if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

I don't have to tell you what this movie is a ripoff of because it's so blatantly obvious you could see it a light year away. As much as I dearly love this movie, it's just very, very bad. Not least because the space shots are all recycled from Battle Beyond the Stars and the rubber monster looks about as convincing as the Shat's new rug. The plot? A Marshall in the Alliance Mike Colby (Jesse Vint) is pulled out of stasis by his long-suffering Cylon partner SAM-104 (voiced by Don Olivera) to have a space battle before whizzing off through a effects shot to the planet Xarbia, where genetic researchers are creating a new kind of life form that gets loose and starts eating everyone. The one thing I think saves this movie from being a complete flop are the characters, particularly Fox Harris' character Doctor Cal. I don't know why but his slightly nihilistic pessimism and constant smoking have a strange charm about them. He should've had his own movie, that's how good he is. Linden Chiles' Hauser is also quite fun to watch, if a little predictable. I kind of feel sorry for SAM, he's always getting switched off. The deaths are a bit over the top, the sex and nudity are a little on the large side, and the sky outside is quite obviously blue, no matter how much tint you stick on the lens. Corman's didn't learn his lesson there either; when he remade it as Dead Space in the 1990's, the only improvement was this time the monster looked better. That aside, it was worse. He even used THE SAME F*CKING STOCK FOOTAGE for the space shots. What a cheapskate.

The always engaging Jesse Vint plays Mike Colby, an intergalactic troubleshooter who's called into service on a remote planet. It seems that the scientists there have let their big genetic experiment get out of control. Now there's a continuously evolving life form on the loose in their station, one that does hideous things to human bodies in order to digest them. The head scientist, Gordon Hauser (TV veteran Linden Chiles, 'James at 15'), doesn't want the truth about the species' origins to be known, which doesn't help matters. Ultimately, it's Dr. Cal Timbergen (notably eccentric character actor Fox Harris, "Repo Man") who will prove to be far more helpful.Of course, one can hardly fail to notice that Mike and the others don't seem too concerned at first about the creatures' whereabouts. Mike's far more interested in hooking up with *both* of the hottie ladies at this station: Dr. Barbara Glaser (foxy blonde June Chadwick, "This is Spinal Tap") and Tracy Baxter (sultry brunette Dawn Dunlap, "Laura" '79). The two ladies even have an enticing scene with each other!Director / editor Allan Holzman ("Grunt! The Wrestling Movie") does a decent job working in confined quarters; genre buffs will know that this typically cheap Roger Corman production re-uses sets from "Galaxy of Terror" as well as special effects shots from "Battle Beyond the Stars". The cheese and trash levels are pretty much off the charts here, as you can tell from the previous paragraph. For a movie obviously designed to get a little more use out of previously existing elements, this *is* pretty entertaining, especially in the directors' cut with its use of classical music and comedic moments. The score by Susan Justin (who was Mrs. Holzman in real life) is quite amusing.The studly Vint is well supported by Chadwick, Harris, Chiles, Ray Oliver ("Child's Play"), Scott Paulin ("Cat People" '82), and Michael Bowen ("Jackie Brown"). Dunlap looks great but really isn't much of an actress. Don Olivera, who did the crude but enjoyable makeup and creature effects along with John Carl Buechler ("Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood"), plays the role of the robot SAM-104.Highly recommended to folks who appreciate the sleazier and cheesier side of B level genre cinema.Seven out of 10.

Corman is a neat guy. He's all about putting something together, engineer work. And he's quite clever, most of the time at least, to know just which parts go together, what to recycle. This is from the brief time he was rehashing popular sci-fi of the day, chiefly Star Wars and Alien. And because Alien in particular is already the product of collaborative , assembled vision, I am interested in which parts Corman reassembled.Galaxy of Terror seems more special to me, I have written quite a bit on that elsewhere. There, he retained the environment of desert planet and 'alien' compound. In a peculiar way, it was a smart annotation and reading of Scott's Alien: it was the place granting visions of horror, with visions shifting according to characters.For this one, they latched onto the creature aspect of Alien: it is the human instead of alien environment that is carried over, an extraterrestrial station carrying out bacterial research, and instead of different visions of horror, we have one shape-shifting creature.Taken together, the two films are revealing of what he thought worked in Alien. Metamorphosing evil and environment, this is what Corman zeroed on. Situations. Not Scott's approach of different fabrics of camera, something beyond his ambitions. Not organic fleshing-out of characters and space life. This model which is the way they were doing sci-fi in the 50's and 60's, dies with this film, and Cameron takes over - a Corman student on Galaxy.And something else. Alien was about the fabric of logic being torn apart - a near-metaphysical presence was onboard that defied anything reasonable.In both Corman films, the 'nature' of evil is over-explained with the usual nonsense. The overabundance of 'reason' is counterpointed with that bizarre irrationality of good exploitation: in Galaxy, you had cosmonauts going bonkers in space, and the craziness exceeded the explanation. The rape by giant worms was sleaze for the audience, it had no film-logic.Here, you have a leading scientist in bacteriological research who is basically a slutty bimbo. It makes no sense for the world of science and space exploration. It's entirely tailored for us to have a steamy sex scene. You have all sorts of amateurish decisions that are just so much fun to poke.One of the spare parts used here is a cocky space cowboy with his robot - Star Wars.

Take note all you horrible makers of today's movies. This is how you make a bad movie. You do not bring in a stupid 80's mall queen, make a film with monsters that are clearly not there, and you do not skimp on the gore and nudity! No, you make a monster out of stuff just laying around, you have young gals that look like they would be more at home in an adult film, and you have lots of gore and nudity like this film does! Is it a good movie, absolutely not, but it is certainly very enjoyable to watch. Though saying this one is absolutely not good may be being a bit to harsh as I actually enjoyed the story here a bit more than other "Alien" knock off movies of this era. Heck, I enjoyed watching his film more than "Alien 3", though that film was clearly better done this one was more entertaining and I was never bored. The film starts out kind of weakly though as dude and his robot pal have a pointless space battle. I do not know who or why they are fighting these people, I don't think it is our business. Once they go to the planet of Xarbia though things really pick up. The guy in the ship is some sort of problem solver and the problem they are having on this planet is that an experiment has gotten a bit out of hand. Killed a bunch of animals and has now retreated to a cocoon. Well it is not to long before it gets out and of course some idiot could have easily ended the entire movie by being a bit more careful, but then the movie would have ended even sooner than its very short running time of 77 minutes. Lots of gore ensues as the creature mutates forms from time to time and its purpose is soon to be known. During this time you get the typical scientist that does not want to harm the creature, but capture it and an even more laughable attempt at communicating with the beast. You also get lots of boobies from the two females at this little research place. Like I said it was a fun watch, the monster looks okay in some scenes and in others it looks bad, kind of like a blown up garbage bag. However, even when it looks bad it is there unlike so many computer generated monsters of today. The film could actually use a bit more time as they could have added ten minutes and had even more deaths and the death of the one guy trying to fix something was weak compared to others. The cast is all right, the lead guy being rather good. One of the females was super hot, the other with the more blond hair was just okay. Just wished they would make cheap movies like this instead of the boring stuff they do now. I am betting this is actually cheaper to make and a lot more fun to watch.