GALAXY OF TERROR
Legend has it that Russian cinema genius Sergei Eisenstein felt that the pinnacle of film making would not be reached until it was possible to portray the rape of a woman by space maggot and have it be sublimely beautiful. Well, 1981 rolled around and B.D. Clark’s GALAXY OF TERROR reached that pinnacle.
So GALAXY OF TERROR seems to get slammed with the ALIEN rip-off tag pretty frequently but I prefer to see it as a rip-off of SOLARIS. The crew of a space ship goes to some shit- hole planet, possibly Gretna, to investigate something or another. Once they get there they are slowly picked off by their own worst fears materialized. Fortunately for us, one of the women ( thankfully not Erin “Joanie” Moran) has a fear of getting raped by a space maggot. The cast includes Ray Walston, Sid Haig , Edward Albert(No, not the Green Acres guy) Zalman King, Robert Englund and spooky Grace Zabriskie. If you are anything like me, you’ve always wanted to see Erin Moran’s head explode and thanks to B.D. Clark, you can. There are also some other creepy critters and bizarre gruesome deaths that are fun.
The sets and the effects are actually pretty good low budget stuff. There’s a decent amount of gore and even a bit of stop motion creature effects. I know I mentioned the space maggot but I also feel that I should point out that at some point during the rape, the woman appears to be having an orgasm. Shockingly taboo and yet sublimely beautiful. If you need the Gorillanaut rape disclaimer again, it goes something like this: Gorillnaut, The Naked Jungle and their parent company LIMBANI INTERNATIONAL are against rape a lot of the time, but not when it’s a space maggot rapist and done in a way that could be seen as “sublimely beautiful”.
I really like GALAXY OF TERROR. In many ways it seems like the greatest RUSH concept album that was never made put onto film. This cannot be denied especially when the mind bending conclusion of the “You are the Master” finale is reached. Cannot be denied. All in all it’s very much in the Italian knock off genre without being Italian. Sadly, I had to go to Italy to get my dvd which is fine because I was going anyway.
The Naked Jungle 