Galaxy of Terror (1981)

The spaceship Remus, belonging to a planetary culture ruled by someone going by the fortunately not copyrightable moniker of The Master, crashes down on a rather dangerous and mysterious planet.

The Master sends a second ship, the Quest, after it. The Quest is predominantly populated by character actors like Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Robert Englund, Grace Zabriskie, Ray Walston and Sid Haig who are perfectly built to turn the sparse hints the script offers about the characters and the world they inhabit into something that feels plausible and alive. Arriving at the planet, the Quest also crashes, and will need some repairs to fly out again.

At least the Remus is comparatively close by, so it doesn’t take long for our protagonists to stumble upon what’s left of its crew – dead bodies, killed under mysterious and obviously violent circumstances. There are some crew members missing, however, so there still may be survivors, somewhere. Perhaps they have made their way to the gigantic, creepy black pyramid looming on the horizon?

Before anyone from the Quest can start making their way there, as well, the newcomers begin suffering from the same troubles that must have killed the Remus’s crew – tempers begin to flare, moods darken, and whenever somebody is alone, they are killed – or worse – by a different monstrosity with the curious ability to disappear before anyone else can see it.

Bruce D. Clark’s Galaxy of Terror – produced by Corman’s New World Pictures - is typically considered as being on of the Alien rip-offs. Some of that sweet sweet, Corman money has certainly flown into the film because of that, but the Alien influence is mostly visible in the grubbiness of the tech, the very non-Star Trek (or Wars) characters, and the spirit of some of the production design (among others by James Cameron, who’d put that particular experience to good use a couple of years later when he made an actual Alien sequel). Much larger in feel and form loom Bava’s Planet of the Vampires – one of the core texts in science fiction horror on screen – and of course Forbidden Planet.

In fact, much of the film plays out like a less polite, more brutal and sexed/sleazed up version of the latter film, with added elements of a post-hippie interpretation of A.E. Van Vogt-style SF weirdness. Which works out very nicely indeed for the film thanks to its spirited, imaginative space gothic meets working class production design and practical monster effects that mix puppets, a bit of stop motion and whatever else was to hand in ways to make any monster kid happy.

Obviously, going by contemporary tastes, I could rather have done without the rape by giant worm scene (that makes a thing explicit many another horror movie prefers to keep implicit or plain metaphorical for a reason) – particularly since Clark films it very much as a scene we (as in the imagined all-male heterosexual audience) are supposed to be turned on by instead of squicked out. Which isn’t just unpleasant but based on very weird assumptions about male sexuality.

Fortunately, the rest of the monster business is much too good to let that one piece of unpleasantness destroy it, and Galaxy of Terror would be absolutely worthwhile for its effects and production design alone. The latter does also add a fine layer of cosmic dread to proceedings, uniting the promise of science fiction cinema to show us things we’ve never seen before with the (cosmic) horror dictum of showing us things we probably shouldn’t be seeing.