“Quivering Venusian blubber cups!”

Star Wars immediately exploded into a big cultural phenomenon, yielding an actual slew of space opera imitators, mostly lower budget imitations that tend toward cheese or ineptness or both. Something like Space Mutiny is an example of lazy ineptness leading to a really funny trainwreck. Then there's low budget sci-fi comedy, where the ineptness leads to something stale and unfunny, like 1980's Galaxina.

Plot

So after an opening title crawl (Star Wars reference) explaining that its the year 3008, and the police cruiser Infinity of the United Intergalactic Federation is finishing up a patrol mission and en route to a new assignment. On the way they get into an argument and then firefight with a ship that looks like an actual bird of prey (Star Trek reference). The Infinity is damaged, the captain eats an egg and coughs up an alien (Alien reference) and almost halfway through the movie the actual plot kicks in: The crew are assigned to recover an item called the Blue Star (Ahhhhhhhh) from prison planet Altair One on a journey that will take 27 years to complete, so before jumping into cryosleep, the crew jump into a space whorehouse for some shore leave.

They finally reach the planet, the sexy robot volunteers to look for the macguffin, gets captured by a cult of bikers, gets rescued, and then an anticlimactic fight with the metal-faced guy from the bird ship, and it kind of ends.

Cast

Galaxina: Dorothy R. Stratten was a beautiful woman with a depressing story of rising to fame as a Playboy Playmate and then being murdered-suicided by her insane, jealous husband shortly before this movie was released. That's the 800lb gorilla in the room for this movie. That said, she was very attractive and filled out a slinky jumpsuit very well. With regards to acting? Well, she was a model, and playing a robot, and her character doesn't speak for most of the movie, so...not that great.

Sgt. Thor: Stephen Macht (the dad from Monster Squad) plays the grizzled, stogie smoking 2^nd in command of the ship. He gets metal fever falls in love with Galaxina and tries to touch and kiss her, leading to painful electric shocks. She eventually reciprocates, reprogramming herself to be able to speak and to not electrify everyone that touches her.

Buzz: James David Hinton play who I think is the communications guy. Its not very clear what his role is. What is clear is his southern drawl, cowboy hat, and Dodgers jersey with the sleeves cut off. Ha ha. Isn't it funny that Dodgers jerseys still exist a thousand years in the future? Comedy!

Captain Cornelius Butt: Funnyman Avery Schreiber plays the blustering, bumbling captain of the Infinity, occasionally narrating some captain's logs. The schtick is at times funny and at times grating, and he's arguably the funniest member of the cast. Though he does take an sadistic glee in “feeding” a prisoner called Rock Biter by throwing styrofoam rocks at him through his prison bars in a painfully unfunny scene. Also, his last name is Butt. Comedy!

Maurice: Lionel Mark Smith plays the winged, ambiguously alien black mechanic who's fake ears don't match the rest of his skin tone.

Sam Wo: Tad Horino plays the weed smoking, Confuscian-esque nonsense spewing guy who hangs out with Maurice in the engine room. Doesn't actually do anything else.

Ordric from Morderick: Played by Ronald Knight and voiced by Percy Rodrigues, this is our villain. A metal faced guy in a robe reminiscent of Darth Vader, but with a silly reverb effect on his voice and a rude attitude.

Chopper: The leader of a cult of bikers that worship Harley David-Son. I’m really only mentioning him because the actor’s name Aesop Aquarian (or Stephen Morrell), which is kind of awesome.

Visuals

Directed by William Sachs, who's done a number of low budget movies. The movie looks fine. The sets and lighting are serviceable to good, the costumes aren't too terrible (except for Maurice's ears), and the model ships look all right. Hell, even the laser effects of the “space battle” look pretty good with the rotoscoping effect of lasers dissipating against shields. The fight is boring since its two ships sitting still and going pew pew pew, but it looks okay. One thing that doesn't look great is the orange filter...thing employed for exterior daylight scenes on Altair One. It hurts the eyes after a while watching Galaxina walking around a Wild West set populated by fair-to-middling alien costumes. Yes there's a wild west town set. Probably because it was cheap to film on.

Pacing though? That's rough. There are long stretches where not a lot happens.

Oh yes, and at one point Ordric is watching First Spaceship onVenus.

Writing

Written by William Sachs, the script is where the movie falls. So much of the movie is filled with 5^th grade jokes (Cornelius Butt), cheap references to other movies (there's an alien bartender named Mr. Spot who looks almost exactly like someone else, oh, who is it? Oh. Right. Barbarella), Avery Schreiber (probably) improving with mixed results, and a few actual good comedic bits. Captain Butt's narration is in turns exasperated and pompous.

Whenever someone says “Blue Star” an angelic chorus plays, causing everyone in the scene to look around in confusion for the source of the sound. That's actually the best bit in the movie, since it starts out random, gets annoying, and then comes back around to being actually kind of funny since they commit to the joke as hard as possible, even going so far as to change it to an almost Doo-wop version when Chopper says it. The god the bikers worship is an actual Harley Davidson, which isn't that funny, but the heroes escape the bikers on it, which leads to a chase scene where a bunch of bikers on horses are chasing after a spaceman and robot lady on a motorcycle. That's a moment of zen right there.

The rest of the jokes don't really work, either because of timing, editing, or delivery. They just feel randomly thrown together.

Sounds

The music seems like a bunch of stock audio mixed with public domain classical music, like Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Strauss, and Liszt. It works. I guess.

Conclusion

Galaxina would probably have been funnier if it had an actual plotline instead of throwing a bunch of jokes at the wall only for most of them to fall short. Or if it had been a serious space opera. Or if the jokes were better. In the end, it feels like people went “Star Wars! That's popular, but everyone's making Star Wars imitations. I know! A parody movie!” It's a shame because the end result is below average and plodding. Watch Spaceballs instead.