Space medic Taaffe O’Connell really hates worms... but they love her in GALAXY OF TERROR, producer Roger Corman’s first entry in the ALIEN knock-off sweepstakes.
GALAXY OF TERROR 1981, Shout! Factory, $19.93 (DVD), $26.37 (BR), 81m 24s
FORBIDDEN WORLD 1982, Shout! Factory, $19.93 (DVD), $26.37 (BR), 77m 13s
By Bill Cooke
As a blockbuster mentality took over Hollywood in the post-STAR WARS 1980s, B- movie maven Roger Corman’s New World Pictures had to pump more money into their productions while aping the majors’ every genre success. Two of the company’s most memorable efforts during this time were GALALAXY OF TER- ROR and FORBIDDEN WORLD, both knock-offs of 20th Century Fox’s ALIEN—which itself was a lavish treatment of B-movie concepts. Both titles became cult items, due largely to their scarcity on the home video
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market, and are now finally available as special editions in Shout! Factory’s impressively growing line of “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics.”
GALAXY OF TERROR has the bigger budget and more compli- cated narrative of the two. Are we in the far future or a long time ago in a galaxy (of terror) far, far away? The writing is vague about such matters. Plotted similarly to Mario Bava’s moody AIP release PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965, also a source of inspira- tion for the makers of ALIEN), the story tells of a rescue mission to the inhospitably dark and stormy planet of Organthus, where a pre- vious group has gone missing. Once there, the Quest’s uptight crew find their sister ship ruined and abandoned, though it is felt survivors might have fled to a nearby artifact—a towering pyra- mid of unknown origin. Early script drafts of ALIEN also fea- tured a pyramid, which went as far as being conceptualized on
canvas by Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger. The look of this struc- ture is straight out of his imagi- nation: bones and veins poke out of surfaces and openings are blatantly vaginal.
As the rescuers trudge to the top, we learn what haunts each of them: the commander (Bernard Behrens) fears growing old and useless, the ship’s captain (Grace Zabriskie) stews like Quint from JAWS over her own version of the Philadelphia disaster, a psychic (HAPPY DAYS’ Erin Moran) dreads tight places (“Must have gotten stuck coming out of the womb”), while a curvy medic (Taaffe O’Connell) reveals that she really hates worms—the kind of fore- shadowing horror fans love to hear. Not surprisingly with such a set-up, a malevolent force begins turning these people’s night- mares and phobias into tangible horrors—a concept previously explored in another AIP sf-clas- sic, JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET (1963). In the most
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