Saturn 3

 

Amidst all the busyness of getting the house in order to sell, getting Little One ready for her SATs, getting Patch to her various soccer practices, games, and workouts, and celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary with the Mrs., I ran into a spell of insomnia in the wee early morning hours of Saturday.

I woke around 2:30 am, tossed and turned, visited the bathroom and the medicine cabinet, went back to bed, got up to switch the fan on, turned and tossed some more. Thirty minutes later I realized there was no more sleep for me this day. So I got up, trudged down two flights of stairs to my writing desk, flipped on the laptop and set to my favorite timewaster of late, Youtube.

However, this time was different.

In my feed was a review of the little-remembered, sparsely-accoladed science fiction flick, 1980’s Saturn 3. That instantly brought back memories. Well, memories of memories. Because while I recall the movie existing (I was 12 years old the summer of 1980), I don’t think I ever saw more than a few scenes here and there.

So why watch a review of it online when I can, possibly, find the movie in its entirety? And sure enough, I did, all 88 minutes of it, right on that there Youtube.

I knew that the movie had a bad reputation, and that knowledge was epistemologically confirmed.

But I enjoyed it.

Saturn 3’s a bad movie, suffering always from bad-movie syndrome typically found in Hollywood: a visionary first-time director who shouldn’t be directing; an established Hollywood icon whose ego runs amuck; a sex symbol who can’t act her way out of a paper bag; a moody villain portrayed by a moody actor who hates the film; a producer who has no experience with making SF films; film execs who slash the budget mid-way through production.

I’ve read that the original script was good and was what got the film greenlit. And then all the above kicked it, forcing re-writes, edits, 180-degree turns and more chefs in the kitchen. The result is blah bland but not terrible. There is a shell of a movie here (perhaps on a cutting-room floor and stored in some long-forgotten vault), but what struck me is that it was made by people who had no idea what SF fans want. And since it’s also billed as a “horror” flick, it’s not particularly horrifying.

So what is Saturn 3, exactly?

In 1979 and 1980 I was enraptured fully and completely with absolutely one movie: Alien. My parents bought me the picture book and an uncle bought me the novelization. That alien egg commercial relentlessly aired on TV haunted and fascinated me (much like the commercial for Magic with that psychotic ventriloquist dummy). But I wasn’t allowed to see it since I was only 12. My imagination though more than made up for it. In this weird stage where I was no longer a kid but not yet a teen, I played out versions of the alien-killing-everyone-on-a-spaceship plotline with the action figures and SF toys I still had not yet phased out of my life.

Saturn 3 is kind of like Alien with a robot. The robot, “Hector” in the movie, is a headless eight foot cross between an arthritic Xenomorph and an automobile radiator. Here, see:

Hector basically turns evil when plugged into evil Captain Benson’s brain for programming, and spends the next hour chasing Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett around a space station that looks strangely like the set design of the Engineer’s ship from Alien. Hmm. That sentence I just wrote is more suspenseful and terrifying than anything in the entire movie. There’s long sequences of an oddly overdubbed Harvey Keitel pontificating about God-knows-what and scantily clad Kirk Douglas romping around with scantily clad Farrah Fawcett, thirty-year age difference be damned. The denouement is routine and unexciting, neither clever nor original.

But the atmosphere! While the model work was slightly above workmanlike,  the interior of the Saturn 3 station is worthy of praise. Not a surprise since the original story – and the film’s first director – was John Barry, an interior designer who worked on such films as A Clockwork Orange, Superman, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Plus there’s a real sinister element to Hector the robot that’s there on the surface, if not exactly fleshed out, no pun intended since the future Frankenstein’s monsters winds up wearing his creator’s head.

I guess ultimately the movie falls into that catch-all called childhood nostalgia. I remember pal’ing around with a bunch of guys in summer art school, reading those SF magazines, talking about the latest Star Wars and James Bond, Alien and The Incredible Melting Man, horror flicks like Phantasm and Prophecy, among countless forgotten and partially-remembered others. Saturn 3 fits snugly in there, and feels quite at home.

Grade: C