Battle Beyond the Stars

A space opera remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, made in the wake of the all-conquering Star Wars, that uses the disparate identities of its hired mercenaries as an excuse to chart several distinct passes at scratch-built starfighters. So while the sozzled earthling played by George Peppard gets to sit upfront in the landing craft portion of an intergalactic eighteen wheeler, Robert Vaughn's morose assassin Gelt pilots something closer to an Italian concept car while protecting his peaceful alien employers. Famously, James Cameron - credited here as one of the art directors, a director of photography and as a member of the miniature special effects department - made his big splash at Roger Corman's New World Pictures by designing the lead craft in Battle Beyond the Stars. 

Cameron's more organic take on a interstellar fighter garnered executive-level attention thanks to the two enormous breasts he attached to its undercarriage. The design that so captured Corman's imagination goes further than this anecdotal mammoplasty though. The body of the craft is the colour of clay, moulded in the shape of a muscled sphinx, while the face is an enormous uterus; its two horned tubes holding laser cannons (rather than, say, ovaries) either side of its pilot, The Waltons' Richard Thomas, who sits inside an armoured womb. A shot of the ship resting on a dead, smoke-filled planet seems to indicate that Cameron's design concept is that of a living, feminine answer to the dried-out, fossilised derelict seen in Ridley Scott's Alien. 

Director Jimmy T Murakami handles Battle's non-special effects photography like television, the film closer to a Battlestar Galactica or a Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode than George Lucas' (admittedly far more costly) space adventures. Characters largely sit in their little boxes, chatting away to thin air, while the audience collectively yearn for yet another adoring appraisal of a gimcrack battle cruiser. In fairness though the film's highlight does occur inside an airlocked area. John Saxon's space pirate Sador, having captured one of the tranquil Nestor clones helping his gentle quarry, decides he wants to transplant the pearlescent android's arm onto his own body. Following a successful operation the remainder of the clones (one of whom is played by the late Earl Boen) command the appendage, from across the galaxy, to strangle its new owner, forcing Sador's panicking doctor to fire up a surgical chainsaw.