Galaxy of Terror (1981)

"There's no horror here we don't create ourselves."

Every so often I have to watch a trashy-looking genre film with quirky casting and this Roger Corman-produced piece of '80s sci-fi schlock, featuring the splendid Sid Haig and a pre-Nightmare on Elm Street Robert Englund, seems to fit the bill. The experience has been... interesting.

There's an obvious Alien influence in the bickering, working class crew of an alien spaceship but none of the visual grittiness and the plot, once you get past the awful cliched dialogue, is really rather different. There's a fair bit of world building with humanity enthralled by a mysterious "Master" who eventually even becomes relevant to the plot and it eventually becomes clear, after a series of increasingly gory deaths by '80s special effects including a suspiciously rapey-looking incident including a giant worm, that the planet's monsters are simply the crews' fears made manifest. So far, then predictable.

Then we get the ending, where the film really tries hard to be something more than a B movie by attempting to be all metaphysical and philosophical. It's a good try, it really is, but there's no escaping the fact that this is, well, a B movie, and strictly one for those of us who like that sort of thing.