Galaxy of Terror

Say what you will about Roger Corman--almost no one in the history of the movies has had a better or more lasting understanding of how to make profitable productions. Other filmmakers have hit greater creative heights, or more astounding popular success, but Corman has spent over half a century stacking modest success atop modest success until he has accrued a monumental tower. A tower of cheese, perhaps, but a tower nonetheless. Free of artistic pretension, he has never let a desire for artistic respectability get in the way of making what will sell. Free of ego, he has cultivated the careers of some of the most talented and ambitious people Hollywood has ever seen. There is an inherent tension here. Corman's films are ennobled by the contributions of gifted young people, hungry and raw, eager for the chance to prove themselves. Yet their contributions are devalued by the exploitationist sleaze they are called upon to make. If you were to give Michelangelo his first big break painting the ceiling of a rundown brothel, you're gonna end up with the best looking ceiling of any brothel in Nevada, but it's not likely an accomplishment Michelangelo will happily note on his resume. You always wonder who got the better end of these deals. Galaxy of Terror is an excellent case in point. The 1981 production brought together a terrific cast and a crew of considerable note, for the purpose of making a movie best known for a scene in which a woman is raped by a gigantic maggot. As Billy Bragg once sang, "You have to take the crunchy with the smooth." To take stock: As the 1980s began, Corman could look back on three decades of dominance in the low-budget genre film realm. It was a dominance born of his extraordinary talent for penny-pinching and recognizing young talent. He bested the competition by making his B-movies cheaper than theirs, and better than theirs. But the time had come when Hollywood's major studios had started to chase his audience, and films like Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) were low-budget exploitation films made with big budgets and aimed at mass audiences. If audiences started to expect that level of expensive special effects from their genre fare, Corman could no longer cut corners as ruthlessly and still expect to survive. He had to spend more, and that exposed him to greater risk. That, in turn, obliged him to be ever more certain of targeting a specific audience with each production. Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) was Corman's answer to Star Wars. At $2 Million, it was the most Roger had ever spent on a single project. And it was just successful enough to reassure him that this wasn't a terrible idea. More SPFX films would follow. Exactly how much was spent on Galaxy of Terror is uncertain. While reports differ, $2 Million is a good ballpark guess. It is packed with lovingly crafted model miniatures and elaborate optical effects. Compared to today's dominance of CGI-based trickery, the DIY aesthetic of this sort of thing has a powerful nostalgic thrall. The spaceship's interiors are made from hundreds of discarded Styrofoam Whopper containers, glued to plywood boards and painted. And they manage to look fabulous. It is hard not to admire that kind of ingenuity. Anybody can sit at a computer and push pixels around; the kind of gumption that it takes to make workable sets and effects out of scraps is a more admirable, and rare, trait. Screenwriter Marc Siegler and director Bruce D. Clark were UCLA film students recruited by Roger straight out of school. They had worked for Corman before, and understood what was expected from them. Just like the art department fashioning sets out of trash, they were charged with making a movie out of somebody else's leavings. Everyone involved on Galaxy of Terror freely admits it was a rip-off of Alien (1979). This is not entirely self-evident from the finished film, which deviates from the Alien paradigm in one important respect (whereas Norman Warren's Inseminoid the same year was as blatant an Alien-a-like as was humanly possible). Galaxy of Terror starts off in Alien territory, with a motley collection of space travelers arriving on an inhospitable planet to investigate the wreck of another spaceship, in which they find monsters that kill them off one-by-one. The key distinction, though, is that where Alien starred a single, iconic beastie, Galaxy of Terror offers up a smorgasbord of different monsters. Every character gets his or her own individual custom-made monster, for a wide variety of grisly death scenes. In the final analysis, this is Galaxy of Terror's allure: a bunch of famous actors with impressive cult movie connections, each one bumped off in some outlandish way. Here is Robert Englund, soon to become famous as Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddie Krueger (killed by his own doppleganger). Here is former Happy Days star Erin Moran (and no, she doesn't die by jumping a shark, instead her head is blown up). Here is the incomparable Grace Zabriskie, a decade away from becoming Laura Palmer's grieving mother on Twin Peaks (burned alive). Here is Sid Haig, cult movie character actor par extraordinaire (a malevolent crystal takes him apart). Here is Zalman King, soon to be an above-the-title brand name all unto himself (disemboweled by a demon). Here is Ray Walston... picking one credit to identify this legendary actor is a challenge, but I'll cite his role as the Devil in Damn Yankees! (1958) because while it may not be his best performance, it is perhaps the most relevant to his role in Galaxy. I should list his death scene here, but to avoid spoilers I won't. Of all the wildly over-the-top deaths, though, the one that sealed Galaxy of Terror's notoriety belonged to Taaffe O'Connell. The bosomy blonde had been lured to the project by the prospect of playing a competent professional astronaut--a welcome diversion from the demeaning and sexualized roles otherwise being offered her. Then, Roger Corman decided that what Galaxy of Terror needed most of all was a rape scene. Screenwriter Marc Siegler objected, as did director Bruce D. Clark. When the day came to shoot it, Clark was so irked he abdicated the director's chair altogether and left Roger to direct it himself. Director of photography Austin McKinney considered the scene an ordeal he "just had to get through." It was more than just a rape scene, though. Poor Taaffe's attacker is a giant maggot. There are two kinds of people in the world: one group will read that sentence and say to themselves, "I gotta see that." The other group probably wasn't going to see Galaxy of Terror anyway. And therein lay Corman's genius for exploitation films. His rape idea was repulsive and insulting, but it gave his film a marketing hook and an enduring cult reputation. Corman got what he wanted out of the sequence: the enormous worm slobbers slime all over the girl, rips off her clothes, and envelops her. And her agony gives way to ecstasy. She dies in the thing's embrace, with a smile on her face. At least that's how it was filmed. When editor R.J. Kizer (one of the New World personnel later tasked with turning the brooding Return of Godzilla into the goofy Godzilla 1985) cut the scene, it was rejected by the MPAA. To avoid an adverse box office rating of X, Kizer had to trim out much of the sequence, especially all of those shots that suggested Taaffe O'Connell found anything positive in the experience. What no one but Roger knew--mostly because he hadn't told anyone else--was that he'd sold the distribution rights to United Artists on the basis of the sex scenes. He was under something of a contractual obligation to deliver a certain amount of footage of topless O'Connell, by hook or by crook, and had to accommodate those expectations in a way that didn't bring down the MPAA's axe. My point in this story is that for those of you who decry "gratuitous nudity," well if you define "gratuitous" as meaning "unnecessary," then that doesn't properly apply here. The whole point of Galaxy of Terror was to get Taaffe O'Connell to take her top off. Everything else was gravy.