War in Space

If this poster makes the movie look cool... it's a trick.

War in Space was filmed in 1977 and is set in the distant future of 1988. It starts out pretty much what it must have been like to live in Japan in the late 70s. Butterfly collars and leisure suits abound. It's ostensibly a Japanese alternative to Star Wars, but this is just a trick (see: Message from Space for a real Japanese Star Wars).

My friend David Cawley informed me about this film. He's the sort of guy who really thinks a lot of old cheesy films are actually good, not ironically. He informed that this film is legitimately bad.

He's right.

It's a fairly typical alien invasion movie. Aliens want to invade. The people of Earth don't want them to invade. For some reason, there is a conflict. A bunch of Japanese guys and their pal Jimmy at NASA built a super space ship weapon to fight off the alien invasion when they thought it was going to happen a few years ago. But now it really is happening, and for some reason the super weapon space ship is still not ready. (Thanks OBAMA!)

The aliens, we discover, disguise themselves as humans. But if you peel off their masks, you see that they are not human at all. They have GREEN SKIN, and apparently never invented makeup. So masks was the only thing they could come up with to try to blend in and invade. Meanwhile, the aliens are also zapping the shit out of the Earth with their laser cannons.

There is quite a bit of spaceship-on-spaceship violence. Some bad subtitles add a bit of humor: "Shoot the ion rockets!"

Remember, this is the same year Star Wars was made.

Just wait till you see the caesarian Emperor of the Galaxy and his guard, horned Chewbacca.

 

But like I said, this movie sucks. It has some interesting elements, but if you are smart, you'll stop watching about 2/3 of the way through.

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