Every once in a while, I find myself confronted by a film where I almost can’t find the words to start writing about it. Such a movie is 1966 Italian sci-fi mess Star Pilot.
To say this film is a mess would be an understatement. If it was scripted, then whoever responsible for that was overpaid, even if they worked gratis. I instead hope they made it up as they went along, or perhaps acting out a tale being spun out by a hyperactive child.
A sign that things are amiss is the original title of 2+5: Missione Hydra. Why the “2+5”? Beats the hell out of me.
And, by the end of 90 minutes, I felt like I, indeed, had the hell beaten out of me. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to pay attention to things that aren’t making sense? I was ready for a nap by the time this was over.
Admittedly, it takes time to get to the deeply weird. For most of the film, it is about a group of people who are investigating what may be a large deposit of radioactive material, only to instead find a spaceship buried underground.
The aliens in the ship look like humans, especially the female leader of the crew. She wears some sort of skimpy thing with a window in the chest covering so as to get a clear view of her cleavage. Her outfit is largely made out of fishnet, so I guess there’s a Frederick’s of Hollywood in outer space somewhere.
I wonder if they call it Frederick’s of the Hydra Constellation, as this is where they claim to be from. Them being from a “constellation” made my brain do the equivalent of a record scratch. First, constellations are grouping of stars. Secondly, they are logical groupings and not physical, being objects extremely far apart in reality, but which seem to be close together from our perspective here on Earth. Regardless of where they’re from, the aliens were as unlikely to say they are from any of our Earth constellations as we would be to say we were from some constellation from the perspective of their home world.
OK, so I’m thinking too much about this. I suspect I have to because the filmmakers clearly weren’t thinking about anything they were putting on the screen. There’s Chinese agents thrown into the mix for no apparent reason. There’s also some type of drone workers the aliens use, only one of which has survived—and that’s a development which factors into the plot in no way whatsoever. I also don’t know why the costumes for those drones look like they found full body condoms somewhere. Maybe there’s some outrageously endowed men in Italy—I don’t want to know.
This probably reads as something batshit crazy, campy and possibly fun, but it somehow also manages to be godawful dull. Characters alternately fight and form alliances seemingly at random and without motivation. Things may happen, but they can’t be called plot developments unless a later conflict or action depended upon the outcome of that event. Everything here is like effect without cause.
I was bored to submission when things REALLY go off the rails. There’s a planet they nearly crash into, except they land on it and get attacked by apemen, then they discover travelling faster than light has returned them to Earth after a future nuclear war has devastated the planet, then they go to another planet which is apparently basically Hawaii as an entire world and…oh fuck it.
I’ll just say one thing which bemused me about all this, and that is they land on post-apocalyptic Earth at the Roman Coliseum, which was already a ruin, and so looks exactly the same as before. That would seem to be a poor yardstick by which one would decide the world has been destroyed.
So, when did Star Pilot get renamed as such? That’s because, like so many other garbage sci-fi films like this, the success of Star Wars prompted a relabeling and quick cash-in re-release. I might have a sadistic side of which I was previously oblivious, as I kinda wish I could have been in the back of a theatre full of people expecting to see Lucas’s film but instead getting this.
Dir: Pietro Francisci
Starring…oh, don’t even make me start listing the nobody’s in this. Really, I will hurt you.
Watched on Raro Video blu-ray