The Science!? 04: Star Odyssey (1979)

An alien overlord named Cobol/Cobor (don't ask me about exact names here, the English dub is terrible) buys Earth in an auction. He soon appears in his invulnerable flying saucer near a futuristic Earth, attacks it and starts to take as many slaves as possible. Humanity's only hope is a dubious professor with psychic powers and a band of misfits he very slowly starts to assemble. For some reason somebody probably knows, the world government won't give him official help, so he has to use highly unconventional and illegal ways to capture his dream team. After about an hour, things happen. Then more things happen. Why? How? I don't know. Later even more things happen. There are fights. Finally, our heroes attack the enemy mothership. They win, as far as I'm able to tell. There's a promise to outfit the two odious comic relief robots with genitalia, so they can "proof their love for each other" - a clear foreshadowing of director Brescia's sf pornos (please, don't ask). A Happy End, I think.
On the seventh day George Lucas created Star Wars. Five minutes later, the Italian film industry heard about its success and started to churn out dozens of bizarre copies, clones and wannabes. For some of Italy's directors, like Star Odyssey's Alfonso Brescia, a long held dream of making space operas came true.
As my failure to produce a plot synopsis above shows, this film, as well as everything else Brescia touched was troubled by a complete disregard for things like logic, taste and sense. I don't want to sound pretentious, but the only word that really describes the Brescia experience for me is "dadaist". It makes more sense the more I think about it. If I am following Greil Marcus' logic in Lipstick Traces (and why shouldn't I) there is a spiritual/intellectual line that can be drawn from medieval flagellants and heretics to the Paris Commune to Dada to Surrealism to Punk Rock. Why not draw a line from Surrealism to bad Italian movies, when their hatred of order and sense itself is so obviously connected. Punk Rock and Italian SF films even started at the same time!