Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

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Anyone remember this bad boy? It was B-movie king Roger Corman's attempt at jumping on the "Star Wars" bandwagon. Unfortunately he had the not-so-brilliant idea of releasing it during the same summer as "The Empire Strikes Back" in 1980, so his movie pretty much got crushed like a bug.

Great, cheesy flick though. Roger may have liked to crank'em out cheap but he spent some decent coin on this movie's costumes, sets and special FX (legend has it that at $2 million, this was the most expensive film Roger Corman Productions ever made) and had some name actors like Robert Vaughan, Richard "John-Boy Walton" Thomas, George Peppard, and John Saxon. Of course, what most red-blooded American boys remember about this movie was Sybil Danning, in her nearly-non-existent costume. A young James Cameron served as a special FX technician and model maker on "Battle Beyond the Stars," it was one of his first gigs in Hollywood.

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Mmmmmm.... Space Boobies.

The plot of "Battle" is not original in the slightest (Corman himself admits it's a space based ripoff of "The Seven Samurai") -- in a nutshell, a peaceful planet of farmers gets attacked by a Darth Vader wanna-be, and since the planet's inhabitants are pacifists, they have no weapons or military hardware to fight back on their own. They elect one of their own (John-Boy) to travel around in a beat up space ship hiring a group of mercenaries to do the fighting for them. Along the way, of course, John Boy learns how to kick ass and becomes a man. Paper thin stuff but hell, it's a load of fun to watch. This came to HBO when I was about twelve years old, and I swear I must've watched it about twenty times. Of course, I was a full on Star Wars Geek at the time and was willing to watch anything sci-fi related. The last time I saw it was maybe 10 years ago when it suddenly turned up on cable one night and though I laughed at bits of it, the movie has held up surprisingly well in a kiddie/retro sort of way.

Given that Roger Corman never missed out on ways to save a buck, many of "Battle"'s spaceship battle/dogfight scenes were recycled in his mid '80s film "Space Raiders" and the theme song turned up in the trailer to the infamous 1994 "Fantastic Four" movie that was never released.

DVD copies of this movie are hard to come by, but there is hope for a new DVD version soon because "Shout! Factory" recently announced a deal with Corman Studios to re-release a whole mess o' his classic film library on DVD and Blu-Ray starting this Spring. "Battle" isn't on the release slate just yet (the first few titles to roll out include "Rock N Roll High School," "Suburbia" and the original "Piranha") but let's hope they get around to this one eventually!

The special effects have been recycled MANY times in many films, most notably Space Raiders, but there are a bunch of other schlock-fests out there that use it.

I also saw this movie on it's original HBO run...and like you I probably watched it 20 times. I saw the DVD release at some point, it doesn't hold up all that well but hey...it's so much fun nobody really cares.

The fact that the main ship is shaped like a giant vagina makes it even more interesting...

Detuned wrote:

The fact that the main ship is shaped like a giant vagina makes it even more interesting...

Hahahaha, I knew I couldn't have been the only one who noticed the ship's rather, er, distinctive shape. Though it was YEARS before I realized that ship's resemblance to the female reproductive system.... complete with fallopian tubes!

I can't help myself, I like to consider myself a sci-fi buff, but I prefer schlocky, B-Grade action fests like this movie to the more cerebral sci-fi. (In other words, I was a "Star Wars" kid, not a "Star Trek" kid).

Now that y'all got me a whole new sci-fi forum to play in, look forward to threads on such forgotten sci-fi films as "StarCrash," "The Last Starfighter," "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" and whatever other relics I can dig up from my fevered brain!!!

LASERBLAST!

I so hope this one makes it back on dvd... I even had it on Viewmaster back in the day

My friend hated the movie, because his name was Nestor

I vaguely remember this and I was too young to notice the Starship Vag, gotta check it out.

Space Tits there was my favorite part of this movie. good Sci Fi all around though.

DeathCult wrote:

Space Tits there was my favorite part of this movie.

"Space Tits" would be a great name for a band!!!

I think that I actually saw this in the theater!!!! I still love this movie in all its cheesiness!!!

Glad this thread made it back up. Has this been reissued yet FF? Alot of the other Corman films have come out recently.

I really want to see this now, it's funny, but I'm in one of those "relive the young teenage years" modes right now, revisiting music I used to listen to and movies I used to love.

Nostalgia can be quite fun all by itself.

Shawn D. wrote:

Glad this thread made it back up. Has this been reissued yet FF? Alot of the other Corman films have come out recently.

Funny you should ask, I got an e-mail from Amazon a week or so ago saying that the DVD release for "Battle" is "Coming Soon" ... I forget the exact date but it'll be out sometime in July.

RAD! I always thought it was cool that they used a "sonic weapon" to kill people in that movie, a neat idea not used much at the time it came out.

Plus, how can people not dig "John Boy in space".

Here's Amazon's page for all the titles in Roger Corman Cult Classics series... "Battle Beyond The Stars" will be out on July 12. Woot!

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I'm falling way behind on these... I wanna get my hands on the original "Piranha," "Death Race 2000" and "Galaxy of Terror" too!!

There are some good ones there!

I highly recommend "The Evil", "Up From The Depths", "Humanoids From The Deep" and this entire box set:
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"Battle Beyond the Stars" DVD was released yesterday! Too bad I'm broke.

Fat Freddy wrote:

"Battle Beyond the Stars" DVD was released yesterday! Too bad I'm broke.

I saw the blu ray at Amoeba yesterday, a bargain for only $14.99...alas I was there to sell things not buy things.

I showed the twenty-something kid I work with the "Battle" trailer the other day (I'm constantly loaning him vintage trash movies, I am trying to warp him into a fan of cinematic craptaculars in my image) and he sez he's gonna pick it up. I suppose I can always steal his copy for a while till I can git my own.

Netflix will probably add it to streaming, they have quite a few Corman flicks.

I'm going to add DVD rentals back to my Netflix account before they change the rules and up the price...still have til October for current members, so I guess I better start pirating now!

Now that I think about it, the kid I work with will probably just download "Battle" from Pirate Bay or something so I can probably get him to make me a copy. He hooked me up with a couple of goodies a while back that aren't available on DVD - "I Come In Peace" w/Dolph Lundgren and "Class of 1999" w/Malcolm McDowell. He checked those out on my recommendation and loved'em so he gave me copies as a thank you.

I saw Class of 1999 in the theater!

By the way, WHERE IS MY COPY OF THE BOOGENS???? HUH????

Shawn D. wrote:

I saw Class of 1999 in the theater!

By the way, WHERE IS MY COPY OF THE BOOGENS???? HUH????

It's been waiting for you to get settled!! PM me your new address and I'll dig it out and ship it to you!!