Director: Lance Lindsay
Writer: Lance Lindsay
Producer: Eric Woster
Cast: C Jutson Campbell, Faye Bolt, John W Smith
Country: USA
Year of release: 1985
Reviewed from: UK VHS
Words cannot begin to describe how awful
Star Crystal is. Not hilariously bad, not shoddily amateur, just compulsively, mindblowingly terrible at every level and in almost every respect. It beggars belief that a large number of people could have worked on this film without realising what they were making or that the people ultimately responsible could have had any attitude except complete and utter cynicism, a belief (apparently justified) that in the mid-1980s anything more than 80 minutes long with a spaceship in it would sell to video distributors around the world and turn a profit.
In a way, this reminds me of Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring. No, wait, hear me out on this one. Stravinsky wrote that piece as an attempt at jazz music - except that, living in Russia as he did, he had never heard any jazz. He had met people who had heard jazz, he had read descriptions of it, so he had a go at emulating what he thought jazz was - and he ended up with something that is nothing at all like jazz. Well,
Star Crystal is what one might get if people who had never, ever seen a sci-fi movie set out to make a sci-fi movie, based only on what they had heard and read about sci-fi movies. It has some of the recognisable iconography - spaceship, alien, talking computer - but none of it fits together the right way. More to the point, this movie makes no sense whatsoever and despite that it still manages to contradict itself at every opportunity.
Oh, I should just point out the one big difference between
The Rite of Spring and
Star Crystal. Stravinsky’s work is good,
Star Crystal is shit. I wouldn’t want anyone to labour under a misapprehension.
We open with a couple of guys in spacesuits wandering across the surface of Mars in the year 2032 (not 2035 as the sleeve claims). This is shot using a red filter, the spacesuits aren’t too bad, it’s even slightly overcranked to make them move slowly. It’s a promising start. For no apparent reason, they dig at a particular spot and excavate a rock about the size of a beachball, which they take away with them.
As the shuttlecraft SC-37 blasts away from the Red Planet, the two unnamed guys show the rock to the ship’s doctor (for some reason) and assure him that their equipment indicates that it’s full of electronic circuitry. When the three men leave the room, the rock cracks open to reveal a large crystal and a small amount of goop which drips onto the floor and starts to move slightly.
So no circuitry at all then.
Next thing we know, the ship’s computer is announcing that the oxygen supply has run out and we have a panning shot of various dead crew members.
Two months later the drifting ship is somehow picked up and docked with the L-5 space station (I assume it’s just a snappy name and not an indication that the station is orbiting the L5 Lagrange point). There’s a tall ‘Colonel’ - a youngish chap with a moustache, a bouffant hairdo and an eye for the ladies - who has to attend a meeting which, we are told from a computer read-out, is to discuss why the ‘nuetron reactors’ are malfunctioning. I would expect spelling mistakes in the I’ve-got-an-Amstrad-and-I’m-gonna-use-it computer displays if this had been made in Japan or Italy, but this is an American movie. That’s just monstrously sloppy.
Oh, and a secondary reason for the meeting is to consider why the entire crew of the SC-37 died. But that’s just an aside, really.
This meeting, between four men, is held in a dark room, around a small illuminated table. In other words, the production has saved money on a set by simply not having one. Meanwhile a computer operator named Campbell (C Jutson Campbell, usually misspelt ‘Juston’ in listings and just called ‘Jutson Campbell’ on the UK VHS sleeve) is trying to get the shuttlecraft’s computer to work while trading banter with a black guy (John Smith, credited as ‘John W Smith’ on the original poster but nowhere else) whose name - Cal - is mentioned I think once in the entire movie. Suddenly, the station and the ship are both rocked by an (unseen) explosion and there are a few shots of people running around, several of which are rather obviously in an office building rather than a space station. Two young women run onto the bridge of SC-37 and Campbell talks on the intercom to Billy, a previously unmentioned frizzy-haired, acerbic, female engineer in the ship’s engine room who successfully blasts the shuttlecraft away from L-5.
The two fellas and the two ladies in the control room sit and watch on the screen as L5 - eventually - blows up in possibly the worst thing-blowing-up-in-space model shot I have ever witnessed.
So now we have our main cast: Campbell, who assumes command of the ship; classy brunette Dr Adrienne Kimberley (Faye Bolt) whose antipathetic attitude towards Campbell ensures that they will eventually get together; blonde Sherrie Stevens (Taylor Kingsley), constantly referred to as Debbie despite the name-patch on her loosely buttoned jumpsuit, which incidentally identifies her as a nutritionist - so she is assigned to cooking duties; misanthropic Billy (Marcia Linn), who seems to be loosely modelled on Carla in
Cheers; and funky, hip Cal, who has his eye on Sherrie. More to the point, we are only ten minutes into the film and we have already killed off two complete sets of characters.
There’s no attempt to explain why SC-37 was fuelled up and ready to leave at the drop of a hat, or why these two women ran on board (and nobody else did) or why L-5 blew up (those pesky ‘nuetron reactors’ I suppose). We also have to accept that since SC-37 was recovered, nobody has actually bothered having a look round to see if there is anything odd on board. You know, like a large crystal or some alien goop which is gradually growing into a sort of monster thing.
A word now about the layout and design of the SC-37, which from outside is a fairly straightforward, square-ish, roughly hammer-shaped vessel. In the fairly large control room, along with lots of control panels, a few computer screens and some chairs, is a device for showing where everyone is on the ship. Given that there are only five rooms and they’re all linked, plus they all have wall-mounted intercom telephone things, you do wonder why this machine is necessary.
The map of the ship on the screen shows four corridors fanning out from the bridge to four smaller rooms, which are labelled (using sticky tape!) as ‘Science lab’, ‘Sleeping quarters’, ‘Supply room’ and ‘Engine room.’ Halfway along each corridor is a junction with a fifth corridor, connecting them. Despite the map showing these corridors as short, straight and with a junction halfway along, the corridors that we see on screen are long, curving and junctionless. But the biggest problem is that they are not proper corridors at all (I slightly misled you, dear reader), they are dimly lit cylindrical tubes about three feet in diameter. So anyone passing along them has to go on hands and knees on a curved floor.
Remember: these are not ventilation ducts, they’re not emergency access tunnels, they are the main corridors linking the only five rooms on the ship. Unfortunately, the design of each room has a door which is rectangular, albeit about four feet high so still requiring even the relatively petite Sherrie/Debbie to stoop. This means that at the end of each tunnel is some sort of weird, pointless vestibule where the tiny round ‘corridor’ ends before the not-so-tiny rectangular entrance to the room.
Opening and closing the sliding door on the four-foot entrance in each room seems to be automatic but it can be locked, from inside only, by pressing some large, coloured buttons and turning a small wheel. This is clearly modeled on the wheels used to lock hatches in seafaring ships, except that it is on the wall, not the door itself. No-one ever turns it more than about ten degrees and when the crew want to be completely safe, keeping out any beastie that might be aboard, they tie the wheel up with a bit of string.
Are you starting to comprehend quite how mindboggling this film is now? Buckle up, because it gets worse.
The five survivors of the L-5 disaster make no attempt to call for help or investigate whether any other ships escaped the explosion or anything like that. They just swiftly calculate that it will take a year (or 18 months, depending on which character is talking) to reach Earth. This is because SC-37 is just a short-range shuttle-craft, not a long-range ship. Unfortunately they only have five months (or possibly two weeks) of food on board. However, there are two supply depots between their present position (presumably somewhere near Mars) and Earth, the nearest being Alpha 7 which can be reached in five days. So away they go. With an alien onboard.
To the film’s credit, for most of the movie we never get a good look at the alien. Instead we get close-ups of gelatinous stuff, close-ups of a large, blinking eye or shots of very long, snake-thin tendrils whizzing across the floor, occasionally ending in a three-fingered claw but usually not.
The first person to encounter the alien is Billy, down in the engine room (the ‘engine’ seems to consist of two laser beams, between two small devices about a metre apart). Billy finds some goop on the floor, goes behind the ‘engine’ to investigate and... well, that’s where it all gets confusing. We get a close-up of Billy’s arm, raising a spanner then whacking it down on something unseen, then there’s a shot of blood splattering up the wall, then the alien’s tendrils winding round Billy’s feet and hands (presumably shot in reverse). Billy is seen lying down but making no attempt to struggle, with tendrils around her head and body, then she is dragged away.
Was she hitting the alien with a spanner? Whose blood was that? I actually replayed the sequence to see if it made any sense but nope.
Sherrie/Debbie discovers Billy’s body, which is now a shriveled corpse and she runs off to Adrienne in the ship’s science lab. Or at least, she runs as far as the engine room door, climbs through it, runs a couple more steps to the tube and then crawls along it until she reaches the science lab.
Campbell and Cal, up on the bridge, have been drinking - and who can blame them? If I was on a spaceship that I had never flown before, trying to reach one small supply depot floating in the vastness of space somewhere between Martian and Earth orbits, with very limited amounts of food and drink on board, I think I would hit the bottle too. This drinking has no bearing on the characters or the plot and is forgotten pretty quickly. Like most things in this embarrassingly pisspoor movie, it’s an idea that somebody had which was never developed or followed up.
At this point I should mention Bernice, the computer. Like all computers in crappy sci-fi movies, this one talks. It also has a read-out screen although this is only ever seen in close-ups and there’s no actual sign of it on the set. The screen is mostly used for transmitting warnings about things like dangerously low oxygen which would seem to be more helpful if transmitted verbally. Oh, and Campbell has programmed the computer to only respond to his voice. There is no reason for him to have done this and there is every reason for him, given their current parlous situation, to reprogram Bernice to respond to his four colleagues (well, three now that Billy’s dead). But he doesn’t.
Adrienne also has a computer terminal in her lab (this one does have a screen, in fact it looks remarkably like an Amstrad PCW) into which she puts a sample of the goop from the engine room, which she removes from Sherrie/Debbie’s clothes. Bernice announces that the goop comes from an “unknown life form - its molecular structure does not require oxygen to live.” Wow, just from this slug trail-like discharge, the computer can say conclusively that the organism that produced the goop respires anaerobically. Nothing else can be determined, just the method of respiration. Intriguing.
Cal and Debbie die next although I can’t recall in what order. The map-of-the-ship doodad is used to show each of the victims being stalked by the alien, which shows up as a different coloured spot because it has a different heat signature, apparently. Odd how nobody noticed that there were originally six lifeforms on board. Debbie tips a beaker of acid on the alien before it gets her, a gloriously unmatched pair of shots showing the tentacles around her feet as she lies on her back, then dragging her away as she lies on her front. As with Billy’s death, the tentacles do not in any way match the goopy alien seen in close-up.
That leaves Campbell and Adrienne alone on the bridge, where they have slowly, one by one, closed the four doors. For the rest of the film they completely fail to generate any sexual tension despite being all alone together. They spend the night in a sleeping compartment leading directly off the bridge, which leaves one wondering what the previously identified ‘sleeping quarters’ were for. When the oxygen supply to the ship is cut off, Bernice does her usual trick of announcing this vital warning silently on a computer screen somewhere.
Having restored the supply, the two survivors find a ‘video laser’ recording of what happened when SC-37 visited Mars. This turns out to be footage of the two spacemen from the start of the film. I mean, it’s actual footage of them on the desolate surface of the Red Planet - so who filmed this? When Adrienne notices that there is 25 hours of this stuff to sit through, they speed up the tape and the resulting high-speed footage is accompanied, incredibly, by comedy ‘silent movie’ piano music!
While trying to get my head around how any film-maker could expect any viewer to watch this nonsensical farrago... another shuttle-craft appears. That’s right. Although they’re stranded out in deep space in a slow-moving short-range shuttle with no human constructions in range except the Alpha-7 supply depot and the smoking remains of the L-5 space station, nevertheless they are briefly accompanied on their journey by the SC-45 (which of course looks exactly like the SC-37, although I suppose that’s fair). Just as the ‘video laser’ recording of the Martian surface was footage that could not possibly exist unless a third person was present, so we now see on the SC-37’s screen footage of both shuttle-craft flying together - which obviously could not exist unless a third craft was present.
We’re not told where SC-45 is going or where it has come from. It’s just there because it’s expedient. Inconveniently, the SC-37’s radio can receive but not transmit so they can’t tell SC-45 their situation. The pilot of the other shuttle, realising that there may be communication problems, asks them to make a 30 degree turn if they’re okay. By now, that sneaky alien - whose crystal, Campbell and Adrienne decide, is both a computer and a power supply - is controlling the ship and executes this manoeuvre, so SC-45 goes off on its merry way.
And then it comes back, just long enough to warn SC-37 that there is “a meteor storm at twelve o’clock”. I tried to work out whether this meant time or direction and then realised that either concept was meaningless in space so it was equally stupid either way. But wait, the alien creates a force field around SC-37 and the meteors just bounce off. Maybe it’s not so bad after all.
‘Two days later’ says a caption but Campbell still only has about twelve hours of stubble so either beards grow slowly in outer space or he’s finding the time to shave regularly. Adrienne’s hair, of course, still looks gorgeous.
What happens next is, even by the plungingly low standards of this film, spectacularly stupid. Hold onto your seats, ladies and gentlemen, because you will not believe this bit.
The alien starts accessing the computer, leading to numerous close-ups of that Amstrad screen. ‘Evolution of the Human Race, Parts 1-20’ is the name of the series of files it investigates, starting (as one does) with ‘Part 5 - 15,000BC to 500AD’. Hmm, I don’t believe there has actually been much evolution in homo sapiens within the last 17,000 years. Really, this is more the history of the human race then, isn’t it? Within this time frame, the file has a menu (as we would now call it) of several directories (as we would now call them), each covering a different part of the globe. Quite brilliantly, one of these is ‘Antarctica’ because of course there was just so much human activity in Antarctica between those dates.
Working through the menus ( as we would now call them), the alien selects ‘Middle East’, then ‘Beliefs and Religions’ then ‘Christianity’. And then the computer reads out two specific verses from the New Testament, about doing unto others and so on. Yes, it’s true, I’m not making this up. The alien reads The Bible! The alien discovers religion!
Maybe, just maybe, if the alien had somehow absorbed the entirety of human knowledge (or at least as much as is routinely stored in the databanks of short-range shuttlecraft) and had noticed the teachings of Jesus in among all the other stuff, there might be some sense in this. But no, the extraterrestrial beastie which somehow has control of this computer zooms straight in to the New Testament.
I wracked my brains at this point (and indeed, after the movie - thankfully - finished), looking for any other element of religion within this motion picture. And I found none. This one solitary moment seems like it would fit neatly into a film with an intended Christian subtext - but it’s an isolated incident which sits so uncomfortably among the rest of this cut-price, sub-
Alien rip-off that I’m amazed it doesn’t just stand up and walk away. Was this just an idea in passing which was never developed (like most of the film) or was it the intention of the picture, except that it took this long to appear and then is instantly forgotten? It’s just one of the weirdest, most out-of-context things I have ever come across in the plot of a piece-of-crap, third-rate, amateur hour sci-fi movie.
For some reason, Campbell now goes to the engine room, crawling through the tubes with a home-made flame thrower held dangerously in front of him. Adrienne stays on the bridge and urges caution, apparently able to be heard through some previously unmentioned communications system which doesn’t require the wall-mounted handsets previously used for this purpose. And ultimately, somehow, Campell befriends the alien, which looks like a slug with the head of ET, is about the size of a large dog and has No Tentacles Whatsoever! (It is also completely devoid of teeth, despite what the poster shows.)
A lengthy montage shows the two humans and the alien - which can now talk and is called ‘Gar’ - living together and having fun. Eventually they make it to the supply depot which Gar says he can convert into a spaceship to get him home. And that, apart from an insipid song called ‘Crystal of a Star’, is pretty much it. Just to put the final nail of unbelievability into this film’s coffin, the singer/lyricist, credited as ‘Stefani Christopherson (aka Indira)’ was the original voice of Daphne in
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?!
Dear Christ in Heaven, I have seen some shit. I have sat through
The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Rock’n’Roll Musical,
Incubus,
Belcebu - Take Me, I’m Your Whore from Hell,
Hellgate,
The Pumpkin Karver and two
Camp Blood films. But I’ve never seen anything like
Star Crystal.
So come on, own up. Where did this rubbish come from? Writer-director Lance Lindsay has one other credit, a few years later - an action picture called
Real Bullets about a group of stuntmen who take on a criminal gang. Marcia Linn and C Jutson Campbell were both in that too, along with - good gravy! -
Martin Landau. Apart from that, I can find nothing on the guy whatsoever. Producer Eric Woster, who shares a story credit with Lindsay - as well as directing the second unit, editing the picture and doing some of the make-up effects - was also far from prolific, although he has an excuse. According to the Inaccurate Movie Database (and believe me, I’ve looked everywhere else) he wrote, directed and starred in a 1992 horror film called
Sandman, with Dedee Pfeiffer in the cast. He seems to have been a pal of Tommy Chong, working as a production assistant on three early ‘80s Cheech and Chong movies and as DP on
Far Out Man. He also allegedly lit another ultra-cheapie scifi embarrassment,
Space Chase. According to some non-IMDB sources, Woster died on the set of
Sandman, just before completing the film, from a congenital heart condition. He was in his early thirties. Poor bastard.
There are three Associate Producers and two Executive Producers. Apart from one who produced
Sandman and another who worked on
Far Out Man, none of them seem to have bothered with the film industry before or since.
Of the cast, none of whom were ever going to trouble the Oscars and most of whom never stepped in front of a camera before or after this (at least, not using these names), the only one with credits is somebody called Emily Longstreth. There’s no credited cast list on screen so she’s either the voice of Bernice or a female officer who has one line in the prologue. She was in
Hardbodies, Pretty in Pink, The Big Picture and
Booby Trap. Our five main actors are all bad but, as so often, the worst ones play the survivors. Billy, Debbie/Sherrie and Cal at least had some degree of characterisation - angry chick, bimbo and skirt-chaser respectively - but Campbell and Adrienne are bland non-characters, a situation exacerbated by the wooden acting of C Jutson Campbell and Faye Bolt. For a leading man, Campbell has no charisma or discernible personality whatsoever - and it’s fortunate that actor and character share the same name so I don’t have to type that twice, it being equally applicable to both of ‘em.
One thing that really stands out when watching
Star Crystal is the number of reaction shots. Every time something happens - like a space station exploding or a dead body being discovered - the people in question just stare blankly while the cruel, cruel camera refuses to cut away. I’ve never seen so many reaction shots featuring actors who either don’t know how to react or weren’t told what they were reacting to (or both).
On the technical side - dear Lord, this just gets better and better - cinematographer Robert Carameco worked on
Spawn of the Slithis, Tobe Hooper’s
Eaten Alive, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, Blackenstein, Octaman, Journey to the Centre of Time, The Cremators, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?, Boss Nigga and
Orgy of the Dead! He passed away in 1997 aged 64 but boy, what a career. (Oh, and his surname was Camarico so this film manages to spell his name wrong...)
A special mention now for composer Doug Katsaros who gets himself an ‘All sound effects programmed and synthesized by’ credit. He’s a big name on Broadway (or possibly just off it) having orchestrated
The Rocky Horror Show, arranged
Footloose and written shows based on
Moby Dick and
Great Expectations. He also wrote the music for the animated version of
The Tick. Unfortunately
Star Crystal seems to have been one of his early credits and it must be said that his tuneless, electronic doodlings never bloody stop. Action scenes, tense moments, effects shots, over dialogue - it sounds like the man is tuning up his synthesiser for 90 minutes. (Trivia fans should note that Katsaros and the Daphne-voice woman were both members of an improv comedy troupe in the late 1980s called Noo Yawk Tawk.)
Production designer Steve Sardanis (who is also dead - what, is there a ‘Curse of
Star Crystal’?) was assistant art director on
The Towering Inferno and art director on
Snowbeast. Costume designer MaryAnn Bozek seems to have gone into hiding after this film but recently resurfaced on
Reno 911! and
Balls of Fury. Script supervisor Nancy Hansen worked on
Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Toolbox Murders, Airplane!, Back to the Future, Turner and Hooch and
Lethal Weapon 2. Sound mixer Clyde Sorensen did his schtick on episodes of
Battlestar Galactica and
Buck Rogers.
Okay, what of the ‘special visual effects’? Step forward one Lewis Abernathy who also - get this - directed
House IV, wrote
DeepStar Six (and one of the many unproduced versions of
Freddy vs Jason) and acted in
Titanic. Apparently, Abernathy is a
Titanic nut who met Cameron on a diving expedition and suggested to him that he should make a film about the ship. Abernathy inspired the character of Lewis Bodine, the guy in the prologue who shows the computer simulation of how the ship sank, and when Cameron couldn’t find anyone to play the part - he gave it to Abernathy. But wait, there’s more. Abernathy is also a jobbing inventor and he inspired the characters of Walter (John Goodman) in
The Big Lebowski and Agent Abernathy in
Jason Goes to Hell. Next time you watch
Titanic, just pause the DVD at that point near the start and think: ‘Twelve years earlier, that man was in charge of special effects on
Star Crystal.”
There are a lot of people credited with effects on this film, considering those effects are pretty much limited to shots of the SC-37/45 flying through space and a quick look at the L-5 blowing up. I suppose there’s the crystal itself and the goop, but ‘Gar’ has his own crew with no fewer than 21 people involved in building and operating him/it. To be fair, they did have to do not only the giant slug-thing but also the tendrils that the slug-thing doesn’t have and the three-finger tendril claws that aren’t on the end of the tendrils. But 21 people? And that’s not including ‘The Gling’ who is credited with providing the creature‘s voice.
Harry Hathorne and T Lindsay built the model spacecraft; Hathorne later co-wrote a fantastic and extensive article on Disney’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for
Cinefantastique magazine. Model construction supervisor John Coats coincidentally worked on William Mesa’s 1995 Brigitte Nielsen-starrer
Terminal Force which was released in Japan as...
Star Crystal. He followed this picture with visual effects work on
UHF,
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Talos the Mummy, The Adventures of Pluto Nash and a whole load of other movies of distinctly variable quality. Construction of the L-5 space station is specifically credited to young Mr Abernathy and Justin Segal. Could he be the LA-based illustrator/designer and author of
The American Sign Language Puzzle Book? On this movie, anything is possible.
There are five visual effects assistants including Greg Huebner (now a location manager) and the distinctively named Tazzilo Baur who, as Tassilo Baur (and we have already seen how untrustworthy the spellings in these credits are) also worked on
A Nightmare on Elm Street, House, Witchboard, DeepStar Six and
Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Annette Buehre (now Annette Buehre-Nickerson) was in charge of ‘OPTICAM motion control photography’. Opticam was a company founded by Buehre and her husband in 1976 which provided both animation camera and optical printer services. Over the years she worked on innumerable commercials as well as TV projects such as Carl Sagan’s TV series
Cosmos.
I can’t claim to know precisely what ‘animation touch-up’ involves but it was done by Dan Kuenster who went on to co-direct
Rock-a-Doodle and
All Dogs Go to Heaven and also worked on
An American Tail and
The Land Before Time. I’m guessing he was related to Luke Kuenster (
Delta Force II) who handled second unit cinematography. Matte paintings (not that I noticed any, but there must have been at least one) were provided by Dave Goetz, later art director for Disney on
The Hunchback of Notre Dame and
Atlantis: The Lost Continent. Vince Prentice (
Piranha, The Capture of Bigfoot, Total Recall, Legend) gets the glorious credit ‘special effects make-up (dead bodies)’. His other claim to fame is making up Keanu Reeves for his uncredited role as Ortiz the Dogboy in
Freaked.
Lou Lazzara - ‘make-up/hair’ - has worked on various instalments of the
Friday,
Elm Street and
Halloween franchises as well as such titles as
Mutant, Teen Wolf Too, Face/Off and
Terminator 3, plus episodes of
Angel and
seaQuest and two
Weird Al videos! Also credited with make-up and hair are Blake Shephard (probably the Blake Shepard who later worked on
Buffy) and Kathy Tessalone, who worked in make-up for 15 years before moving into real estate and teaching; she was last heard of trying to get an animated series called
The Welbys off the ground.
Overseeing all this was ‘visual effects consultant’ Chuck Comisky - yes, the same guy who wrote and directed
The Evil Beneath Loch Ness. His other effects credits include
Battle Beyond the Stars, Strange Invaders, The Addams Family, The Crow, Dungeons and Dragons and
Blade.
Apologies if this is turning into a list of credits (hey, how do you think I feel having to italicise all these titles?) but there were just so many extraordinary people working on this, ahem, unique movie. Do we think that 1st AD Eric Weston could be the guy who, five years earlier, wrote, directed and produced
Evilspeak? I wouldn’t be surprised.
When critiquing a film this bad overall it’s very easy to get carried away and claim that everything about it is The Worst Ever. But let’s give it its due. The spacecraft models aren’t bad and the motion control used to photograph them works well. The acting is poor, that’s no doubt, but I’ve seen far, far worse. The alien is actually an imaginative design (or rather, two or three imaginative designs which don’t match). What plunges this film to the bottom of the cinematic barrel where even scraping for it seems thankless is the sheer haphazard nonsense that passes for a plot, the absolutely paper-thin characterisation (although it’s still not as bad as
Incubus) and the jaw-droppingly pisspoor production design.
Above all, I think it’s those tunnels that will haunt me to my grave. I know that cast and crew often refrain from criticising shoddy productions like this because, hey, it’s work. But can’t you just imagine them, in the evenings, when Lance Lindsay and Eric Woster weren’t around, saying to each other: “What’s with those tunnels, man? I mean, who would design a spaceship where you had to go from one room to another on your hands and knees? Was the ship design to be crewed by three-year-olds? Or just designed by three-year-olds? Sh! Sh! Here they come. Hi Lance, hi Eric!”
There is so much insanity and inanity in
Star Crystal that I can’t do justice to it all, even in a review of more than 5,000 words. A quick google will reveal other reviews around the net, some of them based on a 2003 R1 DVD release by Anchor Bay and many of them dwelling on different details to me. It’s worth reading them all as they vie with each other to find new superlatives for how awful the movie is. Given time, I would not be surprised to find this film established as an icon of awfulness, if not to
Plan 9 levels of infamy, at least up there with
Troll 2. (Or, for an example of how tolerant some people can be of even the worst shite, check out some of the user comments on the IMDB.)
MJS rating: D
And here they find the ‘totem’ of the title, except that it’s not like any totem pole that I, or they, (or anyone) has ever seen. It’s basically a stone column, square in cross section and about two meters high. In one side are three box-like recesses which house three very European-looking statues, each about 18 inches to two feet in height. The four-minute opening title sequence included numerous shots of these things moving slightly or their eyes glowing so it should come as no surprise that they somehow become animated later in the picture.
Then, shortly before the end of the movie, there is a surprisingly clever bit of plotting which turns the whole story (the curse one, not the killer dolls one) on its head. Unfortunately, this is followed by the inexplicable and unnecessary appearance of a couple of dodgy-looking zombies which rather deflate things.
