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| If you ever have a group of merciless friends over who love tearing apart movies, here's the perfect sacrifice. There are more false starts and goofs in this piece of art than I thought possible.
Astronauts exploring Mars in 2032 find a baked potato, after spending around ten minutes of a ninety-minute film getting to know those astronauts they die. (The shuttle's air supply mysteriously turned off.) Now we jump to a space station, meet some more people, a few minutes later they all die when the reactor explodes. So twenty darn minutes into it we are finally set up with the characters, all five of them. Er, six, but that's a different bitch session.
We, the audience, know the baked potato cracked open to reveal a large quartz crystal and somebody's sock covered in ultraslime. Nobody knows it's on board! The ship is equipped with a "heat source detection" display in the bridge. It looks like an old Star Frontiers ship's map, but the damn thing only works when the plot requires. One moment there are five little red "human" lights, then suddenly the little white "alien" light pops in and starts chasing red lights around. (Even worse than it sounds I assure you.)
Billy meets the thing first, smacks it with a wrench, gets eaten. Next it chases Sherry around the room until she throws acid on it, no more Sherry. Cal runs back trying to help freaky girl, shoots, misses, tries to flee, dies. So for the last half of the film we have three characters entertaining us, that's right, three: Roger, Adrianne, and Gar! When our two surviving humans finally encounter the alien it turns out he's a nice guy, only killed all those people to defend himself. (The previous shuttle crew was going to use a laser on the crystal.)
If you can manipulate the ship's systems how about communicating something like, "No laser crystal." you stupid space slug. Killed Sherry for throwing acid on you? The thing was chasing her around the room. Oh heck no, soon as Gar turned his back on me - dead Gar. Instead these two idiots end up befriending the creature, the end. Good riddance.
Watching this film alone is painful, with a rowdy group of b-movie veterans it is moderately fun. |
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| Things I Learned From This Movie: | |
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 | Space suits are equipped with galoshes.
| | The red planet was once inhabited by huge Martian squirrels which buried balls of aluminum foil everywhere.
| | Space stations are very roomy inside and have designated smoking areas.
| | Racquetballs conduct electricity.
| | Shuttle seats are just office chairs with the wheels removed.
| | Survival rations contain an alcoholic beverage.
| | Traveling on a ship where you constantly crawl around on your hands and knees is annoying.
| | Alarms warning that your air supply has been shut off need to be very loud and audible in the sleeping compartment.
| | Footballs made of permeable leather work just fine on Mars.
| | Using telekinesis to pick up a wrench is much harder than creating a forcefield to deflect meteors.
| | Aliens can be born again Christians.
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| 6 mins - Hey, I can see stars through that planet.
| | 7 mins - No seals on those spacesuit gloves? They just slide off?
| | 8 mins - Is that a giant baked potato... ...full of milk... ...and a crystal... ...and somebody's slimy sock.
| | 17 mins - Hehehe! This sure looks like a mall or shopping center, not a space station.
| | 29 mins - Who designed the doors in this place anyway?
| | 31 mins - Those are not Billy's boots.
| | 40 mins - Commodore 64 keyboard there.
| | 51 mins - Wow, lots of stars in that window.
| | 52 mins - Investigators went over this craft with a fine-toothed comb and never found the ship's log?
| | 55 mins - How exactly is their viewscreen showing both shuttles from a third person perspective?
| | 57 mins - RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A DOORFRAME!
| | 89 mins - Oops, the stick supporting the space platform was really obvious.
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| | Audio clips in wav format | SOUNDS | Starving actors speak out | |
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| File | Dialog |  | starcrystal1.wav
| Adrienne: "Now tell me what happened."
Sherry: "It's Billy!"
Adrienne: "What about Billy?"
Sherry: "She's got slime..."
Adrienne: "Slime?"
Sherry: "It's all over her!"
| | starcrystal2.wav
| Roger: "Yes, SC-45, we read you. We have an emergency situation, repeat emergency situation! Unknown lifeform has killed three of the crew. Need assistance, repeat need assistance!"
| | starcrystal3.wav
| Roger: "Bernice, what happened to the meteor storm?"
Bernice: "We are in the middle of it."
Roger: "Why aren't we being hit?"
Bernice: "There is a forcefield around us."
Roger: "Forcefield?"
| | starcrystal4.wav
| Gar: "Through your computer I learned your lack of respect for life."
Sherry: "Lack of respect for life? You murdered three people!"
| | Theme Song | Listen to a clip from the soundtrack. |
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| | Click for a larger image | IMAGES | Scenes from the movie | |
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| | Watch a scene | VIDEO | MPEG video files | |
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 | starcrystal1.mpg
- 2.3m
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| Billy (who chose that name for a female character again?) wanders into the room and discovers Gar. What follows is nonstop horror as she tries to kill the monster with... ...oh skip it. I refuse to care about the fate of bit part actors, especially ones with such a hideous fright wig passing for their hair.
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| | Leave a comment | EXTRAS | Buy the movie | |
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| Star Crystal
Reply #1. Posted on November 18, 1999, 02:38:34 PM by Warren H.
I rented this when I was a kid any my parents grounded me for making them sit through it.
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| Star Crystal
Reply #2. Posted on February 23, 2002, 08:24:42 PM by Dan
Stay away, Stay far, far away!
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| Star Crystal
Reply #3. Posted on November 25, 2006, 05:10:12 PM by Dan
How can you all not enjoy the awfulness of this movie. Man I hate this movie, but now that I look back I cringe and laugh in horror at how bad. And the most anticlimatic ending i've ever seen. "Why is he such a jerk?"
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAH
-dan
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| Star Crystal
Reply #4. Posted on November 25, 2006, 05:09:49 PM by Blake W.
This thing deserves a skull... Even for a veteran B-grade movie fan like me (watching everything from Ed Wood's Plan 9 to Class of Nuke'em High), this was one of most painful things for me to sit through.
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| Star Crystal
Reply #5. Posted on April 16, 2002, 01:49:49 AM by Jim Brown
As much as I luv b-movies & cheese.this one is a waste of time.Yawn.
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| Star Crystal
Reply #6. Posted on November 25, 2006, 05:09:49 PM by Creepozoid
THE ULTIMATE CRAP FLICK.
This makes for quite a case study and it's so bad it's awesome. Can't wait for the DVD.
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| Star Crystal
Reply #7. Posted on November 25, 2006, 05:09:49 PM by eve
hey! why everyone hates this film? I know its just a piece of crap, but whattheheck...is so weird, odd and cheesy that i just love it!
the alien-stupid-gar-ger (what's his name? or was a she?)mades me cry! oh, he/she was so cute!
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Reply #8. Posted on November 25, 2006, 05:10:12 PM by Jurassic Pork
STAR CRYSTAL starts off as two stalwart astronauts, who are not quite as convincing as Don Knotts was, pick up a rock on an airless planet that nonetheless boasts blue skies and 90 mph headwinds. They then leave Califor... uh, Mars, and kindly bring this Pandora's Rock back to the ship. Within mere hours, the entire crew is dead of oxygen deprivation and returns to space station dry dock, where the corpses are seemingly greeted with matter-of-fact apathy. Obviously, paperwork in the coming centuries is worse
than ever.
Cut to an emergency meeting lacking the drama and ingenious set decoration of the one featured in OVERDRAWN AT THE MEMORY BANK (which at least a fat guy to riff). We're introduced to characters who are on camera for maybe eleven nanoseconds total, or just barely enough time for us to accept them into our hearts just before they're suddenly and tragically killed. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The hot chick at the meeting, the one that you fully expect to survive for at least half the movie, is then killed along with the rest of the station's crew but not before one shuttle jettisons with five people.
While the shuttle valiantly limps through the reaches of outer space, trying to get to the next supply buoy, the creature begins to gestate. Eventually it reaches the horrific size of a golden retriever (I guess it was the biggest beach ball that the propmaster could get at the local Wal-Mart). It infiltrates the ship and begins killing off the quintet by wrapping its tendrils around their victims' ankles then sucking their blood, dessicating them and turning them into Strom Thurmond.
The crew is so nasty and vile-tempered toward eachother, hence to the audience, that one would root for the creature were it not so ridiculously innocuous-looking and badly realized. It gains access to the ship's mainframe, which was engineered by Coleco, and begins to rationalize killing humans by studying our Bible (good idea, actually).
One by one the nasty black security guy, then the nasty ship's engineer (think Carla, of Cheers fame, only with a brain tumor) and the only sweet-tempered one, a xenophobe with all the backbone of an egg white. Soon, it's only the nasty computer nerd who knows about computers so is qualified to fly the shuttle through meteor storms and therefore is pragmatic in the ways of orbits and re-entry and docking procedures and stuff) and the nasty woman who
then inexplicably fall in love just before the creature's about to kill them.
But wait. It was all a mistake. The creature, who resembles an ET candle left on a hot radiator for too long, explains to the surviving pair that he brutally and horrifically killed the other three, plus the crew beforehand and, oh yes, the entire space station in between, out of self-defense, leading the ultra-perspicacious viewer to then wonder what the original crew and the members of the space station did to bring out its homicidal but misunderstood
pathology.
Anyway, the movie then degenerates (yes, the
degeneration never ends, ladies and germs) into a
series of cutaways that show the creature and our
stalwart pilot playing games of chess, with the
creature winning, of course, and getting in the way of
his work much in the humorous and disarming manner of
a curious but slimy calico.
They get to the buoy, the creature then changes his
mind and decides he doesn't need the ship, after all,
and will just wait for the next ship to come along so
he can viciously dessicate the crew of the next ship
that he arbitrarily decides will try to kill him. They
wish him Godspeed, the end.
A word on the acting:
Immediately after being cut adrift into what seems
sure death, the black actor playing the security man
advances his race with one giant leap by openly
speculating on who's hot. He justifies this by saying,
"I can't help it, man. It's in my blood!" to which I'd
responded, "I'll tell you what's *not* in your blood-
ACTING!"
This astute observation can serve as a synecdoche of
the entire movie. The actors could've and should've
taken tips from a junior high school drama club. The
movie has the ambience of all those porno movies from
the 80's.
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