Galaxy of Terror

Over the course of a very long career, Roger Corman served as producer on a huge number of low budget movies. Some of them turned out to be classics in spite of their budget (Piranha), and some turned out to be campy fun (Humanoids from the Deep). Most of them, unfortunately, turned out like Galaxy of Terror.

Released in 1981, this sci-fi horror film features a fairly recognizable cast. There’s Erin Moran (Joanie from Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi, beginning a downward career cycle), Edward Albert (sporting quite the pornstache), Ray Walston, and genre mainstays Robert Englund and Sid Haig. I doubt that anyone of them puts it on their résumé in bold print. Reportedly, Sid Haig was so disgusted with the dialogue he asked permission to play his character as a more-or-less mute (he has one line.). If you’ve seen a lot of Sid’s movies, you know dialogue that shocks him has to be a high level of bad.

The movie is mostly a rip-off of Alien, with a bit of Star Wars’ New Age bull thrown in for good measure. In the future, a distress call from a crashed ship is received by The Master, the leader of the world. We know he’s special because his head is a glowing red light. He spends his time playing a future version of checkers with an old woman, but pauses long enough to dispatch a rescue expedition, whose crew is carefully chosen because they all hate each other to various degrees and for various reasons. They also all come completely apart under the slightest pressure, a great trait for their jobs, no doubt. Moran plays a psychic, but if she was any good at it, she would have seen how the movie would turn out, and gone to work at Waffle House instead.

After a harrowing 45 second trip through space, the hapless crew arrives on the Planet of the Bad Matte Paintings. There, they are killed one by one by their worst fears. Sid Haig declares “I live and die for crystals” and before you can figure out what the hell he’s talking about, a crystal kills him. The blonde crew member mentions she hates worms, and gets raped to death by a giant maggot. You might want to read that sentence again, just in case you didn’t want to grasp it. A woman gets fairly graphically raped by a giant maggot. It is possible this was intended to be titillating, but it is a woman being forcibly sexually penetrated by a giant worm, and I don’t want to meet the person who is turned on by that.

Some terrible special effects and listless acting later, and the movie comes to an early and much appreciated end. Along the way, we are treated to some of the worst dialogue I’ve heard, so I think Sid was on to something. My favorite line is probably “I’m too scared to be afraid” but there are plenty of howlers.

The most interesting fact about the movie is it served as the debut of James Cameron, who was the production designer and second unit director. Reportedly, he got the job by demonstrating how to get maggots to move on a fake severed arm (he ran electric current through it). Bill Paxton, who would become better known as an actor and frequent collaborator of Cameron, was a set dresser on the production.

Probably the best thing to say about this film is that most of the cast and crew had better things in their future. If you take my advice, you’ll give this one a miss. You probably won’t.
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Humanoids From The Deep

Not every movie can be a big-budget affair with a prestige director and Leonardo DiCaprio as the star. Some have to be more modest, low-budget fare, and they generally rely on one of the twin attractions of sex or violence to get an audience. No one understood this better than legendary producer Roger Corman, and his 1980 film Humanoids from the Deep may well be the ultimate intersection of cinema sex and violence.

The setting is a fishing village in the Pacific Northwest that has fallen on hard times. The fishing industry is suffering, and the community is torn between two factions, one which favors bringing in a cannery owned by the stock greedy corporation to provide jobs, and the other which wants to preserve the nature of the town, most represented by the local Native Americans. Well, Native American, since only one is seen in the movie. The two town groups are joined by a small party from the big corporation, including a scientist (Ann Turkel) who has come up with a way to make fish grow faster (uh-oh). All this backstory is presented in a perfunctory, by-the-numbers manner, which is okay, since we started watching this to see sea monsters kill people, not feel guilty about raping the environment. The lead, of sorts, is a sympathetic local fisherman played by Doug McClure, several years and many pounds removed from his heyday, and the villain is a hard-nosed local portrayed by the ill-fated Vic Morrow, sporting an unfortunate white-fro. But enough of that.

A series of attacks begin, of strange humanoid creatures arising from the, er, deeps. They rip men apart, while attacking women sexually for breeding purposes, ignoring the inconvenient biological fact that two different species find it difficult to interbreed, or that a fish-man would find a human woman as sexually attractive as a human man would a flounder (let’s not go there). The attacks increase in severity and culminate in an all-out assault at the town’s Salmon Festival. Irritatingly, despite salmon being the backbone of the local economy, none of the cast can pronounce it. The “L” is silent, folks. We are also treated to a scene of exposition as the Turkel character explains the situation is basically her fault, as one of her experiments has gone very wrong. She seems generally unconcerned with this, but that may be the limitations of the actress, other than callousness of the scientist, since the movie follows the old rule that an attractive woman can’t be to blame in these things. Must be the corporation instead.

Much blood is spilled, many breasts are bared, and we are treated to the unfortunate ultimate effect of the creature’s attacks on women.

Roger Corman is one of the most prolific producers in movie history, with a staggering 393 producing credits listed on imdb, although that number may change daily. Although his reputation is that of a guy who could make an exploitation flick as quickly and cheaply as possible, a number of big names went to “school” on his productions. Through the years, he gave work to Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante and James Cameron, all of whom seem appreciative for Corman giving them a shot. He understood what attracts an audience to such a cheaply made film, and his terse instructions to director Barbara Peeters for the movie was supposedly “Kill the men, rape the women.” When Peeters turned in a cut with plentiful gore but mostly suggested sex, he fired her, and got a second unit director to shoot more nude scenes.

So there you have it. The movie is a lot of cheesy fun, in a SyFy channel movie way, but it is mostly gore and nudity. I think most people with a sense of humor would like it, but if you give it a try, you do know what you are letting yourself in for.

In some markets, the movie is known by the more unimaginative title of Monster, which must have shocked some viewers expecting a serious drama with Charlize Theron in uncomfortable prosthetics.
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