Galaxy of Terror

A lurid restaging of Alien (and a fair chunk of Solaris, come to think of it) that substitutes the biomechanical rapists of Ridley Scott's film with scenes that strive for titillation as well as repulsion. Bruce D. Clark's Galaxy of Terror isn't one for subtlety, you see. Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett's idea of an extraterrestrial hybrid who cannot properly communicate its desire for human contact and so defaults to body-shredding violence is translated here into a sequence in which an enormous, oozing worm is seen rutting and ejaculating all over Taaffe O'Connell's shrieking, centrefold-posed technical officer. Clark's film, produced by Roger Corman's New World Pictures, isn't at all interested in the anxiety generated by the invasive, penetrative horror swirling in the Scott forebear. So, in the interest of drumming up lucrative distribution deals, we are all subjected to a torn blouse rape in which the slimed-up woman being sexually assaulted seems to be on the verge of cumming just as she expires. To Clark's credit this overt callousness, when considering the film's cast, is maintained throughout the rest of Galaxy of Terror. 

After landing on a hostile plane at the behest of a glowing, New Age fascist, the crew of the spaceship Quest slowly start to disappear. In deference to the infernal mood of the piece, no-one particularly cares that their shipmates are being consumed, in turn, by literal manifestations of their deepest anxieties. Disappearances aren't ever investigated and when mutilated bodies are actually happened upon the revolted rescue team instantly incinerate them. One-by-one these spacefarers find themselves in sticky situations: Happy Days actress Erin Moran has her head squelched in close-up, while Robert Englund's maintenance technician comes across an impervious doppelgänger who soaks up his rattling laser fire. Given that James Cameron worked as a production designer and a second unit director on Galaxy, much has been made of the ways in which this cash-in prefigures Alien's actual sequel. From a premise based around a thinning cast of experts sent to inspect an intergalactic distress signal to more granular similarities like each explorer having their own personal light rig. Galaxy of Terror's relationship to Cameron's career seems to stretch beyond simply Aliens though. The endless, matte painted interiors of a booby-trapped pyramid recall Cameron's work on his 1978 short Xenogenesis while Englund uselessly firing away at an advancing reproduction of himself would seem to anticipate certain aspects of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.