Italy tries to do Star Wars - War of the Planets (1979)

My latest surgery finally has almost completely closed my wound but I'm still here watching public access on the hospital tv. I never know what I'm going to get, but I know I'm going to inflict it on you dear dramanauts.

More effort was put into this poster than the movie.

This time I found what was possibly the worst of the countless low budget attempts to cash in off Star Wars in the late 1970s. You know how they used to make Spaghetti Westerns because Italy was so poor and cheap to shoot in? They also made truly awful sci-fi notable for goofy costumes and sound effects that would be more at home in a Hollywood children's serial of the 1930s. Instead of trying to give a detailed analysis I think it's better to just share my train of thought.

Don't ever say Star Trek TOS uniforms were goofy.

The Movie

• everyone is wearing goofy euro space uniforms that look like Buck Rogers shit from the 1930s

• people's mouths usually aren't seen while they talk because it's made to be dubbed

• lots of gesticulating and jumping and hugging, not sure if it's because they can't rely on dialogue or this is just what wops do

• there's a supercomputer called Wiz... But can we trust a computer?

• Captain Hamilton plays by his own set of rules and punches his superiors when he feels like it, hates computers, but we need him for this mission

• Some scientist woman has forgotten how to love and needs the greasy captain to teach her

• chica declares that he was so good she'll never go back to robotic s*x toys, Captain declares this his first victory over machines

• Enemy flying saucers whizz by with goofy theremin noises

• even the journos at the panicky press conference all wear identical jumpsuits for some reason

• Ship is damaged so there's lots of old time radio sound effects and cheap effects like the camera slowly spinning around

• there's an actual Nixie tube on the bridge, most high tech looking device in the movie

• Crash land on Planet Dark Stage. Not much happening

• Lots of blundering around in darkness until eventually someone finds a scary robot

• the robot is a red light shining through the front grill of a car or something, we know it's bad because scary music plays and everyone screams

• now this is a slasher movie as each tard gets bumped off one by one

• Captain got teleported to a cave more wandering around looking for the origin of the strange signals

• captured by blue people who speak through telepathy

• An ancient race that was overthrown by their own machines, nuclear war, every scifi trope that had been tired a generation earlier

• captain makes a deal with the Blue Man Group to defeat the monster haunting them

• captain goes back to the ship to get weapons, apparently destroys that scary robot from before?

• meanwhile on Earth... A scene happens for some reason

• Captain's ship's computer tells him to push a red button to kill the bad guy in the end

• There's some kind of attack on the ship? 90% of the screen is always dark so it's impossible to tell what's supposed to be going on

• there's a big bad robot with lots of bright colored light

• Various tired scifi tropes, he wants to build an army of super robots

• he brought the humans here to repair him by putting a few printed circuit boards into slots

• Captain fixes the robot but then throws a rock at his red button destroying him

• The whole planet is going to blow up, we need full power

• I think at some point Captain's gf was killed???

• the peepeeheads on Earth grovel and thank the Captain for saving them, say that humans really are better than machines

• one member of the Blue Man Group is rescued and coming back on their ship

• that evil robot they killed a long time ago has possessed a crew member, it's now jumping between them

• Blue Man gets in a fist fight with a crew member possessed by the villain

• the humans eject them both into space, think they've solved the problem

• Captain's baby has just been born???

• Captain asks the computer for an ETA home, it calls him an "Earthling" so he realizes it's possessed by the evil villain computer!!!

• FIN

Conclusions

Somehow they inflicted this movie on other poor countries around the world.

I'm not really doing justice to just how bad it is. Somehow it uses every formulaic scifi cliche and is still incomprehensible half the time. Most of the screen is completely dark all the time to hide how embarrassingly cheap everything is, but what you do see is still embarrassingly cheap. All I can say for the story is that it's humans vs. computers theme makes the ending of Mass Effect 3 look high brow.

My bro Captain Hamilton didn't even get a chance to pick a color in the end. I guess the synthetics were that jealous of his biological peepee.

Several of these shit movies were made by the same team and apparently they're public domain now, so maybe we could have one for an rDrama movie night. The goofy impoverished Eurotrash character of them is quite enchanting.

This movie was directed by "Al Bradley". No, that's the name on his birth certificate.