There are many movies that are “so bad they are good”, and then some that are so bad you just have to kind of marvel at them. This movie is hypnotic, and suggests a vision of some sort that is compelling enough to recommend it to anyone with a taste for cult Italian cinema. STAR ODYSSEY is sort of like the final half hour of YOR but without a story — Images of a futuristic world literally using junk at one point to create a different time and place.

Just where that time and place is I haven’t a clue. But it has some impressive parts: The film “stars” cult legend Gianni Garko, best known for his SARTANA Spaghetti Western, features music by Marcello Giomboni (including passages recycled from his MURDER MANSION score), has the great Italian character actor Silvano Tranquilli in a supporting role, and one of the central characters is a blonde bimbo in a leather fetish 1 piece with thigh high vinyl boots. “Far out.”

It is compulsively watchable though: You can find it on those 2 DVD bargain bin box sets at the Mall (“Deadly Dimensions” is the release I have) and for $9 or so you’ve got yourself a film that attests for the best of humanity at it’s worst, putting their everything into a project so devoid of apparent substance that in the end, the parts add up to more than the sum of their whole. Which means this is one of those films best watched when you can let it waft in and out of awareness as the better and lesser interesting moments follow each other in a regressive chain that, ultimately, lead up to nothing.

Think STAR WARS by David Lynch but on the budget of your average Discover Platinum card with production design by French artist Jean Tinguely, who made fame by building robotic sculptures that destroyed themselves during live performances. The women are all exceedingly gorgeous, Gianni Garko gets to do back flips & beat people at poker, and there is one guy who runs around with a big letter J on the back of his blue plastic jacket. It is just that kind of movie.