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.