film rating:
disc rating:
company: New World Pictures
year: 1981
runtime: 81′
director: Bruce Clark
cast: Edward Albert, Erin Moran,
Ray Walston, Bernard Behrens,
Zalman King, Robert Englund,
Taeffe O’Connell, Sid Haig,
Grace Zabriskie, Jack Blessing
writers: Mark Siegler,
Bruce Clark and William Stout
cinematography: Jacques Haitkin
and Austin McKinney
music: Barry Schrader
Reviewed from a screener provided
by Shout! Factory LLC
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Galaxy of Terror is due out on Special Edition DVD and Blu-ray from Shout! Factory on July 20th, and is currently available for pre-order from Amazon.com
The anonymous ‘Planet Master of Xerxes’ (a man whose features are obscured by orange light) orders a mission to the far off planet of Morganthus after all contact is lost with a starship there. He hand picks the crew of rescue ship Quest without their knowledge, gathering a motley assortment of officers and engineers with variety of psychological conditions (one is claustrophobic, another traumatized by a past mission, etc.). After a crash landing on Morganthus the crew begins to disappear, killed by their own subconscious fears after an ancient alien pyramid renders them all too real.
I fondly remember the salacious ad art for Galaxy of Terror, featuring a vulnerable beauty in scraps of clothing being menaced by a variety of unlikely beasts (including a buggy skeletal bat thing hovering with obviously impure intent), staring up at vintage late ’80s me from the seedy depths of the local rental store’s horror shelf. Only elementary school-aged at the time, I’d never have dreamt of trying to sneak something like that passed my observant mother (the prominent cleavage on the cover would have stopped her cold long before she glimpsed the ‘R’-rating), but that didn’t keep me from wondering what horribly disgusting (and inherently exciting) events might dwell behind such an illustration. I was a long time in catching up to the film, one of a seemingly endless number I remember passing over in youth, but it was easily worth the wait.
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