BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980) **1/2 Alternate titles might include "'John Boy' Walton Gets Laid After 500 Years," or "The Seven Samurai Lose Their Minds in Space." Offers a special insight into what people around the periphery of a production can accomplish, as several are well-defined and high profile. Producer Roger Corman, for example, must surely have contributed his talents and sensibilities to the scene where Darlanne Fluegel is hung from a meat hook, and probably personally designed Sybil Danning's dress, arguably the most horrid garment in the history of cinema. James Cameron, on the other hand, meticulously designed the spaceships which variously resemble a uterus and a cockroach, and one of which is inhabited by what appears to be a talking pumpkin. 'John Boy' (Richard Thomas) has to save his planet from destruction at the hands of the bad guys (isn't there anyone else?), but ends up on a planet where the mad scientist wants him to stay and breed with Fluegel. Terrified, he absconds, but she, never having seen a live boy before, pursues him. Thomas' innocence is clearly in jeopardy when Danning shows up to pinch his ass, but not as much jeopardy as is all the Scotch on the planet whenever George Peppard gets a second on screen. Robert Vaughn broods so vacuously that it's difficult to tell if he can't handle the part, or whether he's so great that he's playing perfectly to the sensibilities of the film. At one point the bad guys are attacking them with sound, a potentiality discussed several years earlier by no less than Jimmy Page and Allen Ginsberg. I wonder if Corman was eavesdropping from behind a potted palm or whether, like me, he read about it in the underground New York press. Several truly inspired scenes involving some guys that look like Kraftwerk, and the possibilities represented by the clone/collective conscious continuum.
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