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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

And this is Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be talking about the 1978 space fantasy film Star Crash, directed by Luigi Coatsy, starring Carolyn Monroe, David Hasselhoff, Marjo Gortner, Christopher Plummer, and Joe Spinell. What a cast list, really like an all-star bill of different flavors of 70 screen personalities.

You've got alumni of The Sound of Music, the Young and the Restless, and the Godfather,

and you've got Hammer Horror Queens and Tent Revival Maniacs all in the same movie.

That is an assemblage.

Yeah, there's some great representation from Italian Schlock cinema here as well, and some exploitation cinema.

So it really is like a sediment of 70s motion pictures, where you can kind of like dig down and find little little gritty

bits of this and that. So the reason we're covering Star Crash on Star Wars Week here is that

despite the protestations of some of the film's creators, this is widely viewed as one of the

Star Wars knockoffs of the late 70s and early

80s. There were many of these. At the very least, this is thought of as an attempt to cash in

on the revolutionary box office success of the original Star Wars, which came out one year before.

This was 78. Star Wars was 77.

Yeah, I think we should be clear here for anyone who's new to Weird House Cinema. When we talk

about knock-offs, I don't think we've ever discussed a film for Weird House cinema that was,

in some ways, a knock-off that also didn't bring its own beauty and its own vision to the screen.

So we say it with a lot more love than maybe some critics might say it.

I will make the case that Star Crash is possibly the greatest of the Star Wars knockoffs,

and we have sampled a lot of them.

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