Trollheart

Somebody finally manages to hit the Nestor ship. How the fuck did they miss it, glowing like a bloody white light in space? It's a flying target! And serve them right too: that control column is totally ripped off from the TARDIS. The only thing it doesn't do is move up and down. Sador tells his men to ready the stellar converter and fix it on the planet Akir. Somehow this seems extraneous information: where did he think his men thought he was going to target it? Did Governor Tarkin say “Target Alderaan?” No he did not. The Death Star was orbiting it. His men knew what the target was. Further confirmation or instruction would have been pointless, and would have left him less time to chuckle in a cold evil way as Princess Organa's homeworld was destroyed. Some tyrants know how to do things properly!

Valkyrie girl's beasts implants finally give up the ghost and her ship blows up (very appropriately I have to say), while George goes back to his with his best friend, Johnny Walker and takes off to join the fight. He doesn't help much though, and goes out with a song on the harmonica. Cayman engages in some pointless insult trading with Sador, reminding him that the warlord was responsible for wiping all his people out and the alien has a score to settle. Unfortunately this seems to involve trying to ram Sador's ship as Cayman sets a collision course. Not to anyone's surprise, he is blown out of the stars.

And then there was one.

John Boy's ship has sustained damage in the fight and Nell's memory banks have been knocked out. She can't remember anything. Lucky her. The ship gets taken up into Sador's tractor beam and John Boy uses the oldest trick in the book, the old self-destruct-while-trapped-in-a-tractor-beam, and it's bye bye Sador. John Boy and his squeeze escape, but there's no escape from this movie.

As they say on Futurama: “You watched it: you can't un-watch it!”

Notes on the ending

Almost everything about this movie is pathetic and derivative, but the ending needs to be examined for extreme crappiness. First of all, a ship that's crippled gets drawn into the tractor beam of the warlord's ship. Why? He said he wanted to take them alive. Again, why? He hasn't given any clue up to now that he even knows who these people are, much less cares. Why does he now want to take these two alive? Is it that he knows they're the ones who created the alliance that defeated him? Oh sorry: they didn't defeat him. They were all blown out of the stars. For all the use they were, John Boy might as well have stayed at home.

So having made the fatal villain's error of dropping his shields to pull the little ship aboard, he doesn't think that maybe it's a trap? That once caught, if this ship self-destructs he won't be able to get away from the blast? Really? Is he that thick? Not to mention his final scene: Governor Tarkin didn't break down like a spoiled little boy and stamp his foot, saying “I'm going to live forever! I want to live forever!” Well, in fairness Tarkin never saw the end coming, as he balanced his chin on his hand and waited for the rebels to be destroyed. Vader had the good taste to go down fighting, spinning out of control yes, but with a “fuck you I'll be back you bitches!” fist of defiance. Defiance too was in Khan's eyes as he met his end in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and even Rimmer, right at the end, declared “Better dead than smeg!” What an end for the galaxy's most brutal tyrant: whimpering like a child as he realised the end had come.

And the final speech, about everyone who died being part of Akir, stuck in my throat. Existential crap. I think on balance John Boy's allies would all rather have survived to taste the victory than end up part of some imagined shared consciousness of a backwards farming planet they hadn't even heard of seven, um, cycles ago. And wasn't this in essence a massive defeat? John Boy headed off to raise an army, and for all the good they did he may as well not have bothered. One of his allies insisted on flying about in a mobile target, and was deservedly destroyed. The big bad mercenary hardly got a shot off before he was killed and as for Space Cowboy? Well if you want a man who can play a harmonica and drink hard liquor, he's your guy. And he did help organise the ground defence of the planet. But once he got spaceborne he basically flew right into the atmosphere, drunk and playing that damn harmonica to the end.

Cayman fared little better. His great plan to take revenge on the annihilator of his people was to, um, ram a far bigger and better-armed ship shouting his battlecry. He, too, was splashed across the stars. Not too much in the way of tactical thinking, I have to say, and all of this despite General Nanelia's complicated battleplan down on the planet. What happened to that? I suppose you could say they lured Sador in by, um, purposely being blown to shit so that they had to be taken into the tractor beam, thereby forcing the megalomaniac to lower his shields, but how did they know he was going to do that? He could as easily have blasted them out of the sky. No, that was just dumb luck.

And of course, following the plot of “The Magnificent Seven” almost to a fault, everyone dies at the end save the two main characters, and the Mexicans, sorry, Akirans are saved, in the end, by one of their own. Luke Skywalker, eat your heart out. Or rather, don't.

I realise I have probably written a lot more on this bad movie than I have on some of my favourites --- or possibly not; I write a lot, as you know --- and it was not really my intention but once I got into it I couldn't stop picking out the hilarious points and the awful dialogue, and though it never quite became “so bad it was good”, it was clearly enjoyable, if only because I got to slag it off so much. The real mystery is why a director of the stature of Roger Corman would be involved in a low-budget ripoff like this? I guess some mysteries will never be solved.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018