Space Force Captain Larry Madison (Alfonso Brescia veteran Vasili Karis in the expected role) is a perfect example of manly manhood: short like an especially unimpressive piece of shrub, studly as a pornstar, hitable like William Shatner. On one of his shore leave adventures, Captain Larry lands in bed with Sondra (Sirpa Lane). The woman has more trouble than just a dubious taste in men - she has nightly dreams of getting lost on a strange planet, dining with a finely dressed guy in a castle, having sex, and fleeing through the alien woods (which look a lot like bog standard birch woods to me). She's quite sure that her dreams are more than normal nightmares, but telling heroic Captain Larry about it and watching him fall asleep to her troubles is all she'll get.
The hero's hero has more important things to do anyway - his newest mission will lead him and the crew of his new ship to a planet where the incredibly rare metal antalium can be found. And wouldn't you know? Sondra, or Lt. Richardson as she is called when she is dressed, is Larry's new route officer (Brescia for navigator, I suppose).
After the ship nearly crashes on the missions's target planet, Captain Larry and his crew stumble over its surface in search of their precious metal. Too bad that this is the planet Sondra has dreamt of and that the rest of her dreams is going to come true, too, with added satyrs, mind-controlling super computers, the erotic power of horse sex and quite a bit of nakedness.
After making a perfectly nonsensical (and incredibly awe-inspiring) quartet of SF films whose mere existence is only explainable by combining the Italian film industry, dadaism and the Situationist International in one conspiracy theory, every normal director would have been satisfied with his or her part in the history of the genre. Not so Alfonso Brescia. After a short pause (aka making two non SF films in about three weeks), the master returned to the genre, taking the final logical step in his body of work - making a pornographic SF film which he (or the producers) tried to sell as some kind of sequel to Walentin Borowczyk's The Beast.
Surprisingly enough, he produced a film with a certain amount of coherence (I'd even let myself go so far as to speak of "logic"), a certain amount of style, and his usual amount of inexplicable weird shit. Besides the (plot relevant, I shit you not) sex, the viewer is given a kind of best of the effects scenes from Brescia's earlier films. Cynical persons might interpret that as a cheapskate way to get any effects at all into the film, completely overlooking the wondrous pieces of wood and papiermache we haven't seen before, or the hairy satyr legs and ass that are most certainly new to this film.
And yes, it's all cheap and shoddy as hell, but made with a real enthusiasm that's absolutely disarming if you are inclined to be disarmed by the idea of things more than by their "good" execution; and yes, the dialog is terrible (and even less competently dubbed than usual in Italian films); and yes the acting is dubious at best.
But - and this is what is really important in art, right? - it's all made with the strange conviction of people who can't see any real difference between making a quick buck and making really interesting art that, yes, you can make a pornographic SF interpretation of a film which itself already re-interpreted a fairytale with a bit more sex than many viewers were comfortable with. You can do it, just with a handful of people ready to shed their clothes, scenes from and the sets of films you made a year ago and a complete lack of respect for the ways films are supposed to be made.
Alfonso Brescia, I bow before you.
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