To Infinity and Back

There’s a lot of groaning to be heard when watching William Sach’s 1980 flick Galaxina. Starring Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten, you’d hope that the groans would be coming from the screen with scads of softcore sex scenes as her shapely android character got it on with the crew of her ship, The Infinity. Alas, the groaning is all from the side of the audience as they suffer through one corny joke and bad parody after another in this low budget sci-fi cheesefest. More than Star Wars, the parodies in Galaxina rely more heavily on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien—right down to the bad egg that Captain Cornelius Butt spits up which later grows into an intruder aboard the ship.

While Stratten stars in the film, she doesn’t utter a line until almost an hour into the proceedings (afterwards she’s a mite too chatty). The rest of the time she’s merely featured in reaction shots as her shipmate, Thor (Stephen Macht), falls in love with her. He and space cowboy Buzz (J.D. Hinton) trade insults with Captain Butt (Doritos pitchman Avery Schreiber) for the majority of the film. Everything just meanders along as the crew of the Infinity seeks out some semblance of plot, aimlessly drifting from one scene to another.

At about fifty minutes into the film things change so fast that they could give a viewer whiplash. Suddenly Galaxina is on a backwoods planet (with the Batmobile in the background!) looking for a plot device called “The Blue Star.” She finds it in the hands of Ordic, a cloaked figure wearing a metal mask. They square-off in the streets of a Western town for an old-fashioned showdown in yet another incongruous scene. While Stratten may be nice to look at (and the filmmakers know how to display her assets well), Galaxina is one long, painful, bad joke of a film.