Movie Details
| Title: | The Girl from Starship Venus | |
| Director: | Derek Ford | |
| Year: | 1975 | |
| Genre: | Sexploitation | |
| Times Seen: | 2 | |
| Last Seen: | 04.30.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 04.30.06 | Alamo Downtown | This Screening is part of event: Best of QT Fest Quentin on stage: "It's really hard for a film to follow Pretty Maids all in a Row... near impossible. I have one though." He proceeds to go into another fantastic intro about The Girl from Starship Venus, sort of half what he said when it played a month ago and half more in-depth explanation on where he saw it it's unavailability and the way exploitation film exhibition worked back then and what it's like to sit through so many bad movies and finally see a good one, but having to keep that happy memory to yourself for 13 years because absolutely nobody else has seen it and it's pointless to bring it up because all that'll happen is they'll want to see it and not be able to. He talked again about holding onto memories in leiu of DVD or video... and also said that he's got some pretty brag-worthy prints in his collection but this print of Starship Venus is up there as far as he's concerned. It's nearly impossible to find and he's happy to share it with us again, the first time in 9 years since QT1. Then he told us that, in this festival of so much great movie music and catchy theme songs, all of them (Hollywood Man included) PALE in comparison to the these song to this movie. He fully expected each and every one of us to be singing along by the end and even went so far as to tell us the lyrics to the chorus ahead of time so we wouldn't mess them up. Then the lights went down and for the last time we saw a Best of QT fest movie. Just to add to my notes from the first time I saw this, I just love the lines "I'm in need of refueling" and "pleasure is my intent... presently." The supporting male cast is great in this... the theater lech and the wedding lech are fantastic... unbelievably so. The actual star? well who knows.. she doesn't actually do that much acting. They managed to structure the film in such a way that she never really needs to emote or even say lines. It's a really great trick actually, because with so much voice over telling the story they can get away with long drawn out sex scenes over and over again. Like the last 15 minutes of the movie is one superlong softcore sex scene with pages and pages of voice over laid on top of it. It's like a Reservoir Dogs level of what kind of movie is feasible on a tiny budget, except sex instead of crime. I also have to give it up again for the bushy stripper. her scene goes on forever too but the faces she gives as she vibrated her ass or contorts her body is classic. also, the baloon scene went over well and I still contend it's the best scene in the movie, but I also got a real kick out of some of the porno titles that cover all the windows and walls in poster form all around Soho. I have no clue if these are real movies or not but with names like Let's Get Laid, Sex of their Bodies, Love-Hungry Girls, and (my favorite) Sore Throat... they are hilarious, intentional or no. So the crowd ate it up and when the music started coming in at the end of the movie people started clapping along with it. The chorus kicked in and I could hear people singing around us "Cuz she's the... Girl from starship Venus and she came from outer space! And she came down to our planet to observe the human race! She's got turned on to permissiveness now she keeps up with the pace! She's the interstellar traveller of love!" The movie ended. The lights came up. The crowd didn't stop clapping. Instead, people hopped up out of their chairs and turned to face Quentin, not cheering the movie anymore but the man who's nice enough to keep bringing them back here and showing them to us. For a while he sat there sort of letting it happen, probably thinking of something to say... then he stands up and yells "see you at QT7!!!" After some chatting in the lobby and on the street, we all felt the buzz still buzzing even though it was 12:30 already. So we went to Eric's house to watch some random 16mm stuff and I got to ogle all of his amazing film geek artifacts and memorabilia. He had this truly bizarre educational film about handicapped people in the workplace starring a young Michael Keaton with a huge list of cameos and some truly un-PC things going on like a Busby Berkely musical number with people in wheelchairs... Some Clash of the Titans TV Spots... some cool trailers and little snippets of film, hanging out until late night then doing early breakfast at Jim's until 5:30... I ended up having another all-nighter just to come down off the high QTfest put me on. It seemed a lot shorter this time around and even though it's only 7 days instead of 9, there were only 20 films shown this time versus 30 so it's definitely got me looking forward to QT7 already. |
| 03.28.06 | Alamo Downtown | So I was on my way home... literally I had my car door opened and was putting my book and DVD on the passenger seat when I htought I better empty my bladder before the drive. So on the way back to the theater, I ran into a guy I've talked to a few times before. He immediately starts telling me cool stories about being an Extra on Grindhouse... and the awesome death scene that Greg Nicotero gave him the previous night. Then a bit out of the blue, he asked me if i knew about tonight at midnight. So... I'm hesitant to give full details herel. But I think of this site as my personal journal and have never really done any promotion of it of any kind and as far as I know, three people other than myself read it. So if by any chance there are more of you out there, I have to ask that if you're local to Austin that you not spread this around or if you're press or keep a blog or whatever not to pick up on it and announce it to everyone or anything like that. It's not top secret or anything but if everyone knows about it then it will ruin my chances of getting in again :) So anyway, as it turns out, just like with Kill Bill, Tarantino was screening movies for the crew of Grindhouse on their off nights, which is Tuesday and Wednesday. So this guy told me they were showing movies tonight and that I should show up. So I asked my friends, who usually know everything before I do, if they had heard anything about it, and they ask Jay Knowles and nobody's heard anything (I guess we should've asked Harry because I guess he knew about it but wasn't interested) so everyone went home but I figured since it was already like 11 I might as well stop by and see if there was a chance I could get in. So I saw that same guy outside Alamo downtown so we talked some more, this time him giving me dirt on who's a dick and who's a nice guy as well as how generally demeaning it is to be an extra on a film and get paid 75 bucks for 13 hours work and be treated like you're not even human. Then I see Lars and he tells me there's a good chance I can get in so I go upstairs to chat with some people who were just getting out of the Air Guitar championships that I had to miss to see Harryhausen... and I saw a few other regulars hanging around in a nonchalant way so I figured I was pretty safe. Plus it wasn't that busy and it looked like there were plenty of open seats so I called my friends and we all ended up being able to see Tarantino's keep-the-crew-awake Tuesday midnight double feature screening! The first movie was The Girl from Starship Venus. QT went into an intro exactly as if we were at a QTfest (except it wasn't sold out and there were no AFS people or stargazing people not there for the movie or anything like that... plus there people like Michael Biehn, Greg Nicotero, Tom Savini, Robert Rodriguez, Nicky Katt, and Josh Brolin there too, completely casual) where he's animated and lets his inner stand-up comic out and drops the mic from a high height as he walks off. At this point i was pretty much in geek heaven... I felt like the screening was just for us even though it was actually just for the crew. I noticed Tim and Kier-La also stayed along with a few Air Guitar friends but all told the theater was still less than half full. QT's intro called this the funniest sexploitation movie he ever saw because it was genuinely funny. not in a laugh-at way but in a genuine comedy way. It's british and ultra-obscure and he has no idea how he found a print but he did so he's showing it to us. He also mentioned that the theme song that plays in this movie will get stuck in our heads forever. He wasn't lying either man... it's damn catchy and plays a few times during the movie to really cement it in our brains much like that Desperadooooo song from The Dirty Outlaws. After the movie QT actually recited the whole chorus for his friends to applause afterward. His booming voice was heard throughout the theater singing this silly song about an interstellar traveller of love. the movie was pretty great. Even my one friend who doesn't like sexploitation said it was great. It's british so it has all of that seedy London circa 1975 going on... where movies like Chinatown and That's Entertainment are playing side-by-side with movies like "Sore Throat." The story's about a space ship that comes down from Venus to study this human race that they call Dongs. Their spaceship is the size of a ball bearing, but they send out a researcher who blows up to the form of a hot human female. Most of her acting takes the form of her vapidly staring into space while interior dialogue between her and the space ship is voiced over, but the effect gives the audience a great esxcuse to stare at wonderful natural 70s beautiful naked breasts while having a laugh at the fnny dialogue without any sort of bad acting getting in the way. Of course she starts off naked, and the comedy ensues as she walks around completely oblivious to our culture and makes wrong assumptions about our behavior and that sort of thing. It IS actually genuinely funny in addition to there being a hot girl on screen through most of it, and the British-ness of it lends itself to some great lines like "let's knock off for a touch of the naughties." There's a great scene where this guy loves balloons to the point where he's filled his entire bedroom floor to ceiling with them... so he's trying to find the girl in this sea of balloons and he finally gets to where he wants to be but the Venusians have put up a defensive barrier to protect the girl so his junk gets shocked when he tries to "know" her (in the bibilical sense of the word) and he gets shocked up into the air. It's a funny scene in a funny movie with a damn catchy song. I'm always amazed when these really cheap movies have a full-on song complete with verses and lyrics and everything written for them. This movie also finally answered the question of what stripper were like before the age of brazilian waxing, since I wasn't frequenting strip clubs back then, I never knew if strippers always accomodated their mini g-strings or if, like everybody else back then, they let it all grow out. The answer of course is the latter. There's a great scene in here where the camera seems fixated on a stripper's groind while she gives a performance, showing this little tiny thing only covering half of her bush. Actually, I've probably seen more bush in this movie and the next than I have everywhere else combined for a long while... well ok Revenge of the Nerds too (hairpie!!!). ahem. I guess this has been confirmed as one of the new movies QT will be showing for his upcoming Best of QT fest... and I am already looking forward to seeing it again, assuming I get a badge of course. |
