The Roger Corman movie was long considered a simple Star Wars knock off and has long been thought of as little more than MST3K level material. But considering the quality of the cast: Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn, George Peppard, John Saxon, Morgan Woodward and the quality of people in the production crew like James Cameron (got his first big break doing the effects and production design here, his then wife Hurd worked for Corman) and James Horner it is hard to see how this movie is not more well known and higher regarded. And strictly speaking it was a low budget space opera which DID make a profit and wasn't too badly reviewed. Worth seeing if you keep an open mind.
It is a low budget Star Wars knockoff, but a reasonably entertaining one. The James Horner theme is fantastic. It--much like Star Wars--is essentially The Magnificent Seven in space, with Robert Vaughn playing a role similar to the one he played in the earlier film, and he even has a nearly identical monologue.
Yup. Another Magnificent 7 / 7 Samurai clone, this time in space. Saw it in the theater back in the day, had the Starlog issue featuring it, and how they did the (respectable!) fx on a shoestring budget. Still a once-a-decade guilty pleasure. John Boy Walton is the weak point of the movie, AFAIC. Sybil Danning was fap worthy in my tween years...
Well I'm a Richard Thomas fan as I like The Waltons a great deal. I didn't watch it when it was originally on but Amy did and her interest in it caused me to watch it later over the years. Thomas was also great as a Revolutionary War reenactor/rapist on "Rizzoli & Isles" I've also considered John Saxon to be a vastly underrated actor. And I've always liked Peppard and Vaughn.
Richard Thomas has my favorite line of the movie. At 36:30 he's "beamed" onto an alien ship, pulls a gun, and says "Okay, what's the big idea?" Cracks me up every time.
The aliens respond by making him point the gun at himself. I realize now that was the subliminal inspiration for this drawing I made a few years back!
I waited decades for someone to come out with a model of Nell. http://www.inpayne.com/models/scifi/nell.html
S Given the similarities and the fact that Battle Beyond the Stars came out earlier, some have suggested that Horner simply copied most of his work in BBtS for TWOK. Which is not unreasonable. If something is good it's good. I thought a nice touch in BBtS was that while the good guys won in the end, virtually all of them died as a result. It would be like in Star Wars if Han, Chewie, Threepio, and R2 had all been killed off in taking down the Death Star.
It was a fun enough movie - I put it in the same camp (very) as Krull. Mostly fluff but the odd cool scene.
I won’t swear to it since I lost all my old magazines from that era, but I believe that Robert Vaughn had it as part of his contract what his lines would be and that he died fast.
Certainly he doesn't have a big role in it. He has his introduction scene--which is a riff on a similar scene in The Magnificent Seven--and he shows up for the battle, fires a few shots, and then gets shot down. You can almost hear him thinking "God, I want off this picture, but I need a paycheck..."
Don't recall, but the footage of Vaughn during the battle amounts to only a few seconds, and it's the same shots over and over again. You see him at the controls from a few perspectives, and you see him when his ship is going down. And he gets a death scene. That and his intro is about it.
I'll grant that he never seems to change expressions during the battle. But I can't help it. I've always liked Robert Vaughn in almost everything he has done. Hero or villain.
