Nerding Day: Star Crystal 🌭

In the 1980s, Alien ripoffs were a genre in their own right. The Italians, having honed their budget genre chops with westerns, cranked out flicks like Contamination and Alien 2: On Earth, the latter being an extremely unofficial sequel to Alien made before 20th Century Fox could register the trademark. The Japanese, protected by loose copyright law, created anime and games “inspired” by Alien like Lily C.A.T. and Contra. And plenty of Americans got in on the action, too, with, of course, Roger Corman, Charles Band, and Fred Olen Ray’s names figuring prominently.

Among these was Star Crystal, a film written and directed by a man named Lance Lindsay, whose IMDB page is as brief as that shot in Aliens that says that Lambert was a “Despin Convert at birth.” (Look it up.) Other than Star Crystal, he wrote a film called Real Bullets and appeared in Quiet Fire, a straight-to-video action movie from 1991 that was one of twenty-seven such pictures Robert Z’Dar appeared in during that year.

As best I can tell, Lance Lindsay got out of the movie business in the early ’90s, opened a shipping business in Colorado, and vanished, much like Robert Z’Dar’s pronounced jaw disappearing behind his handsome beard in Quiet Fire.

But let us not judge Lance Lindsay — and we must always refer to him by his full, alliterative, porn star-esque name — based on his dearth of artistic output. After all, Charles Laughton only directed one film and it was Night of the Hunter. Herk Harvey’s solo directorial effort was the classic Carnival of Souls. Meanwhile, Uwe Boll was allowed to direct over 20 different films and also roam the earth unmolested after the release of Alone in the Dark.

The universe is not a fair place and success frequently has no relationship whatsoever to talent. And hey, it’s bad luck to release your Alien ripoff the same year that Aliens came out. Maybe Star Crystal is a hidden gem. In space. Because it’s a star crystal. STAR CRYSTAL!

Alien opened with a journey into a surreal landscape filled with eerie architecture, a gigantic alien corpse, and a field of mysterious eggs which provide the inciting action of the film. Star Crystal runs with the egg idea but leaves everything else, instead going with the red action of the red planet. Mars is red, right? So red you can’t really see anything?

Alien took place in 2186. Anyone watching it when it was released would have been long dead by the time that date actually rolled around. Star Crystal, meanwhile, opts for 2032, a date that was only 46 years away when it came out. It’s like the movie is daring you to remember it exists fifty years later. And, well, I guess I’m the asshole here because 2032 isn’t that far off anymore and here I am, writing about Star Crystal.

Two astronauts find a rock on Mars that they bring back onto their ship with them. They talk about being the first people to play football on Mars ever, which clearly means a lot to them.

This is a great detail, because it sets up the bleakness of the cinematic world we’re entering into. These guys are so indebted to Star Crystal‘s equivalent of Weyland-Yutani that they can only find joy by goofing off during routine missions. They’ll tell their grandchildren that they were the first people to play football on Mars and, hold on — is that a futuristic Coca-Cola bottle?

It fucking is! Did Coca-Cola give them money for that shot or was this a freebie? Did Coke even know they were going to show up in Star Crystal? And what’s the deal with those bottles? Will people eight years from now drink soda out of violent shape accidents? This looks like a year 2032 Pepsi attack ad. “Stop drinking cola like you’re a fucking hamster glitching out of reality. Pepsi.”

There’s no time for the hijinks of these space jocks, though. An ’80s Italian space babe informs them the captain wants to speak to them immediately. I can’t wait to see how these characters are going to deal with the threat they’ve inadvertently brought aboard their spacecraft in the form of an apparently innocuous rock, which begins leaking semen as soon as they leave the room.

Again, Alien had an egg splitting open to disgorge a monster that grabbed onto someone’s face then eventually had a little guy burst out of his stomach. Star Crystal has an egg that starts dripping sperm and then plops out a glowing crystal and what looks like an alien abortion.

Not exactly a menacing start, but maybe it’ll grow into something horrific. I bet that Italian lady is going to be the final girl, and maybe she’ll get semi-naked like Ripley while fighting the horrible thing that pile of mucus grows into. It’s the ’80s, right?

Or, we could just have everyone we’ve met so far die off-screen because their ship’s oxygen supply shut down. That works too, I guess. See, Lance Lindsay is a crafty guy. He’ll zag on you. That crew we spend the first ten minutes of the movie with? They’re not our guys. They don’t even get names. They’re all dead, and two months later the shuttle is docking with a space station where a meeting is being held regarding the malfunction of the “nuetron reactors.”

Why bother briefly introducing a crew just to kill them off and make the rest of the movie have nothing to do with them? Maybe to create tension and mystery, or the sense that anyone could die at any time in this movie — just like in real life! But it’s already a fucking horror movie. We know that 90% of the named characters are going to be killed off by alien afterbirth.

So here’s my theory: Lance Lindsay was working backward from the conditions he needed later in the script. “Well, I have the crew stuck on a shuttlecraft making a long trip without enough supplies… but it doesn’t make sense that a short-range ship would be traveling such a long distance. So what if I have the first crew die, send the shuttle to dock with a space station where they’re going to discuss what happened, then have the space station explode and a handful of people escape aboard the shuttle!”

It’s convoluted nonsense and none of it was necessary. It’s not like we’re going to solve the mystery of what happened to the first crew — we know the alien turned the oxygen off and they died peacefully in their sleep. Sometimes, I wish an alien would do that to me. Whoa, that came out of nowhere.

So here’s our actual crew, the only five people who made it off the space station and onto the shuttle that still holds the eponymous star crystal and the alien sludge. We’ve got technician Roger “Rog” Campbell, stand-in captain by dint of being white, male, and present.

There’s “Cal”, his buddy who does not receive a last name and is not what we might today call “good representation.”

And then there are the womenfolk: Sherrie Stevens, your classic blonde space ditz:

Dr. Adrian Kimberly, your classic level-headed brunette space doctor:

And Lt. Billi Lynn, who looks like a cross between Liz Lemon and Carla from Cheers, spends all of her screen time acting like appearing in this movie was a huge favor for a not particularly close friend, and is implied to be a lesbian. She is my favorite character in Star Crystal and also the first to die.

The five of them have narrowly avoided exploding, but now they’re stuck on a short-haul spaceship without much food, and it’ll take them over a year to get to Earth. But hold on — this is the same shuttle that went from Mars to the space station in two months, right? We launched an unmanned spacecraft that did a flyby of Mars in 1964, which took about eight months to get there. Even if the exploded space station was on the other side of Mars from Earth, we should have been able to make that trip in less than a year twenty years before Star Crystal came out. This isn’t getting a prediction about the future cutely wrong, it’s plain old sloppy screenwriting, Lance Lindsay!

Regardless, being stranded in space is the least of this crew’s worries. They soon discover that their “captain” is an incompetent asshole who immediately begins tearing into the ship’s liquor supplies and telling everybody to take it easy despite the fact that they all just narrowly escaped death and likely lost a number of friends and family — or at least co-workers — in the station explosion. He’s even reprogrammed the ship’s computer to respond to his voice alone, which we learn when Cal tries to talk to it and it doesn’t answer.

“Racist,” Cal says. “No, she just has good taste,” Campbell replies. “Master, do you wish to continue our erotic Centurions roleplay Y/N?” Bernice the computer asks.

On top of Campbell’s hijinks, the crew is being stalked by an alien creature that’s pulsating wetly and killing them off one by one. The first to go, as I mentioned before, is Billi. That’s fine by her. She’s had enough of being in this movie anyway.

Her death, and those that come after, are all shot really vaguely. The alien’s M.O. seems to be:

1. Trip clumsy hu-man legs with tentacles.

2. ???

3. They’re dead now!

I guess it’s maybe like, squeezing all of their blood out, or something? Again, it’s all pretty vague. Lance Lindsay somehow discovered the secret space between “don’t show the monster” and “gory kills” where we see parts of the monster killing people but it’s not at all clear exactly how.

Sherrie is the next to go, immediately after Campbell and Cal tell her they’re not going to let anything happen to her, leaving off the part about how it’s because she’s the only female crew member who seems receptive to their advances, in that she isn’t actively hostile, only oblivious. Sherrie was just too dumb to live — she finds some mysterious goop and sticks her hand directly in it.

Even if there wasn’t a killer alien around, this is just bad workplace safety. You don’t know what that is, Sherrie! Why is your first instinct to reach out and grab a handful? Alas, after discovering Billi’s desiccated corpse, Sherrie suffers the same fate despite a heroic attempt to defend herself with a vial of acid.

They’re dropping like flies now. Cal runs off to try and save the already-melted Sherrie with the world’s most pathetic laser gun, and we all know how that’s going to go.

Actually, “runs” isn’t quite right. See, while the rooms on board the shuttle are sensibly human-sized, they’re all connected by tunnels that require getting down on your hands and knees to crawl through.

You can see the thought process at work here: Lance Lindsay saw the part of Alien where Dallas is wriggling around in the air ducts and thought, hey, that’s pretty neat, but what if we made the whole ship out of air ducts? STAR CRYSTAL!

And while we’re doing things from Alien but more, let’s have Campbell and Adrian watch the whole scene on a version of the motion tracker from Alien that seems to be built into the ship’s computer for some reason.

If nothing else, this sets Campbell up for the incredible line “that’s not Cal’s dot” when the alien kills him.

And then there were two. We finally get a look at the alien here and it’s utterly disgusting, but not how you’re picturing. No, it looks like you cracked an egg open and there was a glistening, half-developed baby chicken inside.

In an effort to learn more about the monster, Campbell and Adrienne find and review the old crew’s recordings. They’re awestruck by their findings — that a couple of months ago, two men played football on Mars.

You didn’t think that was coming back, did you?

The alien tries to kill them some more by cutting off the oxygen, they turn it back on. They’re hailed by another ship, the alien prevents them from responding. They run into a meteor storm, and the alien throws up a force field around the ship to protect itself. Campbell comes across the blackened skull of his dead friend Cal and later does an overly long bit about being related to the Campbells of Campbell’s Soup.

But wait a second, Cal wasn’t burned to death! Why is his skull black? Oh no, did Lance Lindsay believe that black people also have black bones? It doesn’t matter, Campbell — just leave his corpse in the tube where you found it.

Thus far, Star Crystal has merely been an incompetently made science fiction movie with bad acting and middling special effects for the time. That would have been enough for some cheap laughs, but surely not for this level of scrutiny. It’s a shitty Alien ripoff from the ’80s — what do you expect, right? But here, Lance Lindsay’s script makes a hard turn off the highway of predictable sci-fi horror, swerving across three lanes of traffic to take the exit marked “insane twist ending.”

The alien uses its magic crystal to review the ship’s archives. It pulls up files labeled “Evolution of Human Race Parts 1-20.” So this shuttle is slower than the spacecraft we had at the time Star Crystal came out, but it at least has a full download of Wikipedia in case anyone gets bored on those long trips to and from Mars.

What does the alien glean from these files? It zeroes in on “Mid-East,” “Religion,” and then “Christianity.” Notice something strange about the list of major human religions in the Middle East there?

No, not the fact that they spelled it “Judisum” or “Buddism,” forgivable errors in the late ’80s where it would have taken a team of computer programmers several days to correct the issue. I’m talking about the total absence of Islam. Sorry, Muslims, you’re lumped into “Others” along with Scientology, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, and Nuwaubianism.

What happens next is so staggeringly stupid that I’m impressed by Lance Lindsay’s audacity. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a serial killer sitting in an interrogation room, wearing his most recent victim’s skin and telling the cops that he couldn’t have done it because he was doing an unrelated murder at the time. Lance Lindsay has the alien read the Bible and learn about loving your enemies while it pulsates wetly, this time in a Christ-respecting manner.

 

Gosh, it’s lucky it hit on those particular verses! Not to get all euphoric atheist on you, but even in the New Testament (the ship doesn’t seem to carry the OT) there’s a lot of weird stuff. How about Galatians 5:12, “Would that those who are upsetting you might also castrate themselves!” That would be a hell of a thing for a telekinetic goop monster to read out of context.

Meanwhile, Campbell is crawling towards the engine room with Baby’s First Flamethrower. Alien had a flamethrower, so Star Crystal is duty bound by the law of movie ripoffs to have one as well, even if they could only afford one that looks like a piece of dental equipment.

To recap, things this ship has: flamethrower, dot-based movement tracker, entire history of human civilization. Things this ship doesn’t have: security cameras, human-sized corridors. It’s almost like the whole thing was built by an incompetent designer to get the crew killed off by a space monster and then allow said space monster to learn about humanity’s beliefs and history!

Campbell makes it to the engine room and sees the alien for the first time. The acting up to this point has more or less been what you’d expect from a cast best known for a movie called Star Crystal, but I think this is the perfect expression for encountering a melting, inside-out E.T.

The alien, whose name is inexplicably “GAR” moves and speaks like its existence is agony. Imagine encountering this thing, this rotten bird fetus of an alien, and knowing that it was what killed your friends. If GAR was what got you, you’d be looking down from heaven thinking, “I hope they tell my family and friends I was killed by a threateningly phallic insectoid monster designed by a Swiss maniac.” Then you’d have to ask God if all or indeed any GARs go to Heaven.

GAR needs the ship to go back to his home planet. Campbell demands to know if it’s going to kill him and Adrian like it killed the rest of the crew. In a masterful display of “no u,” GAR tells them that they would have done the same in its position. “You try to kill anything that is unfamiliar… like you, I was afraid,” GAR says. “Fuck off,” I say. “BACKSTAB SURPRISE!” Adrian says.

GAR defuses the situation with its mind powers. It gives a big speech about how it didn’t know what killing was until its magic crystal computer accessed the ship’s files on the subject. It’s been acting in self-defense the whole time! Humanity is the real monster!

Only, hold on. Sure, Sherrie threw acid at it, Cal tried to shoot it, and Billi kind of hit it with a wrench or something, but it also blew up that entire space station. This is the Bush doctrine of first contact. But like nominally liberal pundits in the wake of 9/11, Campbell and Adrian immediately accept GAR’s logic.

What’s more, GAR has cucked Campbell in his relationship with the computer Bernice. The movie’s made a point thus far of repeating that Bernice only responds to Campbell’s voice, but now it’s answering to GAR. Adrian, too, makes nice with the glowing freak with extreme negative canthal tilt far quicker than she did with Campbell, immediately disproving incel bone law. “I feel that I can trust you,” she says to the mutant sludge creature who brutally murdered three of her crew mates in the very recent past.

The remaining cast then skips straight past uneasy alliance to BFF status. Campbell asks GAR if it is ever afraid, and GAR, whose voice is becoming more like an impression of Frank Oz as dying Yoda in Return of the Jedi by the second, responds, “yes, but the crystal helps me understand.” Coincidentally, I once had a conversation just like this with someone smoking meth at a party in a vacant Brooklyn apartment.

We have left the sci-fi horror movie called Star Crystal behind. Lance Lindsay is now directing the pilot for Star Crystal, a sitcom starring an odd couple and their friend, a wacky space alien who learned about the concept of violent death from humanity. We get a full-on montage with uplifting music and scenes like “Campbell, Adrian, and GAR have a little space picnic together.”

And who could forget “Campbell looks for a wrench and GAR levitates it to him with his powers, then Campbell gives him a look like ‘GAR, you rascal!'”

The sequence culminates in GAR and Campbell playing what could be Go or is possibly some kind of space version of Go. GAR starts to make a move and Campbell protests that he hasn’t placed his piece yet. Gar responds that he released his hand, and Campbell argues that he didn’t.

They probably haven’t even jettisoned the carcasses of their fellow space station explosion survivors into space and their relationship with the space monster that killed them as well as everyone aboard said station has become that of a long-time married couple. “Why is he such a jerk,” GAR asks. Adrian laughs. The souls of hundreds or thousands of pointlessly-exploded space station crew members look on in disbelief.

And then Star Crystal just kind of ends. You weren’t expecting this to go anywhere after that twist, were you? GAR leaves on another ship to go back to his home planet, telling Campbell and Adrian “I value your friendship more than you know.” Roll the haunting Star Crystal theme over the credits, sung by the first, but not the iconic, voice actor of Daphne from Scooby-Doo, and let’s get the fuck out of here.

Alright Lance Lindsay, you won me back with Don Weed. Hold on, filmed entirely where?

Fuck you, pal. I’m glad Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs exploded you in Quiet Fire.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Moexu, the savage alien from beyond the stars who converted to Mormonism.