Spaghetti space wars of 1979

Christopher Plummer and David Hasselhoff in "Starcrash"! Topless Bond girls in "The Humanoid" (directed by "George Lewis")! A viewer's guide to the delirious Italian "Star Wars" rip-offs of the late '70s.

By John Gorenfeld

May 21, 2002 | "Well, it's done. It's happened. The stars are clear. The planets shine. We've won. Oh, some dark force, no doubt, will show its face once more. The wheel will always turn. But for now, it's calm. And for a little time, at least, we can rest."
-- Christopher Plummer, as the galactic emperor in "Starcrash"

We've given George Lucas his chance to recapture the magic of "Star Wars." For "Episode III," why not give Luigi Cozzi a shot?

Cozzi, 54, now works the cash register at Profondo Rosso, a horror movie shop and museum in downtown Rome, and he loves "Star Wars." He should. He's also the director of "Starcrash," an Italian take on galactic civil war that was released in 1979, about midway between Lucas' original "Star Wars" and the first sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back."

"Starcrash" features a then-unknown David Hasselhoff as a galactic prince wielding a light saber against stop-motion droids, along with a one-time Bond girl (Caroline Munro) as a pilot who makes the kind of remarks you've come to expect from space smugglers ("I hope this star buggy holds together!"), only in a bikini.

Now, Cozzi might not have experience overseeing a special effects budget on the scale of the Skywalker Ranch's. The spray-painted vessels that rumble through his galaxy of neon lights are built with model airplane trees, aerosol cans and what look like car parts. When a planet explodes like a small firecracker, bits of papier-mâché waft downward. But a Luigi Cozzi movie will never be accused of being "a technological exercise that lacks juice and delight," as Roger Ebert says of "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones." "Starcrash" has both.

No sensitive, lovesick '90s teen hunks will be found pretending to be the young Darth Vader in the spaghetti space operas of '79. Once upon a time, galactic villains were content to work evil schemes, the way a Dark Lord should. "Starcrash" offers caped desperado Count Zarth Arn (googly-eyed Joe Spinell, producer of the infamous "Maniac"), who does the Lord of the Sith proud. He owns a Doom Weapon the size of a planet and isn't about to apologize for it. And while a Texas-accented sheriff robot (Judd Hamilton) confesses that hyperspace makes him nervous, and Amazon women give deadly chase, Christopher Plummer, as the stately ruler of the universe, re-creates his Duke of Wellington character from "Waterloo" and tries to push the movie beyond Shakespeare.

First Italians reinvented the western. Then they reverse-engineered "Star Wars." "Starcrash" (or "Scontri Stellari Oltre la Terza Dimensione") was one of a host of low-budget space epics of the late '70s unleashed on a world that was suddenly ravenous for space adventure.

"At that time, everyone was crazy about 'Star Wars,'" says Cozzi. He'd written the outline of a space epic, and hadn't had any luck selling it until May 1977, when "Star Wars" arrived. He wanted to model his movie after Ray Harryhausen's "Sinbad" series and other classic fantasy films. But producers "wanted a clone of 'Star Wars,'" Cozzi says. "I had to fight to keep it original."

Of course, Italians weren't alone in imitating "Star Wars." Japan's "Message From Space," also released in 1979, told a familiar story of a princess fleeing interstellar tyranny. Starring Vic Morrow as a general, "Message" cops five especially wistful notes from Princess Leia's theme for use as title music. At home in America, the makers of the TV series "Battlestar Galactica" were sued by 20th Century Fox, the "Star Wars" studio, which accused them of stealing Lucas' looming space cruisers and cocky starfighter jocks.

But the sincerest and most prolific form of "Star Wars" flattery was born in the studios of Rome, in Cinecittà, the mightiest movie-cloning vat of all. The success of Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" had turned an industry known for Hercules sagas into a western-generating machine on the Tiber river, shipping out more than 500 six-gun shootouts between 1962 and 1978.

American moviemakers sell ideas by combining things. "It's 'Executive Decision' meets 'Dunston Checks In,'" they'll say. The rule in '70s Italy, unless you were a famous director, was simpler, Cozzi says. You said, "This is like" -- and inserted the name of just one Hollywood film.

By 1977, American cinema had turned gritty and bleak, and the same was true in Italy. Westerns had given way to movies that were "like Dirty Harry." The countless rip-offs (or polizias) had names like "Violent Naples." In them, mustachioed police inspectors drove around in small European cars, hunting masked thugs and serial killers. Meanwhile, a wave of horror films like "Cannibal Holocaust" and "The Beyond" boasted more agonizing death scenes than any Wes Craven flick, often accompanied by disco music. Britain even banned several under the mistaken assumption they were snuff films.

Next Page: Marjoe Gortner as a space mystic: "You would have changed the future, which is against the law"

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