Luigi Cozzi had been trying to sell his science fiction project to producers for a year when Star Wars came out in May 1977. The French producer Nat Wachsberger had already passed on it. One month after Star Wars opened, Wachsberger called back: "Did you say you had a science fiction project?"

STARCRASH (1978) is what happened next.

Cozzi - who directed under the pseudonym Lewis Coates for international markets - had not actually seen Star Wars when he wrote the script. He based it on the novelisation, which he skimmed.

He then packed the film with everything he personally loved: stop-motion work like Ray Harryhausen's (sourced with great difficulty through a guy in France, because nobody in Italy was doing stop-motion and Harryhausen himself had turned down George Lucas), the pulp science fiction cover art of the 1950s, Barbarella, and the old serials of the 1930s and 40s.

The result is less a Star Wars knockoff than a fever dream of pre-Star Wars space adventure influences.

The cast assembled for this vision: Caroline Munro as the space smuggler Stella Star, always in a leather bikini; Marjoe Gortner as her companion Akton, who refused to wear alien makeup; Joe Spinell as the villain; David Hasselhoff(!) as the emperor's son; and as the emperor, Christopher Plummer, who later explained his participation by saying "Give me Rome any day. I'll do porno in Rome, as long as I can get to Rome."

The film's production was plagued by a communist worker revolt which resulted in the master copy being held for ransom by Italian activists. This is a sentence I've never written before.

American International Pictures, which had acquired Starcrash for US distribution, sued the producers for nearly $2.5 million on the basis that it had not been delivered by the agreed-upon date of July 1, 1978. New World Pictures released it instead.

The score is by John Barry. So there's that.