Crew
Director – Alfonso Brescia, Screenplay – Massimo Lo Jacono & Giacomo Mazzocchi, Photography – Silvio Fraschetti, Music – Marcello Giombini, Special Optical Effects – Aldo Frollini, Animation – Studio H, Production Design – Adriana Bellone & Mimmo Scavia. Production Company – Cinematografie Internazionali Associate.
Cast
John Richardson (Captain Mike Layton), Yanti Sommer (Diane Green), Massimo De Cicco (Azar), Walter Maestosi (Irk), Gaetano Balestrieri (Colonel Dawson)
Plot
The spaceship Magellan encounters two alien craft heading towards Earth, but all contact is lost after they divert to investigate. Earth forces captain Mike Layton and his lady friend Diane Green encounter an alien man Irk and child Azar who say they have come from Ganymede. They wield a weapon that disappears various of the other aliens from Gona. However, the Gonarians proceed to take over the bodies of various Earth forces soldiers.
Italian exploitation cinema used to have a great ability to take international successes and churn out a series of cheaper-made copies. Some of these have become genres in their own right such as the Spaghetti Western, the peplum and the giallo Film. Italy had created a spate of Space Operas in the 1960s with the likes of Assignment Outer Space (1960), Battle of the Worlds (1961), War of the Planets (1965), The Wild, Wild Planet (1965), 2 + 5: Mission Hydra/Star Pilot (1966), War Between the Planets (1966) and The Snow Devils (1967). A few years later, following the massive worldwide success of Star Wars (1977), Italy rediscovered space opera once again. Luigi Cozzi’s Starcrash (1978) was quite a reasonable international success for those starved for more Star Wars. A host of other Italian films quickly followed with the likes of Cosmos – War of the Planets (1977), Battle of the Stars, War of the Robots (1978) and Star Odyssey (1979), all from director Alfonso Brescia, as well as other works like The Humanoid (1979) and the tv series Treasure Island in Outer Space (1987).
As such, Battle of the Stars is not quite a full space opera. Only a certain amount of the action takes place in space and the bulk of the film is earthbound. In these scenes, it feels more like we are watching an Alien Invasion film, in particular some kind of Body Snatchers film such as Invaders from Mars (1953) or The Puppet Masters (1994) with regular humans being taken over by an alien force.
Some of the costuming choices are a little odd when Battle of the Stars is seen today. All of the earth forces officers were cloth headwear, including cloth caps that cover the hair, ears and back of the head with what look like big headphone pads where the ears are meant to be. Elsewhere, Yanti Sommer accompanies John Richardson on a fishing trip while wearing a man’s shirt, big waders and black bikini bottoms. Massimo De Cicco as the kid who is later revealed to be an android wears a silver suit with cloth links over the top and carries a gold sphere on a chain at his waist, which he uses to magically disintegrate Gonarian enemies.
The special effects are fairly standard for Italian space opera of this period. Some of these have appropriated Star Wars designs. They’re not awful but the models are obviously models whenever they appear. These are also fairly limited – there is an EVA sequence but none of the dogfights among small spaceships that were fairly de rigeur for any Star Wars imitator in this period.
Battle of the Stars is a rather stodgy example of the Italian space opera – it emerges maybe down around the level of Wild, Wild Planet. It throws around tropes like UFOs, alien invasion, body snatchers, androids – but fails to stir them into a particularly enervated or exciting mix. Towards the end of the film, we find the Gonarians are being controlled by an evil computer, but this then has a meltdown when it is in danger of being defeated and flees, abandoning its people to their own fate.
Battle of the Stars is frequently confused with the almost identically sounding Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), a Roger Corman space opera copycat from around the same period.
Alfonso Brescia (1930-2001) had a career between the 1960s and 1990s working in various Italian exploitation genres includes the peplum, the war film, the giallo and the 1970s crime film. Aside from the abovementioned, his other genre films include The Conqueror of Atlantis (1965), the giallo A Suitcase for a Corpse (1970) and Naked Girl Murdered in the Park (1972), Super Stooges vs the Amazon Women (1974), the adult space opera The Beast in Space (1980) and the sword and sorcery film Iron Warrior (1986).
Full film available here