With my teenage fascination recently re-awakened, last night I dipped my toes into the Caroline Munro back-catalogue. And I really, really wish that I hadn’t.
Starcrash. Italy’s 1979 answer to Star Wars, featuring Ms. Munro, a pre-Knight Rider David Hasselhoff and an embarrassed Christopher Plummer. I say 'answer to', but actually I mean 'direct rip-off' – when the hero pulls out a light-sabre half way through the movie I was so past counting the moments of über-homage that it didn’t even register as inappropriate.
Sometimes a film is genuinely so bad it’s good. I have to ‘fess up to being charmed all the way through Troll 2, although my son and girlfriend have slightly different memories of the experience. Future Force, House of the Dead, Maniac Cop… you all have thoroughly un-deserved places in my heart.
But sometimes a film is so bad that it just plain sucks.
From the opening shot of a disappointingly short space-craft passing slowly over the top of the camera, I knew that I was in for 94 minutes of stuff that I’d already seen somewhere else. Better.
And therein lies the difference between a guilty pleasure and a wasted couple of hours: ambition. If you try and show me something new, albeit in a way that offends every cinematically-sensitive neurone in my brain, I’m at least engaged. Show me something derivative, and I’m bored. Sadly, this is where a massive number of low-budget zombie movies land. Something to bear in mind if you’re planning to throw something new into a densely populated genre.
Anyway, I’ll leave it as an exercise for the attentive viewer to figure out why I had fond memories of this from my deepest darkest youth. For everyone else, I’ll just leave you with a nagging sense of 'yeah, but what has this got to do with Resurrection?'
Welcome to the problem with blogging. Some days something entertaining happens. Some days are spent working through the unbloggably-boring details. Edited.
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