Shane Watches a Bad Movie on Facebook with Friends: Starchaser: The Legend of Orin

1985 animated science fiction

Rating: 13/20 (Fred: 12/20; Josh: 11/20; Libby: 13/20, although she fell asleep; Carrie: technical difficulties)

Plot: Robots keep humans underground as mining slaves until one finds a magic sword hilt and pops up the surface to have a look around.

We wanted a bad animated flick for the Bad Movie Club this week, and although I was really pushing a Titanic cartoon on my friends [Note: A different Titanic cartoon than the one with the rapping dogs that I reviewed last year], they eventually decided on this one. I agreed because I had been accused of being a Bad Movie Club dictator and wanted to change that perception. Libby suggested it initially and fought hard to get everybody else on board. Then, of course, she fell asleep long before it was over.

I actually kind of liked the movie. The storytelling's a mess, and the titular hero--the Luke Skywalker of this Star Wars rip-off--is a little lame. The main baddie--the Darth Vader--isn't very compelling and never seems quite as intimidating as he should. I think it has more to do with his wardrobe choices than anything else. There are a ton of creative ideas, however, including these mandroids that search for body parts in a Dali-esque swampy landscape and a really cool spaceship--the Millennium Falcon of this movie. The action sequences, especially the little spaceship battles, are as confusing as they are well done, and there's even a scene in which a cigar-chomping character named Dag--the Han Solo of this movie--violates a female android by manipulating her butt circuits. Dag calls Orin a "little water snake"--kind of like how Han Solo calls Luke "kid" in the original trilogy--which made Josh decide that he's going to call me his "little water snake" at school next year which makes this barely effective teacher want to do something else for a career. There really were a lot of Star Wars parallels, but this also seemed to borrow from Masters of the Universe, Dune, Back to the Future (only because they were life vests like Marty), and Terminator. As mentioned, the story's got issues. There's a lot of meandering and too much of a blind kid, a character that leads to an ending detail that nearly ruined the entire movie. Oh, add the Gospels to things the makers of this borrowed from. I forgot that one. More annoying than the blind kid is a little fuzzy glowing thing--the Ewoks of this movie--that randomly save the universe a few too many times. So although there is some cool animated landscapes and nifty-looking characters, this is a little too much of a mess. Of course, I didn't watch this in 3D like I was supposed to, so maybe I'm missing out on the artistic genius. I did enjoy the score, a very synthy and cheesy 80's sound that had my toes tapping throughout the movie.

That poster up there is very misleading, by the way. That blind kid never rides a horse.