Out of every popular movie series, I think Star Wars spawned my favorite rip-offs. The only thing better than outer space adventures on a 20th Century Fox budget is outer space adventures on a New World Pictures budget.
Take Battle Beyond the Stars. It’s as shameless as any of ’em. It’s got lasers, spaceships, a naive young hero, a few grizzled rogues with hearts o’ gold, a glowering evil overlord, robots with likable personalities and alien races with unlikable personalities. It even takes after George Lucas’s penchant for horizontal wipes to transition between scenes.
Add it all up and you’ve got something that’s more than able to tide over any kid who loves Star Wars and doesn’t mind Richard Thomas’s giant mole.
Oh and also both movies borrow from Akira Kurosawa films. Star Wars has some famous parallels with The Hidden Fortress while Battle Beyond the Stars liberally nibbles off of The Seven Samurai.
Here’s the deal: a pacifist planet who don’t have (or even value) money are suddenly attacked by the baddest bad guy in the whole galaxy (John Saxon!) and they have no idea what to do. They don’t have weapons. They don’t even know how to use weapons. The best way to save their bacon is to find some mercenaries. So, Richard Thomas zips off into space in search of people who are willing to kick ass for free. The team he assembles include a couple of alien weirdos, George Peppard as a space cowboy from Earth, Robert Vaughn (in a very funny, ultra-straight-faced performance) as a seasoned assassin in hiding who takes the job because he’s losing his mind from boredom and Sybil Danning as a perfect Frank Frazetta warrior woman with huge breasts and an even bigger urge to fight. Solid entertainment follows. Everyone here seems to know full-well that they’re in a trashy movie, but they’re still doing their best.
The screenplay is by John Sayles back in the days when he paid the bills turning out schlock for Roger Corman while he was working on his getting his own, more personal films made.