Director: "Al Bradley" (a.k.a. Alfonso Brescia)
Cast: Yanti Somer, Gianni Garko, Malisa Longo, Nino Castelnuovo

Way back in 1977, the major Hollywood studio 20th Century-Fox released a science fiction movie with a healthy budget to hundreds of theaters around the world, a movie that made an impact on the audiences that went to see it. It was no ordinary science fiction movie - let me list some of the ingredients it had. Among its main characters was a young man who on his quest with some other people stumbled upon a young woman. The young man and the young woman formed a bond together, never considering at any time any possibility that they may later discover they were actually brother and sister. During their mutual quest, they are accompanied by an older fellow who pilots a big and unique-looking craft. In the craft, the characters travel through hostile environments that result in them getting into situations of peril. In one such situation, the young man and women are pursued by dozens of enemies, and have to cross a wide gap in order to get to temporary safety. The group of protagonists have to struggle in water mixed with junk at one point. There are also some weird lifeforms the protagonists have to deal with that are often hostile in nature. We even get to witness a world being blown up. At the end of the movie, the protagonists are welcomed with open arms into a small pocket of hope in this troubled environment that they are welcome to stay in. By now I am pretty sure that you know what particular movie I am talking about. But for those who don't, the movie I am talking about is... Damnation Alley. What? Huh? Just think about it for a moment - all of what I just listed about the movie I was talking about can be found in Damnation Alley, not just in the other 1977 20th Century-Fox movie that popped up in your mind while I was listing those plot elements.

For the millions of readers of The Unknown Movies who somehow don't know what movie I was really talking about, that movie is Star Wars. Those who know even a little about the movie will almost certainly have some idea of the instant impact that movie made not just on Hollywood cinema, but in world cinema. It's interesting to compare how the impact was different in Hollywood and the rest of the world. Certainly, it planted the seeds of blockbuster mentality in both countries that (for better or worse) have fully blossomed in this day and age. But I want to compare the first few years of cinema in Hollywood and elsewhere after Star Wars was released. You might think that in Hollywood, where there is both so much power and money, other Hollywood filmmakers in major studioswould be making their own clones of Star Wars. As it turned out, however, there weren't quite as many as you might think. There were movies like Flash Gordon, Battlestar Galactica, Krull, and Buck Rogers, of course. But after those obvious movies, it starts to get difficult to think of others blatant Star Wars imitations coming out of major studio Hollywood in the first few years after the original was released. Instead, the big Hollywood studios seemed more content to come up with blockbusters that covered a wide range of different genres. Some certainly were science fiction, but there were a lot more blockbusters that were action movies, horror movies, comedies, or just about any potentially lucrative movie genre that you can think of. However, outside of the United States of America, the output of movies obviously inspired by Star Wars was a lot stronger. Japan, Turkey, Italy, and other countries churned out a lot of these clones despite having a lot less of the money, skill, and basic story understanding that was needed to make the universally beloved Star Wars.

Having seen some of these ragged foreign clones, it got me to recently wonder why these foreign countries were more gung-ho - despite their severe limitations - to ape Star Wars than people on the same soil as the people who made the original movie. After thinking about it a little, I have several theories. One theory of mine is that Star Wars was so ground-breaking and changed the rules of movie-making so drastically that foreign filmmakers in jealousy wanted to show Hollywood they could do the same despite their limitations. A more likely theory is that since these foreigners saw how much money Star Wars made over the world, a space movie of their own had a chance of making serious coin too. Whatever the reason or reasons may be, there was a mad rush by foreign filmmakers to imitate Star Wars for several years after 1977. I thought it might be fun to take a look at one particular clone. Since Italy seemed to make the most clones, I decided to pick one from there, my specific choice being Star Odyssey. While I didn't expect it to beat or even match the original movie, I was confident I would find it interesting to some degree - even if the degree wasn't one that the filmmakers intended to put in the movie. Unlike Star Wars, Star Odyssey doesn't take place a long time ago in a galaxy far away. Instead, it primarily takes place around Earth many centuries from today. A Darth Vader-like dude named Kess (the actor playing him isn't credited - probably for a good reason) from another planet goes to an intergalactic auction, one where various planets from different parts of the universe are up for sale. (Did L. Ron Hubbard see this movie and get inspired before writing Battlefield Earth? Lord, don't ask me why I read that book.) Anyway, he decides to purchase one particular planet, that being Earth. He travels to Earth to take a look at what he bought, and promptly starts to destroy Earth's military bases and anything else that may provide resistance, and gather human slaves to sell to far off worlds. Understandably, military leader commander Barr (Franco Ressel, Sabata) is irked by this, and orders Lieutenant "Hollywood" Carerra (Nino Castelnuovo, The Five Man Army) to work with genius scientist Mauri (Ennio Balbo, Street People) so that Mauri can reunite the old team he used to work with in troubled times such as what is happening now. Mauri enlists the services of his niece Irene (Yanti Somer, Man Of The East) and not long afterwards everyone is gathered, including the E.S.P. gifted Han Soloish Dirk (Giannie Garko, If You Meet Sartana... Pray For Your Death), a couple of imprisoned chemists named Bridget (Malisa Longo, A Cat In The Brain) and Sean (Chris Avram, The Violent Professionals), and a boxer (yes, a boxer) named Norman (Roberto Dell'Acqua, The Fighting Fists Of Shanghai Joe) who brings with him a couple of robots to help out. And help is what they really need, since Kess with his robot army seems determined to wipe out humanity.

For many potential viewers of a Star Warsesque movie of this sort, having been spoiled to death from watching the real thing to death, they will demand that the movie must meet certain expectations at a much higher level than with other kinds of science fiction movies. I would bet my life savings that one of those expectations they have high standards for would be the look of the movie - the sets, costumes, props, and the special effects. How good is Star Odyssey in these areas? Actually, for a movie of this pedigree, the question should be just how bad the movie gets in its overall look. For those who have already have some kind of taste for Italian sci-fi, my report that every attempt of the movie to succeed visually fails won't be too surprising. I could go on listing multiple examples of the movie's unconvincing look, from androids that look like the iconic Dutch Boy mascot wearing silver fire-retardant clothing, to moments when these androids are "cloned" in front of our eyes by just having one android come out of another by imposing and moving an extra image of the same android image. But I don't think it's really important to go into detail as to why the production design of Star Odyssey is downright terrible. The real question to ask is whether these sets, costumes, props, and special effects are so awful that they may provoke a viewer into fits of hilarity. Unfortunately, I didn't laugh once at these shoddy visuals. From start to finish, all of them have a feeling that director Al Bradley (Iron Warrior) and his team simply didn't give a damn about how they all looked. Bradley and company didn't care at all, and that's the key as to why shoddy visuals like these don't inspire mirth from this or a lot of other bad movies. When someone is trying hard and fails spectacularly, we can laugh seeing great effort being wasted. Related to that is when F/X teams are obviously so naive with what they end up making, we can laugh at what deranged minds they obviously had. But when the director or crew doesn't care about something particular, how can we in the audience care enough about it to find it legitimately good or so-bad-it's-good? It just becomes embarrassing and infuriating for the audience.

At their best, the visuals for Star Odyssey are just odd, like when two robot characters introduced later in the movie have what look like the Jewish Star of David on the top of their heads. The poor production design happens to give the movie an additional problem - there is no feeling of awe, no feeling we are in a world much different that ours right now, no feeling that the characters have great and believable powers and Earth may be in danger from a menace much more alien than any menace we currently know. It just seems so phony. No wonder then that when it comes to portraying fight-for-your-life battling of one sort or another, the movie pretty much fails here too. There are a couple of moments with characters blatantly aping Jedi lightsabre battles that do have some energy, but each moment is over fairly quickly, and the movie returns to being boring. This includes the climactic blatant Death Star battle imitation, where director Bradley is content to mostly just focus close-ups of the characters in the cockpits of their spaceships, making it much slower and boring than you can possibly imagine, especially since there is no music during this sequence. To top it off, Star Odyssey middle-fingers the audience right after this climax has a concluding scene that abruptly stops midstream while a character is talking so that the closing credits can start to be displayed. Though honestly, I had long stopped caring about the movie's story for various reasons. Even if I could have overlooked the fact that the Earth auction sequence comes up 33 minutes into the movie instead of right at the beginning of the movie just before Kess enters our solar system (no, it's not fashioned as a flashback, and this scene ends midstream just like the closing sequence), the story unfolds at such a slow pace (it's almost an hour before all the good guys have assembled) that the movie's unoriginality and general incompetence become more apparent.

That general incompetence to be found in Star Odyssey does stir up unintended laughs - three times. All three laughs come from moments involving the character Norman prancing around in a really silly manner. There are other acrobatic feats by actor Dell'Acqua that do catch your attention, but apart from that I didn't care about his character at all. Or any other character in the movie, for that matter. For example, while you might think that the chief villain Kess might be hissably evil and a constant threat like Darth Vader, he's anything but. We learn pretty much nothing about him, not even in the scenes where he actually shows up; he's actually offscreen for most of the movie. As for the other characters and the actors that play them, they are almost uniformly bland and forgettable. Like Kess, none of them seem to realize that they are in a struggle for extremely high stakes, the fate of the planet Earth. Maybe the uninspired surroundings I described earlier completely sapped any enthusiasm from them. The saddest sight among the cast is seeing actor Gianni Garko, who earlier in his career had been so cool and charismatic as spaghetti western gunslinger Sartana, but in this movie reduced to a crumbling empty shell of his former persona. "Empty shell" is probably the best way to sum up Star Odyssey; it only does enough to have a running time of 103 minutes, and has no desire to do anything else. If you really want to have a taste of Italian Star Wars knockoffs, you would be far better off looking for a copy of either Starcrash or Escape From Galaxy 3. Sure, they are stupid movies too, but at least they have genuine energy and enthusiasm on display to make them at the very least unintentionally amusing.

(Posted March 19, 2025)