious planet Lorigon where they re-encounter Cardoso, who has got there first, and his host and friend Onaf (Claudio Undari), one of the figures from Lt. Richardson's vision...

There are probably all sorts of subtexts that could be drawn out of The Beast in Heat - the implied existence of a primitive subconscious, with creatures and planets from the id even in the ostensibly civilised far future; the relationship between the military industrial complex and the rest of the world (or indeed universe) - but it's questionable whether the film-makers ever seriously thought about them.

Or, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a light sword is just a light sword...

What's there, then, are the surface pleasures: the bad dialogue (this must be the only film where someone actually says "Quickly! A bottle of Uranus milk!" with a straight face), acting, costumes, production design, effects, direction and scoring (courtesy of the inimitable Pluto Kennedy).

Or, in other words, one hell of a lot for the Euro-trash fan, especially if he or she is already familiar with any of director Al Brescia's other sci-fi epics of this period.

[More reviews and information on the film: http://robertmonell.blogspot.com/2008/04/beast-in-space-dvd.html and http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-qzcELew6frWBZspks_7SsnUuv9VNTUA-?cq=1&p=268]

Nel labirinto del sesso (Psichidion) / The Labyrinth of Sex / Sexual Inadequacies

This 1969 film from trash favourite Al Brescia presents an interesting combination of mondo and “white coater” exploitation forms, apparently using the time-honoured defence of being educational as a means of getting around the censors - as when a discussion of the normalcy of voyeurism provides the justification for an voyeuristic candid camera montage of women in various states of undress.

The film begins with some classic Mom and Dad style birth of a baby footage, as the narrator’s voice-over emphasise the Freudian notion that the infant is already a sexual being.

A montage of clips of children and adolescents then follows, as the voice-over - soon identified as that of a doctor type - emphasises the importance of discussing sexuality openly and honestly with children and adolescents so that they grow up to be normal rather than deviant.

Unsurprisingly the film’s discourses around normal and abnormal sexuality are where its age shows. On the one hand, its defence of masturbation during adolescence as a natural stage in the development of a healthy adult sexuality was probably quite a progressive position for an Italian film to take in 1969. On the other, the lumping together of homosexuality with paedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia as perversions where the wrong object of desire is chosen seems rather dated.

The various vignettes address such themes of nymphomania, understood as a normal desire taken to excess rather than a true deviation; fetishism, featuring Franco Ressell and a mannequin to suggest a giallo connection; gender (re)assignment surgery, focusing on those born with ambiguous genitals; and a man and woman having their physical states monitored by doctors as they purportedly have sex.

An entertaining historical document.

Sette uomini d'oro nello spazio / Star Odyssey

These are the continuing voyages of the spaceship Giallo Fever. It's five-year mission: to seek out the worst in European cinema, to boldly go where few trash film fan have gone before...

Yes, it's Al Bradley / Brescia's Star Odyssey, one of that select group of Italian filone films that make their Turkish counterparts seem almost accomplished by comparison.

The model, however, is not less Star Wars, as was the case with Luigi Cozzi's Starcrash and most other entries in the sci-fi filone circa 1978-81 – although we do get a spot of light-sabre style action – but rather Star Trek, with the film taking place in and around Earth a few hundred years in the future, rather than a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.


The bridge of the Enterprise Mark I


Dig that moustache

In this time mankind has started patrolling the other planets in the solar system, but has not yet developed any kind of faster than light travel. We also soon learn that people have developed the mental ability to control others' minds and to move small objects, and that a new metal – call it Unobtanium, since that's total world production apparently only amounts to around 1kg – has been discovered.


These aren't the droids you're looking for...

But if man is technologically more advanced than now, he is also several hundred years behind the alien species to whose attentions he has new come. Worse, these aliens are if anything behind contemporary man in terms of their culture and civilisation, inasmuch as they soon decide that Earth makes for a useful supply of resources, including slaves, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.


The professor and his robot

Needless to say the Earth government is not about to take this lying down if they can help it, as the advice of the smartest man in the world is sought and a hand picked team of superheroes are assembled to take on and repel the invaders...

The German Marxist theorist Ernst Bloch posited the idea of uneven development, noting that in any given civilisation economically, culturally and politically development need not necessarily follow from one another and, indeed, could be in inverse relationships. Though it may admittedly seem something of a stretch to introduce such notions to a discussion of Star Odyssey, I think they apply at at least two levels.


You can tell he's evil because he doesn't look like us?

The first is the obvious subtext of the film itself, with the Professor remarking upon how the aliens' desire to enslave and exploit man is really no different from that of the relationship between the white coloniser and the non-white colonised a few centuries earlier, as a theme which further cements the filmmakers Star Trek-like future utopian message:


A lethal boxing robot, further illustrating technological development outstripping moral development.

The second is as a no doubt unintentional comment on the status of the Italian sci-fi film in relation to its better-resourced Hollywood counterpart. For if Space Odyssey is a clearly impoverished production it's also a well-intentioned one where the filmmakers have clearly tried – if failed.


The inter-galactic auction of Earth

When the alien warlord demonstrates his super weapon, he does so by destroying a city or two. Perfectly (un)reasonable, except the stock footage used is in black and white in an otherwise brightly coloured film, and is clearly of WWII vintage. Was the idea was again to cement that the bad guys, for all their technological superiority, were really no more than fascists, and, if so, perhaps not that different from Star Wars, with its unthinking, unfeeling, supremely loyal to their leader / fuhrer Stormtroopers?

The enslavement of mankind is represented only by stock footage of Africans but not the other people that the aliens apparently sample from, like the Japanese. If budgetary considerations were clearly to the fore here, it also helps reinforce the idea that the aliens are only doing what we Europeans were doing a few hundred years ago.


Brescia's scrapheap challenge: make a film from this


Wir sind die roboter...

Another reference point, oddly enough, is Douglas Adams, specifically in the form of not one but two paranoid – or more specifically suicidal – robots, Tilk and Tilly, who provide for some intentional comic relief with their Romeo and Juliet style romance. Tellingly the pair are also rescued from a rather contemporary looking scrapyard and again provide a 'we've learned something today' reinforcement of the message from space:

Tilk: Great integrated circuits! What's that thing? Look Tilly! A prehistoric cave robot!

Tilly: I've never seen anything so ugly.

Tilk: They say creatures like this shouldn't be allowed to run around loose. They ought to be kept in zoos.

Tilly: Now Tilk, that's just prejudice. He has as much right to activate as we have, even if his tin is a different color.

Of course, if all this serious, pseudo-intellectual stuff isn't your thing you can always enjoy the sheer awfulness of the film and the misfortune of the various filone veterans, including Gianni Garko, Franco Ressel and Chris Avram, reduced to appearing in it; the bleep and sweep heavy synthesiser based score, and the sheer MST3K-ness of it all.

[The film is available for download from Cosmobells blog]

Ator il guerriero di ferro / Ator the Iron Warrior

After Joe D'Amato temporarily abandoned the Ator franchise after his second film failed to achieve the same heights of success as its predecessor, Al Brescia stepped into the breach to present this reinterpretation of the character.

We begin with a prologue in which Ator's brother, Trogar, is kidnapped by the power hungry sorceress Phaedra. The other members of her sorority, led by Deeva, take of dim view of this, but merely banish Phaedra as punishment.


Ator poses in front of a mirror, but where did it come from?

18 years pass and Phaedra has returned, along a the fearsome skull-masked, heavy-breathing warrior (think Skeletor meets Darth Vader, I guess) and their assorted minions to launch an attack on the King's castle on the very day of his daughter Jenna's own 18th nameday ceremony.

Though escaping the castle massacre, Jenna is captured by cloaked dwarf creatures.


Jenna, in wet t-shirt mode

Sure enough, Ator, now played by Miles O'Keeffe, comes to the rescue, while also having the first of what will be many evenly-matched fights with Trogar.


Trogar

So it continues for another hour or so in ABC-quest fashion until the forces of good and evil face off for one final battle in which rightful order is restored, or something...

Right from the opening credits, proudly announcing The Iron Warrior to be an Al Bradley film to the strains of Carlo Mario Cordio's derivative-if-heroic theme music, its obvious that this is going to be a nonpareil cheesefest.

The best things the film has going for it are the picturesque Crete locations, which do good service as the Kingdom of Dragmor, and Jenna's tissue-thin gowns.


Ator delivers a witty one-liner

The worst is that in seeking to add a soupcon more style to the proceedings, Bradley / Brescia overcompensates with the slow-motion to the point you start to imagine that the film could have been refitted for a hour-long TV spot by dint of playing everything at regular speed.

Really, however, it's the kind of film that offers predictable pleasures and which doesn't take itself too seriously anyway and, as such, is arguably immune to this kind of criticism.