Submitted by Iain McLachlan 
(May 26, 2004)GALAXY OF TERROR
(US 1981)
Alternate Titles: PLANET OF HORRORS, MINDWARP: INFINITY OF TERROR; QUEST.
MetroColor
RT: 81 mins
Pro Co: New World Productions/United Artists Pictures Corp
Dir: B(ruce) D. Clark; James Cameron (2nd Unit);
Pro: Roger Corman; Co-Pro: Marc Siegler;
Wrs: Marc Siegler, B.D. Clark;
Exec in Charge of Pro: Mary Ann Fisher.
Pro Sup: Aaron Lipstadt;
Assist Pro Man: Charles Skouras III;
Pro Co-Ord: Don Opper;
1st Assist Dir: Peter Manoogian;
2nd Assist Dir: Betsy Magruder
Pro Account: Rupert Harvey.
Phot: Jacques Haitkin; Gary H. Wagner (2nd Unit);
Film Eds: R.J. Kizer, Larry Bock, Barry Zetlin;
Mus: Barry Schrader; Michael Hoenig (synth);
Pro Des: James Cameron, Robert Skotak.
Viz FX: Tom Campbell (Sup); Sara Nelson (Co-ord); Dennis Skotak, Austin McKinney (Phot); George Dodge, Steve Caldwell, Julia Gibson (addit phot);
Make-Up FX Sup: Thom Shouse;
Graphic Anim Des: Ernest D. Farino;
Optical FX Sup: Anthony Randel;
Addit Optical FX: Jack Rabin & Associates;
Stop Motion Anim: Brian Chin;
Prosthetics: Makeup Effects Lab.
Cast: Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Ray Walston, Bernard Behrens, Zalman King, Robert Englund, Taafe O’Connell, Sid Haig, Grace Zabriske, Jack Blessing, Mary Ellen O’Neill.
INTRODUCTION
Produced in association with Orion Pictures on a budget of some $5m, Jimmy T. Murakami’s Battle Beyond the Stars (80), one of several space operas spawned by the success of George Lucas’ cultural phenomenon Star Wars (77), proved to be one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by exploitation movie mogul Roger Corman and his New World Pictures studio.
Although expensive to mount, requiring the creation of a new special effects house within New World’s facility at Venice, California to service it, the film generated in excess of $13m box office revenues in the US alone. Emboldened by this success, Corman set up this equally ambitious (to the tune of c$4.5m), but considerably darker, genre item in association with the soon to be bankrupt United Arttists.
SYNOPSIS
On a desolate, storm-lashed planet on the edge of the universe, the sole survivor of a crashed spaceship, apparently being pursued by some foe, seals himself into a section of the craft but is attacked and killed by an unseen force. On another planet a very long distance away, two figures are seen playing a strange game. One, an old woman, is identified as the controller of the game while the other, his head replaced by a glowing red ball of light, turns out to be an all-powerful mystic called the Planet Master. A military officer contacts the Master to inform him of the loss of the vessel. When he is informed of the location of the crash, the mystic becomes very interested and devises a secret plan, despite the protestations of the game controller who believes that it is dangerous and will cause suffering and death. He commands the officer to take command of a rescue craft and travel with a crew selected by the Master to rescue the survivors of the crash. The crew are not to be informed of the mystic’s connection with the mission. Shortly after the ship’s personnel have been assembled and preparations for lift-off made. The officer, now listed as mission commander meets the captain of the vessel who immediately orders the ship into launch mode, even though the crew itself needs more time to organise. With only 30 seconds available, the team (most of whom had a history together) frantically scramble to their positions. The ship takes off and heads off into deep space, with the crew shaken but otherwise unharmed. The captain suggests that the mission commander is rather old for this type of mission. He agrees, saying that he has not been on an active mission for many years, whereas she has been on active duty now for over 25 years, since surviving a notorious disaster as a youth. The other crew members are unhappy to learn who their captain is, and even more so when she changes the preset co-ordinates for a hyper-space jump and immediately engages it. Within seconds they are hurtled across the universe to near the planet where their rescue target is located. As the ship approaches the planet’s atmosphere, it suddenly veers out of control and plunges toward the surface. The captain is unable to regain mastery of the craft and is about to give up when it mysteriously begins to slow down enough for her to perform an emergency procedure, allowing her to crash-land on the surface of the world. After recovering from the landing, the crew prepare to leave the ship and search for survivors. The team have a psi-sensitive female among their number. The team leader is unimpressed by her presence or her inability to detect any lifesigns whatsoever. Making their away across the landscape of the planet, they eventually reach the other vessel. Entering, the find evidence of a massacre with the crew dying horribly. The rescue team split into two and explore the craft. The find further evidence of something catastrophic having happened and, after disposing of the rest, take on victim back for analysis. The highly-strung, youngest member of the team, despite being reassured by his seniors, is traumatised by the atmosphere on the ship. It appears that his fears may be well founded as, out of sight, a grotesque creature is seen stalking him…
REVIEW
By 1981, the cycle of Star Wars-inspired galactic adventures, which had included titles like Kinji Fukusaku’s Message From Space (78), George McCowan’s The Shape of Things to Come and Aldo Lado’s L’Umanoide (both 79), as well as the Corman/Murakami venture, had effectively ran its course, commercially.
While still displaying some influences, mainly on a technical level, of the Lucas work, B.D. Clark’s Galaxy of Terror owes its existence, together several other early-to-mid 1980s productions like Luigi Cozzi’s Contaminazione (81), William Malone’s Scared to Death (82) and Douglas McKeown’s The Deadly Spawn (83), to the next big thing in genre cinema, Ridley Scott’s horror/sci-fi hybrid Alien (79).
The most obvious element lifted from the 1979 work is the film’s visual appearance that becomes very apparent as soon as the credits begin to play. Here the viewer is shown the familiar sight of a camera panning across a desolate, storm-battered planet where a crashed spaceship is seen ominously against the horizon. Like Alien, cinematographer Jacques Haitkin (A Nightmare on Elm Street 84), employs a mixture of blue filter and strobe lighting to create a suitably strange and atmospheric setting.
Also like the Scott film, a lot of use is made of terrified characters running up and down badly lit spaceship corridors, often shot with hand-held cameras and with particular emphasis on subjective camera shots.
Other material the viewer may recognise from that film include the rescue crew’s trudge across the debris littered landscape, their first sighting of the crashed spaceship along with their being dwarfed by it as they stand by it and the one of their number having an ulterior motive to being part of the team.
The most obvious feature, however, taken from Scott’s feature is that of the sets, created by production designers James Cameron and Dennis Skotak. This is especially true of the interior of the colossal pyramidal structure that is discovered by the crew, and which is believed by them to hold the fate of the remaining crash survivors as well as being the source of the force that forced them to land on the planet.
A mixture of physical construction and process work, these impressively oversized sets feature steeply angled ramps and platforms together with bizarre contours and grooves. Black in colour, they also appear drenched in condensation, giving the impression of something organic with the structure appearing to have been grown rather than built.
The underlying sexual element found in Alien is made much more overt in Clark’s movie, with hands seen probing deep inside very vaginal openings in walls, from which very phallic worm-like creatures sometimes erupt.
While Ridley Scott’s work clearly had an impact on the makers of Galaxy of Terror, it does deviate from that model in a number of respects, notably the absence of a single alien as the main threat, no chestburster sequence and no cat clichés, all of which are considered de rigueur for this type of venture. The false scares provided by the feline in the earlier feature are replaced by errant electrical cabling brushing against a character’s face.
B.D. Clark’s film in fact displays influences from a number of sources.
Because it was not in general circulation for some years prior to 1979, with the general movie-goer therefore unaware of its existence, Ridley Scott’s picture borrowed much of its style, and some plot details, from a 1965 science fiction movie called Planet of the Vampires, considered one of the key works in the wave of Italain science fiction movies initiated by Antonio Margheriti’s Spacemen (60) and Il Pianeta degli Unomini Spenti (61). This was an Italo-US production, directed by fantastic cinema maestro Mario Bava and partially funded by Roger Corman’s main employers of the 1950s and 1960s, American International Pictures (AIP).
Possibly unconsciously (although New World employees tended to pride themselves on very knowledgeable film buffs), Galaxy of Terror harks back to Bava’s work visually, and incorporates a key plot point of having one spaceship searching for the downed crew of another on a strange, barren planet where they come under attack from an undefined menace.
The solution to the plot found in the B.D. Clark’s film, that the survivors have come to the realisation that the ordeals they have endured are the results of their fears and anxieties being made real, either by some force within the pyramid or another party. This is a well-used plot device in science fiction and is now considered a cliché in the genre. It seems to have first been exploited cinematically in the 1962 Danish/American co-production Journey to the Seventh Planet, directed by Sidney Pink and has recently been featured in Paul W. Anderson’s Event Horizon (97) and Barry Levinson’s Sphere (98).
Some reviewers have also suggested a possible link with George Orwell’s seminal literary work 1984, in which the servant of a totalitarian government of the future uses the worst fears of the book’s hero, Winston Smith, against him for the purposes of turning him into a model citizen, although the actual connection between the screenplay by Marc Siegler (who normally performs as an actor, with films like Stephen Hopkins’ A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child 89 to his credit) and B.D. Clark seems rather tenuous..
At the climax, it is revealed that they huge pyramidal structure they have been investigating actually a huge machine used by the children of a long-vanished race to test themselves against their personal demons, as part of an initiation process. This seems to be a reworking of concepts found in Fred M. Wilcox’s classic Forbidden Planet (56) where the extinct peoples of the title world used immense electro-mechanical devices to boost their mental powers, giving their deepest thoughts physical form before losing control of them and being destroyed. There is at least one direct visual reference to Wilcox’s work when the rescue team make their way toward the centre of the pyramid by way of a series of platforms suspended within a massive glass and steel cavern, echoing the scene where Walter Pidgeon gives Leslie Nielsen a guided tour of the interior of the planet where the still function alien machinery is still automatically performing its tasks.
While basically a space opera, George Lucas’ Star Wars contains a number of elements that belong more easily in the fantasy genre, such as the concept of “The Force” which has been more fully developed as the franchise progresses. Fantasy, or what would now be labelled “New Age”, concepts also turn up in Galaxy of Terror.
The most obvious of these is the seemingly omnipotent mystical being identified as the “Planet Master”, whose face is obscured by a glowing red light. Conspiracy and gaming buffs may recognise such a character as being an Illuminated Master or agent of the Illuminati sect, said to control the affairs of mankind. Here the Master plays a strange electronic board game, the rules and exact purpose of which are not disclosed but which seem to involve determining the destiny of individuals or societies, implying that one’s fate is based decided entirely by the chance move in a cosmic game.
The Master is sometimes advised and assisted by an old woman known as the “Game Contoller”, played Mary Ellen O’Neill, who performance as a kind of oracle/shaman wouldn’t seem out of place in one of Roger Corman’s later sword and sorcery epics like the Deathstalker series.
The symbolism offered by the image of the pyramidal structure that the rescue team explore is an important feature of many “New Age” movements with particular emphasis being placed on the existence of hidden chambers (which the characters encounter), the significance of geometric designs providing clues to gaining access to other parts of the structure, and the importance of the inner sanctum of the pyramid where enlightenment presumably awaits.
Interestingly, the huge pyramid seen in B.D. Clark’s film seems to be based on Mayan rather than Egyptian design. This South American connection is underlined by the sequence when the rescue team’s spaceship takes off from its home world, with the craft being shown against a travelling matte of the bizarre lines found at Nazca in Peru, purportedly aerial markers or landing strips for our alien ancestors, implying that the influence of the race that built the pyramid extended to many worlds across the universe.
Another mystical element introduced into the mix is the presence of the throwing weapons owned by crew member Sid Haig (The Aftermath 82). In keeping with the film’s recurring triangular symbolism, they are three-pointed and made out of supposedly unbreakable crystal. It is suggested that the character has some form of psychic control over the weapons, resulting in his psychological collapse when they are shattered.
As a science fiction production, technically the movie is a triumph over its meagre resources. Particular mention should be made of the highly detailed miniature work (mainly the work of Robert Skotak, Strange Invaders 83) for the spacecraft used in the film (including a rather good crash sequence) and especially the highly elaborate pyramid which dominates the landscape of the planet (and that, when seen from certain angles, may remind some viewers of the urban structures seen in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner 82).
The production design by James Cameron and Skotak is imaginatively executed with the massive illuminated glass-fronted chamber that they characters find themselves travelling through or the glass maze that Erin Gray find herself trapped in. Many of the sets, while a combination of glass, plastic and metal, still preserve the almost organic quality that pervades the rest of the pyramid, although section of the structure has its own particular character.
The exterior of the planet is convincing hostile, littered with jagged rocks and debris along with a variety of other obstacles in addition to the constantly driving wind. The use of filtered lighting and sound effects add considerably to the sequences taking place in this set (which look forward to the future Earth material found in Cameron’s own The Terminator 84).
While possessing generally excellent production values and being thematically fascinating, in many other respects, Galaxy of Terror is seriously flawed.
The film’s biggest handicap is unfortunately the screenplay by director B.D. Clark and co-producer Marc Siegler, which is frankly a mess.
Although certainly full of intriguing concepts, none of them really gel within the framework of the narrative, and often seem to have been introduced on a random basis, with little in the way of development. There are large sections of the plot in which these concepts play a part that are left hanging at the film’s conclusion.
Although it transpires that the object of the game that the characters are forced to participate in is to select a successor to the Planet Master (Ray Walston, Blood Salvage 89), this information is confusingly presented as is the exact nature of the mystic himself.
It is never made clear whether the population of the planet he rules over consider him a deity (his name is invoked as an oath by one of the crew), an aspect of the “godhead” or merely a powerful mystic. Some of the old woman’s dialogue suggests that there is a Master for individual planets, while there is also the implication that they have created a police or military state (as represented by the officer played by Bernard Behrens, The Changeling 80) to control the populace.
The relationship between the Planet Master and the race that built the pyramid along with its machinery remains unclear. It is never determined whether the Walston character is an actual member of the vanished race who may have deserted its home planet and dispersed throughout the galaxy, where they assumed positions of authority, or if he is from the same planet as the other characters and in the past discovered the remnants of the alien civilisation, exploiting the power contained within the pyramidal structure for his own purposes.
There is some evidence to suggest that the planet’s original inhabitants may have evolved to the stage where they have abandoned their physical bodies, and exist in the form of psycho-electrical energy, this being supported at the climax when a special effect is used to show the transfer of some form of energy from the dying Walston to Edward Albert (The House Where Evil Dwells 82).
Even more frustrating are the backstories provided for the characters in Clark and Siegler’s script. These include the animosity between Albert and second-in command Zalman King (Endangered Species 82), the result of a confrontation between the two on a previous mission, Albert’s relationships with the other crew members dating back to their time at a military academy and the disaster which befell the captain of the ship (Grace Zabriske, Rampage 88). This material, designed to provide the groundwork for dramatic conflict between fails on almost every level because it is so underdeveloped and leads nowhere. Together with very inconsistent characterisation, Robert Englund (Dead and Buried 81) suddenly turning on his best friend Albert, for example, the writing often resembles a really bad Harold Pinter imitation. Another inconsistency occurs near the end when Albert is chosen as to replace the Master as winner of the game, even though Englund has actually worked out that he and his fellow crew members are fighting their own fears well before anyone else. Matters are not helped by painfully banal dialogue, often shouted, against which a dream exploitation cast don’t stand a chance.
New Zealander B.D. Clark’s previous work, including the psychedelic The Ski Bum (71) and Fred Williamson blaxpoitation vehicle Hammer (72), does not suggest an affinity with the horror and sci-fi genres and regrettably this impression is borne out in Galaxy of Terror. While his writing displays a knowledge of science fiction concepts and conventions, his directing shows little empathy with the actual material and overall his style can be best described as workmanlike rather than inspired. The work does benefit from the occasionally atmospheric scene such as the crew’s rookie (Jack Blessing) being terrified in the ship’s hold and Morin and Albert trapped down a chute into the pyramid’s deepest interior. Much of the success of this material can be attributed, however to the efforts of exploitation veteran Jacques Haitkin and his second unit counterpart, Gary H. Wagner (Child’s Play 80).
Galaxy of Terror had a difficult time finding an audience, with New World releasing it three times under as many titles, eventually making a small profit from its theatrical run (it was far more successful on home video, a sign that things were changing in the market place). Reportedly, this final release involved extensive re-editing (the work of three editors) of the existing material, along with some re-shooting, going some way toward explaining the disjointed nature of the final product (particularly in some ineptly inserted dialogue scenes), with its overall weakness being attributed to B.D. Clark perhaps unfairly, It is hard to gauge this, however, since all of Clark’s subsequent output has been as a producer, usually on TV, and so any additional directorial credits cannot be assessed.
The main purpose of the re-cutting was to emphasise the more exploitative aspects of the movie and as released, Galaxy of Terror was effectively reduced to the level of a high-tech splatter movie, in the style of the Friday the 13th franchise, initiated by ex-porn director Sean Cunningham in 1980. The much-imitated model created by this work involves a bunch of irritating and dislikeable characters being killed in a gory and creative manner.
While Clark’s film follows the Cunningham formula faithfully for a lot of its running time, there are a number of deviations from it for the purposes of its own plot. These include the fact that the participants are generally older than the teen maniac fodder usually found in stalk and slash and splatter efforts, the absence of the female mirror image of the blonde virgin and blonde bitch and the killings not being the result of the attentions of a disfigured guy in a mask.
The death scenes experienced by the characters in Galaxy of Terror are certainly well executed by Thom Shouse, the team from Makeup Effects Lab and James Cameron. Among the highlights are elaborate burn effect make-up for Grace Zabriske’s character, when her laser rifle blows up in her face, Erin Moran being crushed by electrical cabling until her head spectacularly explodes, and Sid Haig having shards of crystal burrow under his skin. He then hacks off the offending limb only to have it pick up one of the crystal weapons and chuck it into his heart. The mechanical prosthetic arm in this sequence is an impressive piece of work. Other prosthetic effects include shots of brain matter and stomach contents.
The gross-out moment that brought Clark’s work real notoriety, probably ensuring that it remains in people’s minds long after most other genre works from the period have faded from memory, involves the ship’s technical officer, played by Taafe O’Connell (New Year’s Evil 81).
Several of New World’s genre ventures from the early 1980s contained overtly sensationalist elements, typified by the likes of Barbara Peeters’ Humanoids from the Deep (80), with its human/salmon hybrids dragging women swimmers under the sea before raping and impregnating them, and Allen Holzman’s Forbidden World/Mutant (82) which climaxes with a monster swallowing a cancerous tumour and puking itself to death. The prize for sheer outrageousness, however, should be awarded to Galaxy of Terror.
In a sequence reportedly helmed by James Cameron, O’Connell rather unwisely makes the assertion that she really hates worms just before stumbling onto Sid Haig’s severed limb, now covered in maggots. Disgusted by the sight of it she incinerates the arm but one of the creatures remains. Unnoticed by O’Connell, the maggot mutates into a giant worm, which then attacks her, ripping offer he clothes and graphically rapes the woman at length. This is pretty extreme stuff, and may prove difficult viewing for some.
In addition to the splatter footage already shown, the chaotic, and largely incomprehensible climax suddenly veers off into a territory usually considered the domain of Italian horror cinema, in particular that of Lucio Fulci, the zombie horror film typified by such Fulci works as Zombi 2 (79) and Paura nella Citta dei Morti Viventi (80). Here, after being assaulted by assorted monsters, Edward Albert is attacked by the ambulatory corpses of his former colleagues, in a delirious scene that the Italian director would have been proud of, little sense though it makes.
Galaxy of Terror’s problems were symptomatic of a wider malaise affecting New World at the beginning of the 1980s, eventually leading to Roger Corman selling the studio in 1983. A number of films, not just Clark’s and including properties picked up the company had underperformed, some projects were shelved and existing productions had their budgets and resources trimmed, the most notable casualty of this being Jack Hill’s fantasy adventure Sorceress (82), whose production difficulties forced the director to take his name off the credits.
Corman abandoned any further plans to create more lavishly-budgeted genre projects (although Forbidden World is more generously budgeted than many others from the period), and concentrated on much more modest fare like Howard R. Cohen’s Space Raiders (83). Subsequent ventures for his newly created New Horizons and Concorde production arms continued this trend, with budgets becoming ever tighter over the coming years, especially when in the 1990sthe studio (rebranded New Concorde) began to concentrate almost exclusively on Direct to Video (DTV) product, shot very cheaply in Europe and South America. A lot of stock footage from both Galaxy of Terror and Battle Beyond the Stars continues to appear in Corman productions as well as being leased to other filmmakers.
Several of the personnel on this production went on to have interesting careers in Hollywood. Among them production co-ordinator Don Opper who later acted and co-wrote the directorial debut of production manager Aaron Lipstadt, the cult favourite Android (82), which used sets and stock footage from New World movies, as well as helping create and appear in the four-strong Critters franchise. Both the Critters films and Lipstadt’s work were produced by Galaxy of Terror’s production accountant, Rupert Harvey.
Assistant Director Peter Manoogian is most associated with his work for Charles Band’s Empire Pictures (and later Full Moon), where his credits as director include Eliminators (86), Arena (90) and Seed People (92). Optical effects supervisor Tony Randel later graduated to directing after a spell as a film editor and post-production supervisor at New World, both during and after Corman’s tenure. His genre work features titles like Hellbound: Hellraiser II (88), Ticks (93) and Fist of the North Star (95),
One of the film editors on this work became something of a fixer at New World, post-Corman, shooting additional footage (sometimes uncredited) on product picked up by the studio, such as the US version of Koji Hashimoto’s Gojira (84), retitled Godzilla: The Legend is Reborn (85) and Donald G. Jackson’s Hell Comes to Frogtown (87). He is one of the most highly regarded Automatic Dialogue Replacement (ADR) editors in the industry where he has worked on features like Bryan Spicer’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (95), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection (97) and Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil (03).
Zalman King later all but dropped out of acting to concentrate on making upmarket softcore erotica including Adrian Lyne’s 91/2 Weeks (86) and his own Wild Orchid (90) along with the long-running Red Shoe Diaries film, video and cable TV series.
James Cameron of course became the director of the world’s most successful film, Titanic (97). At New World he graduated from prop and model builder to production designer and second unit director in the space of two films. He made his directorial debut (thanks to the lobbying of Roger Corman) on the international co-production Piranha II: The Spawning (81), a much-troubled project, only tenuously related to Joe Dante’s New World venture, Piranha (78). Cameron then fully entered the mainstream by co-writing the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Rambo: First Blood Part II (85) and helming the megahit sci-fi action flick Aliens (86).
Some sources suggest that regular Cameron collaborator actor Bill Paxton was a member of the crew on Galaxy of Terror.
©Iain McLachlan 2004
Chroma-Noize cult movie reviews: www.geocities.com/bigfatpav2000
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(34 ratings)