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. 

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. 

The Trip - Director's Cut

Peter Fonda plays Paul Groves, a successful but emotionally inert ad director experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Reeling from a run-in with his soon-to-be ex-wife - Susan Strasberg's Sally creeps onto set to very patiently remind her husband that he has to actually turn up to their divorce proceedings and make time for their child once in a while - Groves decides to take LSD as a way to gain insight into his personal and professional frustrations. Armed with several cameras, a box of poetry and Bruce Dern's John (a laid-back but still slightly sinister spirit guide), Groves journeys to a seaside squat to take acid. Groves is a bundle of neuroses, approaching his drop in transactional terms - a way to tap into something a little more artistic than the blaring TV noise he usually peddles.

For all its harassed editing and psychedelic imagery, Roger Corman's The Trip is as much about a man puzzling through his inability to maintain relationships with women. Groves craves this kind of insight but he is unable to recognise how his hang-ups influence or pollute his behaviour. He's too busy snooping out something he can sell. As soon as he swallows his pill he's instantly chatting about a violent drug bust, almost willing a swift intervention from all-knowing jackboots. John attempts to gently prod Groves down a path of gentle revelation but the ad-man sees suspicion everywhere. These phantom threats exerting themselves as the deposed, hooded ghouls from counterculture fav The Lord of the Rings or Satanic rites on smokey film sets. The one consistent thread throughout Groves' trip is Sally. Her presence surprisingly comforting, not at all the antagonistic bummer you might expect.

Although Groves attempts to distract himself away from the recollection with umpteen other smiling blondes, he can't help but fixate on a memory of himself and his wife having sex. The reminiscence is fuzzy, like a channel that can't quite be tuned in. Their bodies mix and merge under hot fluorescent lights - different faces bleed in before disappearing - the writhing blobs looking very much like the contents of a Mathmos lamp. This, it seems, is Groves' way into a deeper, more personal form of introspection. Unfortunately the ad-man resists, imagining a murder then fleeing into the night where he eventually meets Salli Sachse's Glenn. When Glenn and Groves have sex Corman ramps up the discomfort. The film thrashes wildly, introducing subliminal imagery and mocking music that jab at Groves' sense of self. The coupling may be exciting, even aspirational, but it leaves Groves none the wiser. Fonda's face remains unshattered in this only lightly altered Director's Cut. Instead we're left with the feeling that Groves, although still psychologically intact, has squandered a real opportunity.

Piranha

Paced to express the mounting sense of anxiety felt by the film's lead couple, Joe Dante's Piranha starts out leisurely, bordering on sluggish, before slowly building to full-on, adrenal mania. Heather Menzies plays Maggie McKeown, a spunky skiptracer hot on the trail of two teenagers who skinny-dipped in the wrong pool. Along the way she recruits Bradford Dillman's topped-up drunk Paul to help investigate the disappearance. The pair stumble on a semi-abandoned military research tank (the kind that holds water) which they promptly, thoughtlessly, drain. Unfortunately, this bone-clogged cauldron housed a strain of super aggressive, selectively bred, piranha, able to survive in the cold, local waters.

After a couple of run-ins with the film's buzzing, agitated shoals, Maggie and Paul abandon their emerging relationship to arrive at a state of total, propulsive motion. This unceasing advance hits a peak 79 minutes into the film - editors Dante and Mark Goldblatt assemble a short, delirious sequence that mixes on-water stunt falls; a speedboat crashing through a smaller vessel (and the subsequent explosion); massing, carnivorous fish and, finally, our heroes launching themselves into space in a stolen, slow-motion police car. Dante's film may be slight in terms of storytelling - a quickly produced cash-in hoping to ride Jaws' wake - but it's assembled in a way that extracts maximum impact out of its (comparatively) meagre budget. The Piranha attacks manage to be both protracted and frenzied. The film's micro maulings communicated with churning, underwater collages that knit together images of teeth, injury and clouding, dilute blood.

Death Race 2050

Soulful bruiser Manu Bennett fills-in for David Carradine in Death Race 2050, a ramshackle sequel-cum-remake of Paul Bartel and Roger Corman's cult perennial. Perhaps mindful of the real-time collapse of civilisation we're currently churning through, GJ Echternkamp's film ditches the correctional facility cock-fighting seen in Jason Statham and Luke Goss' loose remake trilogy, returning this film's focus to pointless, tranquillising distractions and a flagrant disregard for human life.

Unfortunately, Echternkamp's film has all the satirical bite and visual pep of a porn parody. Although costumed bodies are occasionally lingered over, the rough and ready grime of a New World production is gone, leaving the kind of flat, HD sunniness usually associated with rushed productions and the aforementioned smutty replication. Actual racing is terminally safe, rendered as little more than monotonous, static head shots granted a vague sense of movement by a light camera shake.

The casual, future-shocked cruelty of the Bartel's film, perhaps no longer shocking enough, is only wheeled out as a series of gooey punchlines, any sense of horror neutralised by the weak, variety show standard mutilation. 2050 is too self-aware. It knows it's a cheap supermarket shelf-filler, so why try harder? Echternkamp and Corman's sole shots at relevance are a few click bait friendly jibes at the current political establishment - 2050 works overtime to visually connect Donald Trump's mad hairdo with the kind of polished ferns you see in The Hunger Games series.