1980 science fiction, dir. Jimmy T. Murakami, Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn;
IMDb /
allmovie. The villagers know
the bandits are coming, so they hire fighters to defend them. In space.
And this is a less-authorised remake than The Magnificent Seven
(Roger Corman don't pay no licencing fees). Somehow, it manages not to
have Caroline Munro in it, but it does have John Saxon (a leading man
in the 1960s, but probably more familiar to the sort of people who
read this from Enter the Dragon as "the good guy who isn't played by
Bruce Lee"), and Robert Vaughn pretty much reprrising his role from
twenty years earlier.
Unfortunately it also has Richard Thomas, known for playing John-Boy
Walton, and the script does him no favours: it's wide-eyed annoying
kid all the way, except he's technically old enough to be a romantic
hero too. Everyone gets their few seconds of character development,
but it's very cursory stuff, and I at least felt little emotional
connection as they were variously destroyed. (Limitations of effects
mean that many of these deaths take the form of a shot of a spacecraft
whizzing across a screen, followed by an explosion clearly filmed
against a different background and not involving the model at all, so
it's often hard to tell whether they're actually dead or have had a
hair's-breadth escape.)
But what's really a problem for me, rather than a limitation of
budget, is that there's never any sense of progress. In other
iterations of the story, the bandits could be counted and ticked off
as they were killed; here everything rests on an all-or-onthing attack
on the enemy superdreadnought, and while there's some mention of
stripping away their defensive fighter cover, nobody ever talks about
how that's going.
Which is a shame, because much of what's here is great fun,
particularly the various alien members of the Seven. The personalities
are barely present, but watch the thing as it's intended to be
watched, cheap trashy entertainment cashing in on the public's
appetite for SF after Star Wars, and one can still enjoy it. Even
the guy whose name, and basically entire personality, is "Space
Cowboy". (George Peppard, shortly before his career resurgence on The
A-Team.)
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.