1980s SF film

[peteryoung]

Galaxina, 1980, USA   DIRECTED BY WILLIAM SACHS
As parodies go, Galaxina takes a slightly less manic approach than something like, for instance, Mel Brooks's Spaceballs, but no matter, there were plenty of similar space opera comedies that followed this one throughout the 1980s that did exactly the same kind of thing either a darn sight better (Battle Beyond the Stars) or a darn sight worse (Naked Space). the crew of an interstellar police patrol is sent to recover a mysterious crystal known as the Blue Star, and meanwhile the ship's female android Galaxina learns some human ways by overcoming her programming and falling in love with a crew member. Not only does this unashamedly daft B-movie spoof Star Wars, Star Trek and Alien as well as assorted Westerns but it borrows plenty from other places too, including sound effects from Trek and Battlestar Galactica, footage from First Spaceship on Venus, and even the Batmobile can be seen in one street scene.

Galaxina is, or would have been, a completely forgettable movie but for the murder of its main attraction before its premier. Canadian Dorothy Stratten was a twenty year-old Playboy Playmate of the Year and her appearance as Galaxina was her first major film role. She clearly couldn't act yet and has few lines. Her estranged husband/manager Paul Snider murdered her then shot himself, and this has been dramatised twice in Death of a Centerfold and Bob Fosse's acclaimed film Star 80. Galaxina is at it's heart slapstick, a kind of Barbarella or Flesh Gordon without the sex. There's also a UK edition DVD out there with ten more minutes of deleted footage if you really need ten more minutes of stupidity – it's not surprising that this appears on many 'Worst Ever SF Movie' Top Ten lists, although it's certainly better thought out than something like the impressively bad Space-Thing from 1968 – as memorably awful movies go, that is unsurpassable.