The Beast In Space

Beast In Space

Italy- 1980

Director - Alfonso Brescia

Severin Films, 2008, DVD

Run Time - 1 hour, 32 minutes

I couldn't help but watch Alfonso Brescia's Beast In Space after having my mind totally exploded by his Trilogy of Pain. I wish I could go back and watch them again for the first time and feel violated all over again. That is why these days I watch whatever other Brescia trash I come across. I no longer feel surprised, but I want to recreate that feeling of shock and awe. The last one I found entirely by accident, realizing that Amazons vs. Supermen was a Brescia film only because the music had been recycled, and because it was such a unique flavor of terrible. I bought it because it was co-produced by the Shaw Bros. Studio and I was hoping for some bizarre kung-fu. What I got was a godawful emotional hangover.

I kindof found this one in the same way except that I spotted Brescia's pseudonym, "Al Bradley" in the opening credits. Beast In Space is a more "modern" spin on the French arthouse bestiality porno La Bete (The Beast, 1975). In Brescia's "space" version the Beast is a guy with goat legs (pants with hair glued on), ostensibly a satyr with a giant cock and a preference for human astronaut women. The rest of the plot is a barely connected mess of recycled garbage from the Trilogy, which to be perfectly honest was pretty much just recycling itself already.

This has the exact same feel as the Trilogy, foggy ethereal, and very low budget with an underlying foundation of swinger innuendo. The difference of course is that in this case, they follow through on the innuendo. There is an X rated version of Beast In Space, but I watched the soft version. Plain old grinding is fine with me, I have a hard time with the clinical body-double penetration shots typical of this era and genre, they're gross. (Like Thriller: A Cruel Picture) But it leaves me wondering if there are dirty versions of the Trilogy. Sleaze certainly fits the atmosphere set in those earlier films (and copied in this film), and it seems likely that the feel of the film, regardless of the plot/context should give us an indication of the film-makers true passion. Either Brescia's spaceships look like cheap nightclubs, or cheap nightclubs look like Brescia's spaceships. For all intents and purposes, they're the same thing.


Witness if you dare my intoxicated, stream of consciousness Brescia deflowering with the Trilogy of Pain. You've been warned:
Cosmos: War of the Planets
Star Odessey
War of the Robots

The DVD cover of the hardcore version.

Amazons vs. Supermen

Amazons vs. Supermen

(Superuomini, superdonne, superbotte)
Italy - 1975
Director – Alfonso Brescia (a.k.a. Al Bradley)
Rarescope, 2008, DVD

The music alone foreshadows a tenuous grip on logic, and should have given me all the warning I needed. If only I had noticed it during the first viewing, drunk with four friends, I might have noticed a big terrible secret. Instead, I sat expectantly through what at first looked like an average low budget Italian adventure movie, but what quickly turned into a full-fledged assault on my sense of propriety. Menaced by brutal vicious Amazons, their callous disregard for life proven by an opening a scene of them killing each other to great fanfare, the innocent peasant residents of a peaceful valley turn for help to Dharma, a skinny old white man who lives in a Batman style rock cave. Not just any skinny old white dude, this guy spouts cocky mystical passive aggressive rhetoric while wearing a chain-mail short-short/hood combo with a tiny waist length red cape.


Nearby a giant black man is eating lentils and pitching dwarves at local hoods, while a Chinese guy (Shaw Studios actor Hua Yueh) astride an ox does more or less the same thing to the strains of spooky jazz, and wins the affection of the only other Asian actor in the film, a pretty girl.
Passing on the yoke of “gay medieval superhero” to his protégé, Dharma reveals the secret of the flame of immortality. Really, is this supposed to be metaphorical?

With their racially matched mates in tow, black man and Chinese man team up to beat up some more thugs, ostensibly to prove their worth to Dharma who is busy trampoloining into a fracas with the gullible Amazons, taunting them all the while with an incessant trampoline slide whistle sound effect. With Dharma hogging 90 percent of the screentime, and having sufficiently angered the hollering Amazons with a little panty-raid, the three heroes return to the valley to prepare for the inevitably bizarre confrontation.
A brutally, hair pullingly insistent combination of inept slapstick and vanilla violence, this bears all the marks of improvisation on a scale that can only be the work of one man. Alfonso Brescia, mastermind of babbling, semi-coherent “tourettes syndrome” filmmaking. There is no way of predicting what crescendo of insanity is sure to come spluttering from the glue sniffing blowhole of this movie short of heavy drinking and cranial trauma.

Cosmos: War Of the Planets

Cosmos: War of the Planets
Italy - 1982
Director- Al Bradley (AKA Alfonso Brescia)
Brentwood Home Video, 2003, Space Quest 20 movie DVD set

Effin’ eh, the first few seconds have got me worried, and sure enough it’s another crap-tastic Al Bradley Italian space turd.

Some people in a space station are wearing some silly costumes with these sweet molded felt helmets. One dude punches another in the face. They get in trouble with their bosses, and one dude goes on a spacewalk, the same spacewalk that was re-used and besmirched the first several cringe inducing minutes of War of the Robots. Hey all the actors are the same, hey all the sets are the same too! Everything is the same, except for one thing, a goddamned badass super computer called WIZ. WIZ knows everything. Everything! The WIZ also conveys orders from the space sytation commanders to the capitans of the spaceships. Ship MK-31, is on it’s way back to base Orion for a little well deserved rest and relaxation. Orion picks up some crazy alien signals that are “messing up the radio and video transmissions on Earth”. WIZ orders the ship to go and terminate the signals. Capitan Hamilton bluntly refuses, but then suddenly some alien craft appear and they exchange gunfire. MK-31 is hit and thrown into some kind of freefall through space. Finally in some remote sector they are able to stabilize their craft as they descend into the atmosphere of an alien planet. (I think I’m starting to lose track).

Despite the orders of Orion Base they land on the planet and exit into a conveniently breathable atmosphere. As they explore the rocky surface, suddenly one of their number is killed by the cheesiest robot costume ever, while another crew member disappears. The remaining crew members go looking for her, but instead find a subterranean race of atomic mutants (the same actors as the puffy eyes in Robots, only with silver body paint). The humans agree to assist the mutants who have been enslaved and menaced by the shitty robot, even allowing one of the mutants to don one of their unitards and join the crew. They figure out which weapons they need in order to defeat the robot and they head back to the ship to get them, but wait! There’s the robot, wait, they’re going after the robot! They end up in a big cave chamber place with a different giant blinking robot with lighted buttons in the form of a face. All they need to do to defeat this ultimate evil slot machine robot? Push the big red button! But the evil genius robot foils that plan too, and now it seems that only some bible verses will help the humans.Volcanos! Avalanches! Gothic organ music! Give it more power! The ship escapes the planet, but alas is overtaken and conquered by the most unabashedly canned soundtracks of all time along with a plethora of the most washed out, grainy and decrepit stock footage available.

Sexually suggestive remarks are made towards the mutant who joined the crew (the same ugly dude who did the same thing in Robots). No satisfaction, none whatsoever, but, you can see nipples through the suit in one scene. The epitome of 70’s hot for 70’s not. God bless Yanti Somer and Kentucky straight bourbon.

Star Odessey

Star Odyssey
Italy - 1979
Director- Alfonso Brescia (as Al Bradley)
Brentwood Home Video, 2003, Space Quest20 movie DVD set

On a crappy Italian backlot soundstage somewhere in CineCitta, Al Bradley (AKA Alfonso Brescia) has finished his “film” War of the Planets ahead of schedule. What to do? Here’s the deal, shoot one film, and get the next two, of equal or lesser value FREE!

A spaceship detects an alien craft, the first contact with aliens! The alien craft flees, and when the humans try to catch up, the alien ship destroys them! The humans try and blast back, but their weapons are ineffectual. The commander of the human mothership is befuddled, but quickly realizes that if they are to have any chance they need to enlist the help of Professor. Sadly, Commander and Professor don’t get on well ever since Commander threw Professor in prison. The only person who can successfully help Professor escape from incarceration is Space Hero Oliver Carera. Carera is a by the book jerk who refuses to violate the law and perform the jailbreak, so Commander hypnotizes him.

Meanwhile, the aliens have been scoping out earth so they can offer the planet and it’s resources of slaves and such at their next “planet auction”.

Carera teams up with another guy with a child molester moustache and a silver spider web on his shirt who also has hypnotizing power and telekinesis. They do some crazy stuff and Spider Shirt keeps Carera hypnotized and they team up with Professors sexy big-boobed daughter/assistant who in turn recruits a crazy android boxer who in turn enlists the help of two manic depressive suicidal robots who can phase in and out of physicality. Follow?

Somehow, they rescue some scientists who are going to create some synthetic “Indirium” which is apparently the only way they can defeat the evil aliens plan. During a conversation they are served whiskey by a little R2-D2 knockoff foam and plastic robot that obviously has an impatient little kid in it because the silver lycra clad arms twitch and flop impatiently. Ha ha that shit is funny! While the scientists are in the lab synthesizing, the muscle is outside digging holes when the aliens attack, hey, it turns out these aliens are the same gold wigged assholes as War of the Robots, who once again are armed with light saber knockoffs. After the good guys capture one of the alien swords, the scientists go to the lab and synthesize it. The leader of the bad guys, Gator Face does psychic battle with Professor. The scientists finally synthesize “anti-indirium”, oh wait, no one of the depressed robots does. There is a big ass sword fight in the aliens ship Then a heat ray or some something. This is so horrible that it’s jaw dropping. Everything that could be low class and lousy about it is. It’s like one of those trashy Italian barbarian movies (one of which, Iron Warrior was directed by Brescia) but in “space”, and with the lowest possible production value. What makes it so incredible is that it combines every possible bad and corny stereotype into one sordid package and wallows in it with pride, without using nudity as a pressure release valve! Making it even more heretical, aghast it continues. Pure excruciating beauty. Screw it.

War of the Robots

War of the Robots

Italy - 1978

Director- Alfonso Brescia (as Al Bradley)

Brentwood Home Video, 2003, Space Quest 20 Movie DVD set

The credit sequence is straight out of a 50’s serial. The names all look Anglo-American, but the production value, all the visuals and the dubbing are oh so Italian.

A professor conducting genetic experiments in a reactor on a space station with his beautiful blonde “au naturale” assistant are kidnapped by several golden page-boy wigged and silver jumpsuit clad “aliens” armed with light weapons of some kind. They are whisked by wire propelled spacecraft into the blurry depths of space. After a droll and simplistic computer reads off some grade-school computations, a rescue force is launched into space with directions that include North and East. They encounter three enemy craft, which they engage, destroying two. The third disappears. The rescue force, ship damaged in the brief exchange, lands on a nearby soundstage planet to perform repairs. On the surface they encounter a race of aliens who resemble humans in every way except for their puffy latex eyes and leather helmets. The puffy eyed people it is revealed are the slaves of the silver jumpsuiters. Anyway, it turns out the 2 kidnapped people are actually the leaders of the golden haired bad aliens, except for the fact that the woman, the assistant chick is in love with the leader of the humans, so she helps them escape and splits with them.

Damn, this is so incredibly low class it’s shocking. Classless as hell, but mercifully, all the men are clad in loose fitting jumpsuits, and predictably, but thankfully, the women are not. None of the women is wearing a bra, the spaceship animations are circa 1960 TV quality and are so painfully wooden and Star Wars derivative that it was hard to keep from covering my face. Ugggghhhh. When the spaceship gets hit all the people’s chairs shake in different directions. The actors all deliver some of the most idiotically scripted and and dubbed lines ever. People stand in the open and have conversations during gun battles. Wins the award for worst spacewalk scene ever sinfully committed to film, while simultaneously delivering the awesomest soundtrack this side of a death rattle.

So bad it’s like punching yourself in the face repeatedly or shooting up under your fingernails. Terrible, painful, unhealthy and rotten, but it feels so goddamn decadent.