Galaxy of Terror (1981)

Directed by Bruce D. Clark [Other horror films: N/A]

I can’t say that I overall care a lot about Galaxy of Terror, but I do appreciate that it had heart, and while the final product isn’t great, I can dig what they were going for.

Most of the small problems work themselves out. For instance, throwing us headfirst into a strange world with no context and characters with odd names (we have Trantor, Baelon, Cabren, Alluma, Quuhod, Kore, Dameia, Ilvar, Cos, and Ranger) and no real introductions, it can be tough, but after a while, the characters get differentiated nicely, and before long, you can tell a Quuhod from a Dameia in no time.

The larger problem is the conclusion to Galaxy of Terror. It’s unsatisfactory, yes, but more than that, I don’t know how much sense it makes, at least with what I was able to gather. Parts of it, such as the origin of the pyramid, were sort of cool, but other aspects just felt too unexplained.

Aside from the final ten minutes, though, the film is pretty decent. There are some pretty memorable kills: a dismembered arm kills the person it came from with a crystal star, someone has their stomach slit open and is thrown down a rather long chasm, and another poor soul is crushed to death, and it looks like their head explodes. Oh, and there’s also a rather gruesome alien rape scene that I’d rather not think too much about. Truth be told, that’s a scene I could have done without.

The performances were largely solid too. To be honest, I didn’t think too much of Edward Albert (The House Where Evil Dwells, Sea of Fear, Killer Bees, Demon Keeper), but it’s not as though he were a bad lead. It’s just that this film also has Sid Haig (House of 1000 Corpses, A Dead Calling) and Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Kantemir, Eaten Alive), so it’s difficult for Albert to stand out. It could be fairly said that neither Haig nor Englund do much, but I did like’s Haig’s character, as I don’t know many people who live and die by the crystal, and Englund had surprisingly high staying power.

Regardless, those three were among the most memorable, but I also thought Bernard Behrens, Ray Walston (The Stand), Grace Zabriskie and Erin Moran did well. The best of these four would probably be Walston, but I can’t say I loved where his story went, and Behrens was a rather more likable individual.

It’s a shame, really. I went into Galaxy of Terror with the hopes of singing it’s praises. It’s a film I’ve seen before, and I remember it a bit more fondly. I think I probably spaced out toward the end, or perhaps it’s because the movie feels like it should be better. It’s not the earliest space-based horror (even discounting Alien, you have both Planet of the Vampires and It! The Terror from Beyond Space), but it seems to me that it should be one of the funnest, and I just don’t know if it personally hits that level with me.

All-in-all, I didn’t have a bad time revisiting this movie. I really didn’t care for the finale, though, and unfortunately, as okay as the rest of the movie could sometimes be, I think the film falls a bit below average, at least for me.

6/10