As I’ve continually maintained, being a child of the ’70s means that you automatically use that decade as a baseline cue for style, sensibility and your world perspective. Setting aside many abnormal (if not outright offensive – but then again, hawaii shirts and golf-anything are still with us, so you can’t *only* blame the 70s) fashion trends, what still most often resonates is 70s music.

In this case, however, you have a cut-rate sci-fi film – Starship Invasions – that has a typical plot (alien race needs to colonize and overrun Earth because their home planet is about to die, unseen guardian aliens already reside here and would stop them but they are all but wiped out by the invaders until a UFO expert and math whiz human pair are enlisted to help, then things work out) with B list actors (Robert Vaughn who plays it fairly boring, Christopher Lee as the more interesting archvillian, the rest of the actors are no-names.

While the plot varies between boring (the attempts at transition scenes to show character development fall fairly flat), predictable (the invaders being successful and then being thwarted), and unconventional (Ramses’ visit to the pleasure center at the guardian alien base, which is populated, of course, by scantily clad alien women – Capt. Kirk, eat your heart out) – what carries the movie is the soundtrack, really. It goes between ’70s action scene’ upbeat jazz to piano interludes and stuff that wouldn’t otherwise be out of place in The Six Million Dollar Man or similar – definitely not your typical overblown orchestral fake grandeur by any means.

The spaceship effects are fine given the obviously low budget, despite the androids on the base looking like paper mache halloween costumes painted silver and every guardian alien having a huge, white bald egg-shaped head. And the fact that they were able to repair (well, temporarily) the saucer when they were on the run by raiding a downtown Toronto computer company – impressive…

As I saw this movie back in the day, it was nice to revisit, but it’s not going to win any Oscars anytime soon. Still, the soundtrack was very cool, i’ll have to look for other movies by the composer to see if they measure up.

Other voices:
Rotten Tomatoes
IMDB

candybowl

Tags: 70's, computers, freaks, malevolence, movies, music, sci-fi, space travel, technology

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