There was once a little “science fiction fairy-tale” flick called Star Wars, which came out of nowhere, changed the face of popular entertainment forever, and made dumptrucks full of money. In its wake were some of the most astonishingly shameless rip-offs ever made, many of which are known to and beloved by bad-movie fans and almost nobody else. What to make of Luigi Cozzi’s Starcrash (starring David Hasselhoff, no less), as cheesy as the 1980 Flash Gordon and with even less regard for little things like continuity and the laws of physics? Or Turkish cult star Cunyet Arkin’s infamous The Man Who Saves the World, complete with effects shots stolen intact from George Lucas’s movie? Or Os Trapalhões na Guerra dos Planetas, a Brazilian shot-on-video monstrosity that’s so bad it’s actually entertaining?
The list does go on, and as you can imagine the Japanese got into the game as well. Future Battle Royale director Kinji Fukasaku had a massive hit on his hands in 1983 with his flashy updating of the samurai classic Hakkenden, but back when Star Wars exploded he jumped on that bandwagon with Message From Space—which was the exact same story as Hakkenden, just transferred to a vaguely Star Wars-ish setting and decked out with truckloads of special effects tinsel. I saw it again recently, and what amazed me is how it’s actually more entertaining in a goofy, unpretentious way than Lucas’s miserable follow-up prequels.
