A Rough Guide to Al Bradly's Space Operas

Copyright © C. Demetrius Morgan

I'm going to get this forum rolling with a quickie overview of the spaghetti space opera's of Al Bradly. Al Bradly AKA Alfonso Brescia was as prolific Italian director whose output included a diverse range of movies from Battle of the Amazons, Poppea: A Prostitute in Service of the Emperor, Helen, Yes... Helen of Troy, Amazons and Supermen, and a number of giallo's.

Recently I reviewed his most obscure space opera entry, Beast in Space, so if you've never heard of Alfonso Brescia you may want to glance at the review before continuing. Now then before anything else is said we must be aware that, as mentioned in my review(s), some sources list three movies, some five, others merely four film entries in this series. And it was a series of movies, granted these seem to be the least known of the 70s Italian spaghetti space opera movies. Which is a shame.

So what do I know? Well I can personally attest to the existence of four distinct versions as I either have or have seen videos of them. To briefly recap these are the confirmed movies: WAR OF THE PLANETS, WAR OF THE ROBOTS, STAR ODYSSEY, and BEAST IN SPACE. The unconfirmed title is BATTLE OF THE STARS, which, depending on what source you are referencing, may or may not be an alternative title for WAR OF THE PLANETS. But it's not.

What does that have to do with anything?

To understand Beast in Space you have to be aware it was the LAST entry in Alfonso Brescia's space opera quad- or quint-ology. Each movie having had close to half a dozen video releases, each under different titles, with Beast in Space being conspicuously absent from English language retail video. I assume each specific title/release potentially represents a different edit of the film in question. Depending on whether the release in question was on film (16 mm), intended for television (some aired on Creature Feature shows), or sold to the retail/rental video market this means they could be wildly different edits. Of course this is all speculation.

For the purposes of disclosure, and so you don't have to re-read my massive review of Beast in Space, I have no idea what version of this title I saw is beyond the fact it had German titles and everyone was speaking the same. (For a list of the various video versions out there please refer to the main Beast in Space review.) All I can say for sure is it was a Nth generation dub, thus I can't even be certain that what I saw wasn't edited by a video hacker before it got to me. It certainly looks it in places.

Which is a shame because BEAST IN SPACE really does follow the basic premise and general story flow of Walerian Borowczyk's La Beté rather closely. There are departures, as would be necessary given it's a entirely different genre, but the similarities are remarkable.

There are strange dreams aplenty, which lead our heroine to a far distant planet. Once there a scantily clad Sirpa Lane does, eventually, get chased through a forest by a cloven hoofed Satyr with a large phallus! At least based on the Italian clips I've seen he's supposed to have a somewhat prodigious member. In my print you see nothing as there are abrupt edits removing these scenes. Even worse, just when it gets to the point that (one assumes) beauty should be taming the beast there's yet another abrupt cut and the scene just sort of ends without any conclusion or resolution.

BEAST IN SPACE is, for me, perhaps the most baffling of all Brescia's spaghetti space operas. Most of the video versions of these movies I've seen seem to suffer from dreadful editing. Which either means they were utter crap fests edited by a hack to begin with or, as is more likely, are horribly truncated, altered, and/or re-edited versions of the films. This certainly seems to be the case with the video of Beast in Space I had.

Another peculiar aspect of Alfonso Brescia's space operas is most reviewers have a tendency to classify them ALL equally as "Star Wars" rip-offs. They're not. They are really quite varied in style from movie to movie copying elements wholesale from a wide variety of sources. The first two seem to be heavily influenced by Margheriti's Gamma Four Quadrology and Bava's Planet of the Vampires whereas Star Odyssey is the only obvious attempt at emulating elements of Star Wars. And Beast in Space, starring Sirpa Lane more or less reprising her character role from La Beté, is really a spaghetti space opera version of The Beast. At least near the tail end. The beginning is brutal tedium!

However it is my opinion that Brescia's influences, overall, were most likely the space operas of the fifties and sixties. The look of the sets is very "Planet of the Vampires" as are the costumes; which look like cheap knock-offs of the costumes right down to the skull caps! True, 'skull caps' of a sort were also used in the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials but. .

While there are many visual similarities you can find similar images in the comics and pulps of the time as well. Thus, to my eye at least, these movies are not so much an attempt to imitate the visual style and costuming of specific genre classics but rather were intended to use established genre tropes to present the movies to the target audience. It's only the latter two entries that are obvious imitations of existing features.

Alas the look chosen for the costumes was already well dated and past it's expiry date by the time these movies were made. Combined with the fact the audience, in the wake of Star Wars, had long since grown accustomed to a far more refined costuming thanks to television shows such as Star Trek (1966-69) , Space Academy (1977-79), and Space: 1999 (1975-77). By the late 70s to early 80s sci-fi costuming had become revitalized with fresh and unique designs as seen in such series as Logan's Run, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and the numerous anthology series like The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits.

However, most telling of all, is that even movies such as The Humanoid and Starcrash had moved beyond the clichéd camp 40s and 50s era 'space fighter pilots' look. A look emulating the dress of WW I fighter aces, so you know it was well passed it's prime when Mr. Brescia's costume designer decided to emulate it for these space operas.

Yet how to explain why these movies seem to only have survived in horrible 'PD' versions? It is my opinion the dated, borderline silly looking costumes, combined with very chinsy SFX, doomed these features to obscurity. The fact I can't even properly confirm these movies, which were contemporaries of The Humanoid and Starcrash, ever really had a theatrical release says it all.

What's even more amazing about these movies is Alfonso Brescia was obviously aware of the problems. Witness the sudden use of rubber diving suits as stand-ins for space suits in Star Odyssey and Beast in Space. Alas this only made the features all the more ridiculous since he didn't make a total switch to these costumes. Why? Stock footage. By retaining the old costumes this allowed the director to shrewdly reuse stock footage from his previous features. It was a very Corman-esque approach. While it may have made the movie look all the more ridiculous this is also what lends them such great schlock filled B-movie appeal. They are ludicrous and silly and, if you are a forgiving fan of science fiction, you can easily find yourself laughing at every minute of them!

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So who's seen any of these movies? What did you think of them?