Bad SciFi - or how I spent my Thanksgiving day

Three really shitty movies. I am not sure if I enjoyed them, or if I wasted a holiday. But I am becoming an aficionado of bad cinema. Scratch that, I am addicted to the genre of SciFi trash

Saturn 3

I read a pithy review of an early 1980’s Science Fiction flick, titles “Saturn 3”, and I thought to myself, why not spool it up while I was making the Chili Verde for dinner that my wife asked for instead of the big bird.

Turns out it was streaming on Amazon Prime video for no fee (just a couple of commercial breaks), so why not.

The film was from 1980, and the premise is somewhat warped. The Earth’s population had exploded, and there were bases all over the solar system to help augment the resources of the Earth, and a new super “robot” was part of the evolution of the projects. A captain was picked to pilot the delivery and start up of the robot on outpost Saturn 3, an outpost that was doing research on how to produce food to help keep the starving hordes of Earth fed.

But the original captain was shunted out an airlock (rather violently) by the character played by Harvey Keitel who washed out of the program for mental instability (I think you can see where this is going).

Keitel then usurps the ship taking the robot (in pieces) to the outpost on Saturn 3.

Of course, the outpost is just two people, played by Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett. Your classic older creeper with the young hotness of Farrah. A tired and predictable trope, especially in the 70’s and 80’s.

The arrival of Keitel upsets the dynamic, and bad shit starts happening.

I got about 2/3rds of the way through the movie before I tossed up my hands. It was soooooooo bad, it was just unwatchable. IMDB has it rated as a 5.1, and I have to say that is a generous rating. I am guessing that it is so high because you get a scene with Farrah Fawcett’s breasts in all their glory. Whoopie.

Galaxy of Terror

So, I went hunting for other movies to watch that were similar, and Amazon’s algorithms popped up “Galaxy of Terror”. In this “gem” a rag-tag crew is sent on a rescue mission, and what they face is their deepest fears. It turns out that the alien intelligence is able to telepathically identify what your horrors are and to manifest them.

About 90 minutes of heinous deaths caused by ET organisms that boggle the mind, coupled with a lot of excessive gore, and pretty unbelievable group dynamics.

But in the end, the master of the intelligence was looking for one person who could conquer their fear and then become the new “master”.

I clicked on this because the only name I recognized in the cast was Erin Moran, who played Joanie on Happy Days. I never thought she was good on that series and I wanted to see if her acting ever improved.

Narrator: It did not.

This one was rated 5.0 on IMDB. Looks like I was headed in the wrong direction.

Inseminoid

Third up was also from 1981, a fine film called Inseminoid. Sort of a copycat of the original Alien, but with a twist that the alien inseminates a human female who then is endowed with super strength and the ability to breathe the atmosphere, and a winnowing of the players on this “base” that ends with them all dead, a pair of alien infants, and the clean up crew ultimately bringing these aliens back to the human population centers.

It was just awful. IMDB’s rating has this one at a 4.0 out of 10. And that feels generous.

But there are some bare skin shots, so if that is your thing, have at it.

Summary

Look, I LOVE me some SciFi schlock, and frankly, there are buckets and buckets of this slop on Amazon Prime Video service. So, while I spent about 5 hours watching these (well, I did abandon Saturn 3), I did enjoy it. Nothing like vintage 1980’s B-movie SciFi.

Just hook that shit to my veins!

But I can’t in good conscience recommend this shite to anyone. If Amazon is recommending these to you, think about what wrong turns you’ve made in life to deserve an algorithm that will dish up this swill.

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