#15 - Galaxy of Terror (1981)

Galaxy of Terror (1981)

(dir. Bruce D. Clark)

A crew of explorers is sent on a mission to a distant planet to rescue the survivors of a spaceship crash. When they arrive, they find no survivors but instead a strange pyramid, where they encounter hallucinations of their deepest fears. This starts off as a partial rip-off of Alien, and was definitely trying to capitalize on the popularity of that film, but it does go its own way pretty quickly, for better or worse. It throws out basically any semblance of a plot by the end in favor of stringing together some pretty wild imagery and ideas. Among other things, it features killer tentacles, Robert Englund in a knife fight with his doppelganger, a psychic empath for some reason, and Sid Haig karate chopping his own arm off. Also an uncomfortable scene with a giant maggot that I'll get to in a moment.

One of the more interesting things about this film is that James Cameron served as Production Designer, and aesthetically this has a lot in common with Aliens, which he won't direct for another 5 years. The alien planet has the same sort of H.R. Giger-esque design, and the same seemingly never-ending storms. The pilot of the rescue ship, here played by Grace Zabriskie, is the only survivor of a previous mission that ended in disaster, which is pretty darn close to the role Ripley fills in Aliens. Now, this film had a fraction of the budget that Cameron would later get and therefore doesn't look nearly as good, but it still has the same sort of vibe. I will say though, that the sets and costumes do look a lot better than you'd expect, even if upon scrutiny they reveal themselves to be made of styrofoam takeout containers.

Back to the maggot thing - there is a pretty gross scene where a woman is raped by a giant maggot monster, and it's pretty explicit. The story is that the original version of the scene was a bit tamer, with nudity but no assualt, but the financial backers of the film required that it contain a sex scene so producer Roger Corman combined the two (and filmed it himself because director Bruce D. Clark refused). This sort of scene wasn't entirely unheard of in trashy exploitation films of the time - Humanoids from the Deep has something similar - but even so this one feels a bit worse than normal and it goes on for too long. So, fair warning.

Aside from that, this is a pretty wild film that fans of shameless b-movie trash will enjoy. It comes in at a tight 81 minutes and move briskly the whole time, throwing tons of weird ideas at the wall to see what sticks. The plot is thin and dumb and nothing that happens makes much sense, but it looks cool. It's also fun to see a young Robert Englund playing a normal character instead of Freddy Krueger. Tentatively recommended if everything I've said doesn't bother you.