Year Of The Knockoff! Saturn 3 (1980)

Farrah Fawcett looks like she knows she made a huge mistake. Kirk Douglas looks like he just doesn't care.

I know I just covered an Alien knock off, but I had forgotten that 4.26 was Alien Day, so I figured why not jump right back into the Alien pool with another 1980 quick cash grab attempt that had a higher budget than Contamination, but somehow has a plot that makes less sense. Let's take off for the land of weird sex urges and tiny headed robots, Saturn 3.  

One of the few occasions where the trailer 

tells you more story than the film did.

Here is the wikipedia page, and the imdb.com listing. 

The film starts off with Captain James running late to his shuttle to start his mission on Saturn 3. While in the locker room (?) changing, Captain Benson (Harvey Keitel.. in face only, he wouldn't change his Brooklyn accent, so he was overdubbed the entire film) is upset he wasn't given the mission as he had failed a mental exam and decides to do what any stable person would do: open the roof of the locker room to space and let Captain James get shattered/torn apart.

I don't think gravity or anything at all works like that.

Shortly thereafter, Benson is on his way to Saturn 3 with some very specific cargo. Once he lands, he is met by Adam (Kirk Douglas) and Alex (Farrah Fawcett). Saturn 3 is an 'experimental food research station (this facet of the film and story is never mentioned again and it makes me wonder why it was needed at all)' and they are the only two on the station. Well them and their dog. Also, Adam and Alex are a couple. I mean, there isn't too many other options on a space station with two people. 

They also have a control room that looks like it would be the coolest pinball parlor in the whole solar system.

Benson is very agitated by their lack of productive research and is there to help them start getting results. He immediately sees Alex and asks if he 'can use her body for pleasure'. That's how he asks it. He states that on Earth, people use each other all the time for pleasure. Since that sounds really sexy, Alex says no. Benson will not let go of his fixation on her. Adam doesn't see Benson as a threat as we all know that Adam is just secretly playing himself and Kirk Douglas is not afraid of any man. 

Benson's cargo is soon revealed to be a robot. Not just any robot, a new 'Demigod Series' robot named Hector. Hector looks to stand about 7 feet talk, with large legs and a hefty torso that holds a tube full of pure brain tissue (it looks like 10+ human brains all jammed together). He is intended to learn the roles of Adam and Alex, increase efficiency and then replace one of them.

Two things to know about Hector:

1. Hector can learn on his own but his learning is accelerated when Benson takes over 'direct control' via a remote control port in the back of his neck. This has the side effect of Hector knowing everything about Benson, including his unhealthy attraction to Alex and that Benson zero gravity murdered that other guy earlier.
2. He looks like this:

Tiny head, tiny head, Hector's got a tiny head.

It is hard to take a film about a large and potentially killer robot seriously when its head looks like a rejected Erector Set project. When I learned that that this film initially had a higher budget but another film being made by the same company at the time was running over budget and caused this one to run short, decisions like the design for Hector kind of make sense. "Hey guys, I got the legs and torso built. This robot is going to be a hulking killing machine. Hector is going to be the new face of terror." "Bill, we have to tell you that we only have 15 more dollars for the robot." "Oh, I will figure something out that will look just as cool as what is in my head." I thought poor Hector was just the victim of money drying out...

...I then learned the Hector design at the time cost around a million dollars. "Bill, we gave you a million dollars for a robot, what did you do?" "Don't worry guys, I just won't build a head. Problem solved."

To be fair, Nintendo tried the same thing a few years later with about as much success.

Anyway, Hector is also attracted to Alex and tries to remove anything that stands in the way of it and her having a weirder relationship than the 32 year old Farrah Fawcett and the 62 year old Kirk Douglas. 

Hector tries to seduce Alex through the power of well played Chess.
He heard that Deep Blue got a lot of trim that way.

Alex is not interested in Hector, so he does what any robot that has been imprinted by a psychopath would do: He kills her dog and then proceeds to grab her and pick her up off the ground.

That's probably the right number of alarms for something like that.

So Benson gets trapped trying to save Alex and Adam runs in to save the day. Seriously, they make it a point through out the film to show how spry and in shape Kirk Douglas is (more on that later). Adam convinces Benson to dismantle Hector and for him to leave with the robot as soon as he can. Benson does as he is told, but as soon as he leaves the room, Hector somehow is able to use the other shitty robots on the station to reassemble him. Now that I think about it, Hector is just a shitty version of Ultron.

Hector is then back on the slowly moving rampage. Benson decides he has had enough of Alex not letting him use her body and decides that he is going to take her with him on his ship off of Saturn 3. This results in two amazing moments:

1. Kirk Douglas nude wrestling and choking Harvey Keitel.

You're welcome.

    

  2. Harvey Keitel getting dehanded by Hector.. and then Farrah Fawcett's appropriate reaction.

"Unhand her!" says Hector from the tiniest robot mouth ever.

Benson is then drug away, leaving Adam and Alex to figure out how to escape the station and Hector. As they run around the station, they discover that Hector is using all the cameras to track their every movement. They break the camera in their hydroponics lab and set the the ultimate trap...

...just kidding, they figure out that the top heavy robot is easily knocked over as if it were a badly posed He-Man figure.

Will robot on robot violence ever end?

Film over? No, then this is where it gets odd. As Adam and Alex try to escape, Hector somehow manages to free himself of the watery grave he was tipped into and destroys their escape ship and then subdues the both of them. They awake to find that Hector has taken control of the station and can now use their voices to communicate to the outside world. He tells a patrol ship that everything is fine and they say they will be back in six months. Soon it becomes apparent that Hector wants to take direct control of Adam's brain and keep Alex alone on the station.

They then find out the sorta gruesome fate of Benson as well. 

"Now you can call me Sorta Normal Head Hector."

Adam figures out a way to lure Hector out of hiding and sacrifices himself to save Alex by blowing up both him and Hector. 

Alex then heads to earth. Lessons learned?

The End.

So the question: what does this have in common with Alien? It is a remote outpost that makes travel to and from it difficult, so it does try have an isolation feel to it. Alien did have robot who went crazy, Ash, and Hector certainly did do that as well. The hallways of Saturn 3 had the grid/grated flooring like the Nostromo and later on Adam and Alex were crawling underneath it while Hector was stalking them from above. The shafts of light coming through were very Alien-esque. The one computer Hector used to initially 'talk' Benson make the same clacking sounds that the Mother computer made in Alien. It has a female lead who survives till the end.

Oh, and the title sequence attempted to ape Alien with how different parts of the letters appear to make the title of the film. (Last gif, I promise):

This is actually on of my favorite parts of the whole movie.
Too bad it is the very beginning of it.

Saturn 3 has no atmosphere and feels flat through out the entire run time. I know I showed some crazy/silly moments above but I think they exist due to the budget and the weird direction the script went. You can see that there was money spent on Saturn 3, the sets are pretty good and some of the imagery is interesting. I do think that as they budget started to fluctuate, the vision for this film did too. Not that it was the strongest to being with, but some of the ideas in it could have had some legs had better thought been put into it. I am not saying that a robot that is imprinted with the mindset of sex driven unstable man is high art, but it could have at least been a lens in which to have the Benson character see how he sees himself as it was projected through Hector. But this isn't what Saturn 3 wanted to be. It was trying to be exploitative by using the success of Alien to make a sci-fi vehicle that would flash Farrah Fawcett's breasts and Kirk Douglas's ass briefly, thinking that would somehow appeal to different generations of audiences. 

Saturn 3 is not a good film. It isn't a bad film (okay, it's kind of bad). It is a forgettable film which I believe is a greater sin. If you are going to have that weird of a robot design, Harvey Keitel being a creeper, and a pretty big budget, then go down swinging. Get weird. Have Kirk Douglas nude wrestle the robot or something for heaven's sake. Make Saturn 3 a trip worth taking.  

On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?

I will give Saturn 3 a... 3. They got a little bit right but had I not known this was chasing after the success of Alien, I wouldn't have thought about it.

On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator?

Like I said before, you can tell a decent amount of money was spent of this film, so production wise it is (tiny) head and shoulders above Ator. Fun wise though? Ator the Fighting Eagle soars above this.

Would you recommend this film to anyone else?

Only for people that have the patience of Job like I do to see what happens when money is spent chasing something that those involved don't quite understand why the original source worked. 

Bonus:

To show how weird this film could have been, here is a deleted scene showing Alex and Adam taking a drug (what they call a Blue Dreamer). Watch how fast Farrah Fawcett changes outfits. 

Bonus Bonus:

If you want to take the trip to Saturn 3, it is free(ish) on YouTube. Weird brief nudity and all.

If you guys have any other suggestions for knockoffs that Steve and I should watch, let me know in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

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Year Of The Knockoff! Contamination (1980)

In honor of the egg related holiday weekend, I thought I would take a look at a not so egg-cellent unofficial sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece, Alien. Contamination feels like if Alien was written over and over again due to budget restraints but at the same time the plot got fuzzier and fuzzier with each rewrite. This is what Alien would look like it there was such a thing as an R-rated made for TV film.

This film, made by director Luigi Cozzi, fresh off his success (?) of the Star Wars cash in, Star Crash (don't worry people, that one is going to be covered on the podcast and we can't wait), wanted to make a direct sequel to the original alien. He literally wanted to call this film Alien Arrives on Earth. 

His producers changed the title against his will. I am not sure if that was a right or wrong decision.

The film starts off with a cargo ship, the Caribbean Lady, heading into New York at a great rate of speed with apparently no crew to be seen. Without explaining how, they get the empty ship to dock and a bunch of cops and science guys suit up in white decontamination suits and board the ship. Among them is Lt. Tony Aris. I mention Tony because he is in the rest of the film and I am not sure what purpose he serves. He and the rest of the investigators eventually find the remains of the captain and the crew. They look like something exploded from inside of them. Everyone takes this in stride, no big deal, all these dudes exploded. Mondays, right?

They discover that the ship is carrying nothing but boxes labeled as coffee. They dismiss coffee as the culprit as it wouldn't make people explode (but we know it can.) Soon, they find an open box.

I mean, I would drink some after it was ground up. I drink
  Monster and it probably has real monsters in it.

One of the eggs is near some pipes and is glowing. The guys that were just openly wondering what would cause all the crew to explode decide to do the rational thing: pick up the glowing egg that is making noise. 

It doesn't go well.

It explodes and its gunk hits most people, except for Tony. After a moment, they all explode. He freaks out, understandably.

Tony is taken into custody by the government and put in quarantine. We then meet Col. Stella Holmes, who is seen here, talking to some guy in a lab coat by the coolest computer ever.

Seriously, this thing could just make toast and it would still be the coolest.

She decides to keep Tony around as he saw what happened and because he is a cop, he may be able to help them find leads (or something, you would think the government would be able to do that part on their own). They then proceed to the rat destruction lab to show everyone what happens when you put the egg juice into a body.

No Patton Oswalts were harmed during the making of this gif.

They determine that the eggs are heat sensitive and once they reach a certain temperature, their contents become toxic. They also determine that they are not earthly in origin. This is when Stella remembers that there was a previously undisclosed mission to Mars in which one of the two men who returned was deemed crazy because he talked about seeing a bunch of eggs. 

Stella goes to see Commander Ian Hubbard, who is now a shut in drunk thanks to her assessment that he was crazy. She make him tell her about the mission from 'a long time ago.' So he starts talking about how all of this happened two years ago (I am not sure how he got there and back so fast). The film then flashes back to Ian and his partner, Hamilton, as they are walking on the north polar ice cap of Mars. They enter a cave that looks a lot like a mouth with gaping teeth and find a tunnel lined with eggs. A bright light starts to appear at the end of the cave.

Look at all of those peas, I mean eggs!

Ian seems to be not affected by the light but Hamilton is a little more so.

This is how Steve looks at me when I try show him anything about Overwatch.

Stella believes Ian is now telling the truth and recruits him to go with her and Tony to South America to investigate the coffee production plant. He reluctantly agrees to go. This sets up a forced love triangle between Stella, Ian, and Tony. It does not serve the film well. 

I should also mention that Stella, a high ranking official in the government, lets Tony slap her across the face during an argument and she lets it go. It was a bit off putting to see it almost be forgotten as fast as it happened and how suddenly she started to respect him more. Go go awkward work place sexual politics. 

Then the gang flies to South America to Scooby Doo around the coffee place. 

This is about the halfway point in the film and for as silly/gory/goofy as it was heading into this point, it had some energy and I was enjoying it. The wheels fall off suddenly as the movie grinds to a halt as there is a prolonged sequences of driving around the country, everyone getting settled into their hotel rooms, Ian and Tony bickering over Stella, and then Stella taking a shower.

The film tries to up the ante by having a mysterious stranger put an egg in her bathroom with her. She notices the pulsing egg (that is supposed to react immediately to heat but seems like it is not bothered by the steam from her shower) and does try to escape the bathroom. Of all the bad decisions this film makes, I can't forgive her for never trying to cover the egg up. She knows it can explode at any moment and that it reacts to heat, but nah, I am just going to try to jimmy the lock open and then sit down with my back against the door. Maybe she was worried she would get charged for using extra towels.

After she is rescued, they investigate the coffee plant. They discover that Hamilton, Ian's Mars mission partner, was compromised by the light in the cave and is now doing the will of 'The Cyclops.'

The big plan was to get its eggs all over the world... for something. It is never clear what the eggs do other than make people and rats explode. Maybe it is just an angry disapproving alien and wants to make everything explode.

Or that it is angry to be in this film.

The Cyclops is kept in the lower floors of the plant and doesn't seem to move much. It does mentally force people to walk towards it so that it can eat them. I wish I had that power with pizza rolls. Tony exits the film by being sucked into The Cyclops, where he can't slap anyone anymore.

The design of The Cyclops looked familiar.

Don't blame me, I voted for the other one.

It makes me wonder if the people behind the Simpsons saw this film and was inspired. If so, kudos (kodos?) to them.

Eventually, Ian and Stella stop The Cyclops, Hamilton explodes for reasons and they world is safe...

...until we see a busy street in New York in which an egg is somehow mixed in with the trash and it explodes. 

The end?! 

So it is clear what elements were taken from Alien:

• A empty ship that happens to be full of eggs.
• Eggs lead to explosions of body parts.
• A tunnel full of eggs that tries to somewhat ape the style of H.R. Giger.
• A female lead that has to face off against the alien at the end.
• The final showdown being in a room that is darkly lift with metal grating on the floor so that shafts of light can come through to mimic the look of the corridors of the Nostromo.

Not even trying to hide it.

Contamination is not the worst film I have seen. It just does nothing with its premise to make it stand out enough to be its own work. Had there been a little more thought put into place about what The Cyclops's plan actually was and showing the eggs doing more than just killing anything they touch, this could have been a cheap throwaway late night cable flick that would be a guilty pleasure. Overall, there are only two things that stand out to me from my time with Contamination: the score and the added 'elements' that the person who put this film on YouTube decided to include.

The score is done by Goblin. This is a band that I have known of but have not really crossed paths with during my horror movie watching but I now look forward to whatever I find that they are associated with. No matter the quality of the film, their music will likely carry me a long way towards enjoying it. Their prog rocky synth and guitar sound is amazing. It feels like they lived next door to John Carpenter and they would have the greatest jam sessions and drive the rest of the neighborhood crazy.

Check it out below. Doesn't it make you just want to go explore the streets of late 70's New York via Rome?

The other thing about the version of the film I liked had nothing to do with the film. The person who uploaded this to YouTube decided to add some vintage 1980's commercials in the middle of it. Moments right after Tony slaps Stella, the film cuts away to three commercials: one for the new Ford Granada!, one for Wendy's with employees way to happy to be working at Wendy's, and Jame Garner selling Polaroid cameras. It was great and weird. I was not expecting it and oddly made me start paying attention to the film more. They even add another car commercial at the end just as the credits start, just to show you they did this on purpose. Hats off to you, internet guy.

Or as my wife thought it said 'New Ford Grandma.' I like her name better.

On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?

I will give this a 5. You can tell what they wanted to do. Budget limitations and not the most creative thinking held them back. They understood that pulsing eggs were creepy, bodies exploding (the gore in the film was pretty good for what it was) are off putting, and the final location did look kind of like the dark interiors of the ship from Alien. Having the film transition to South America made it feel more like a cheap action film than a cheap science fiction film, though.

On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator?

Production wise, better than Ator. Fun wise, Ator is still a more enjoyable watch. Contamination has a better score, Ator has a better end credits theme song. Ator will always have a better end credits theme song. Always.

Would you recommend this film to anyone else?

No, unless you love the original Alien as much as I do and want to see how something so right can go so horribly wrong (and boring).

Bonus:

The whole film is available to watch for free(ish) on YouTube if you want to watch. I made sure to link the version I watched with the commercials added into it.

In space, no one can hear you yawn.

If you guys have any other suggestions for knockoffs that Steve and I should watch, let me know in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

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