Customer Reviews

Laserblast

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The funny thing about B-Movies is that they become campy classics only when they were made with somewhat serious intentions. We crack up over "Plan 9 From Outer Space," but when they crank out contrived spoofs like "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes," we grow bored.

Laserblast is one of those classics in the spirit of Ed Wood Jr. Released in 1978, it stars the late Kim Milford (best known for popularizing the role of Rocky Horror in the Roxy version of "The Rocky Horror Show") as Billy, a handsome but shy and dysfunctional young man who comes across this groovy space gun that blows people & things to smithereens. There is a catch to this magical zapping-machine: with each blast, poor Billy gradually turns from the sweet & shy guy to a physically grotesque and murderous creature who begins taking out his enemies (not to mention a few innocent bystanders). Being that the film takes place the year after "Star Wars" was released, Billy even takes his aggression out on a small billboard advertising the film!

All this time these Claymation Space Creatures are cruising about in a spaceship, monitoring the earthly activity of their potent zapping machine, speaking in a way-out tongue that is never revealed.

As one who enjoys spotting familiar celeb faces in B-Movies, I had a field day with this film as the cast includes Roddy Mc Dowell (it always interested me how he appeared in as many campy films as he did quality films), Keenan Wynn, Gianni Russo (best known as Carlo in "The Godfather"), Eddie Deezen (character actor known for his ultra-nerd roles in movies like "Wargames," and most recently in "Polar Express"), and the late Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith, who appeared in scores of B-Movies throughout the 1970s. The movie was directed by Michael Rae, who went on to direct.....uh, nothing else ever again.

On a "bad movie scale" of 1 through 10 (1 being SO bad that it doesn't even pass as a fun B-Movie experience, 10 being a wonderful viewing experience because it's so bad!) I give Laserblast a 10+!!! You can pick up this DVD for a very reasonable price, so check out these Clay Creatures and their Monster-Making Laser Gun!

I can remember my mom having this movie on during "Action Theatre" local channel at 12 in the afternoon when I was a kid. Why? She liked to put on lame movies to get her sleepy and help her take a good solid nap after church.
Well, I couldn't help but watch this little gem of a ludicrous sci fi laugh fest. Turtle aliens leave a LAWN MOWER GUN in the desert that can only be activated if you strap a glowing grenade necklace around your neck!!
Enter Billy the disenfranchised stereotypical 70's dude. He's mad at everyone kicking him around so he puts two and two together with the lawn mower shaped tube gun and the grenade and WHHHAMO!! Laserblast!! He is transformed into a green alien with pointed teeth, roars like a mountain lion, and leaps through the air in his Robert Plant outfit....
Billy quickly takes revenge on all who pick on him...

Blows away the deputy sheriff while the deputy's unloading in the outhouse

Shoots two punks in an old Chevy driving down the highway

Kills another hippy who picks Billy up while hitchhiking

Blows away multiple mailboxes

Shoots the newstands

Blasts an airplane after getting shot full of M-16 bullets

Engages turtle aliens at the end....

If you like movies like Plan Nine From Outer Space, Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, and other psychotronic cheesy yet fun movies, you MUST BUY THIS SUCKER and have a belly laugh. It's awesome. My wife HATES it when I put this movie on but I just can't help my guilty pleasure, watching good bad movies!! This is the cream of the crop!!

I can't recommend this movie. I saw it when I was 10 years old, and even at that age (and a sci-fi freak) I thought it was bad. Let me put it this way: I saw it as part of a double feature with Disney's "The Cat From Outer Space", and it made that poor excuse for entertainment shine in comparison. (Then again, there are a bunch of people that gave TCFOS 5 stars on Amazon, so maybe I'm off base? Whatever.)

Think "Corvette Summer" with cheesy special effects. Only for the avid collector of bad '70s sci-fi.

I pretty much agree with ALL the reviewers here. This is a bad cheesy movie which I enjoyed for some strange reason. It's hard to describe, but this movie makes cheesy film-making an art form. It probably is for nostalgics only, but who knows. I saw it once when I was very young and it stuck in my mind until I accidentally stumbled across it on amazon.com 24 years later. As soon as I saw it listed here, I just HAD to get it, and I wasn't disappointed. It is what it is, and I like it for that.

Two extraterrestrials are in pursuit of another in the Arizona desert, and when they catch up to "him," they disintegrate all but the other's gun-like weapon. They seem uninterested in the weapon, however, and leave it behind.

Enter young Billy, stereotypical teenage pariah. In an effort to escape his troubles for awhile, Billy wanders into said desert and--you guessed it!--stumbles across the powerful weapon left behind by the murdered extraterrestrial. It isn't long, of course, before he learns how to successfully wield and fire this laser-like weapon. Then, bent on meting out his revenge to those who shun him, the misguided youngster takes the weapon back to town and proceeds to blast just about everything in sight. There is a price, however, for joining the intergalactic NRA: When Billy uses the weapon, it temporarily makes his skin greenish and his teeth pointy and sharp. And worse, these changes seem to be edging more and more towards permanency each time the weapon is used.

Meanwhile, back at the cosmic ranch, the aliens that own the weapon--probably kin to the murdered bloke--are aware of Billy's activities, and they are on their way to Earth to reclaim their property. Will Billy finally overcome the addictive allure of the laser weapon, or will he permanently mutate into his demonic, laser-wielding alter ego? Will the aliens get there in time to save Billy, or will they be forced to commit euthanasia and put Billy the Mutant out of his misery?

Of all of the pieces of cinematic flotsam that were churned up in the wake of the highly successful (and much, much better) STAR WARS (1977), 1978's LASERBLAST is truly among the worst. The film suffers from the lack of a coherent and comprehensible plot, and the bit of story that is there is thin, cliché, and amounts to little more than a cheap teen empowerment fantasy. Michael Rae's direction is erratic at best, non-existent at worst, and this only adds to the confusion of the lousy plot. Terry Bowen's cinematography makes everything look abysmally flat and washed-out, and most of the acting is as flat as the cinematography. The few exceptions to the latter are the performances of the beautiful Cheryl Smith, who plays Billy's girlfriend; venerable and longtime character actor Keenan Wynn, who has a minor role here as a military type; and master thespian (and genre regular) Roddy McDowall, who appears here in a bit part as a physician. Alas, the skills of these talented actors are wasted here, though, since their performances get lost within the muck and mire that is LASERBLAST.

There are a few bright spots in the production values of this dull piece of celluloid. While not quite on a level with the work of master animator Ray Harryhausen, Dave Allen's stop-motion animation of the extraterrestrials is really pretty cool. Fortunately, Allen would go on to do FX work for better films like 1981's THE HOWLING and 1989's HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS, to name but a few. Also very cool is the alien spaceship in LASERBLAST. The model was designed and built by Greg Jein, who also worked the on the models for CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) and STAR WARS (1977) at about the same time. Jein has gone on to do miniature and FX work for both the theatrical and television incarnations of STAR TREK, as well as for other notable films and TV shows.

In spite of the few minor highlights in LASERBLAST, the film is best avoided by serious filmgoers who prefer flicks with quality writing, talented actors, and skilled filmmakers. The DVD from Full Moon does offer a few bonus features. One is a behind-the-scenes featurette; the other is a very enjoyable supplemental featurette with tons of campy trailers for even cheesier films. Indeed, this bonus material is much more entertaining than the feature film. But unless you're really interested in what happens on the set of an awful film, or unless you're a collector of kooky film trailers, these extras are hardly incentive to purchase the disc.

Saw this originally on cable in the early HBO days, several times and it always stayed with me. The aliens with their little Nazi take-off saluting their leader, cute aliens, kind of endearing. You get the feeling they felt quite justified every time they shot down another earthling who happened upon their casually leftover armnaments without asking the question of whether they shared any culpability for leaving these things behind. Entrapment anyone?This movie is about people. it is slow and so are most of those who inhabit the film which makes this a great escape from the paranoid times we live in today. It is simple and it is real, the feelings, the music even, the 70's as the perfect backdrop for this. It creates a whole lot of nostalgia for many reasons just to watch the slow pacing and basic human elements and lack of discrimination and realize that it is not boring, that maybe we don't need a security guard around every corner or intermittent warnings about the color of security from Fox News.None of that exists here, just simple people doing simple things with some intervention from some cute aliens with nasty weaponry who play on the angst of one kid who falls for it but even then doesn't go on much of a spree until the end when we have absorbed the strangely compelling enactments of various forms of pathos enough to be ready to head to the obvious back set upon which the end occurs which somehow matches the action regardless.Why didn't Billy dissolve like the last guy? Well, it would have been kind of messy for his girlfriend to pour over him. Why did they leave the weapon behind? Maybe Billy just needed a way to measure his anger. However, it seemed like the device took over his mind as it did his physiology so was that even really him?Somehow there is something innocuous about this film and maybe a couple of nerdy antagonists in a 62 Buick convert and cops eating and smoking weed and other dubious plot elements just allow the story of angst in the desert in the 70's to play itself out. I could never tire of this strange little film.

Alright guys, let's get real. This is a terrible movie, but there was something cool about it to me.
It came out when I was about 13 and I remember really wanting to see it then because of the stop motion aliens (remember the 7th voyage of Sinbad?) I never did see it but one of my friends did and said it sucked. So I moved on with my life.
Skip ahead 30 years to the internet age and there's my long lost baby for sale on Amazon. After playing a couple of clips of campy music and seeing the "cult status" reviews I was convinced to buy it. But now it's time to be honest.
It was bad guys. Having said that I am a fan of really bad B movies (does it get any better than PLAN 9 ?) so I did enjoy it. Probably because it takes you back to the 70's, and who can't relate to that high school outcast syndrome?
Unfortunately, in the end we never really feel sorry for Billy when he gets caught by the aliens and starts sucking ray. That little bit of empathy could have saved this film and elevated it to true cult status.

I bought this movie with one intention, to make fun of it. Unfortunately, I didn't succeed. I didn't beat the movie, the movie beat me. Bad. It wore me down, and put me in agony. It was worse than I could imagine. Watching it put me in so much pain.

I was lucky enough to see the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this movie though, and man, it made me laugh. Even though I already knew how awful this film was, watching the MST3K version of it confirmed my knowledge. I firmly believe that this film doesn't even deserve one star.

So little happens throughout this movie that it's astounding. It would have been more exciting as a silent picture actually. Billy walks around, drives around, and walks around some more. Then he blows up stuff, acting like explosions all of a sudden make the movie exciting.

This movie has virtually no plot nor any other redeeming quality. The best that can be said about it is it features some stop motion animation aliens for a full one and a half minutes total. (40 seconds at the beginning, the rest at the middle and end.) The closest it gets to a plot is this: Billy wears a pendant and becomes an alien. This movie just has SO much padding. Don't watch this film even if you get it for free. However, if you're lucky enough to see a MST3K version of it, you're in for a treat. You'll laugh non-stop at how much it's made fun of, and trust me, this movie deserves to be made fun of.

*
Can a movie be so bad that it's good?

Well... If you ask me, a classic example of an automobile that's so ugly it's cute is that retro-looking Plymouth PT Cruiser. So if it works for a stupid old car, then why not a movie?

I had seen "Laserblast" only once: It had apparantly made such an impact at the theatres that about a year or so after it was released I was among an audience of perhaps 70 or 80 viewers at the most in the gymnasium of a children's home that had rented the film reels for a private screening. (Now that just HAS to make it an instant classic!)

But there was just something about this slow-paced sci-fi film with cheesy effects that impressed me enough to stay stuck in my mind for over two decades. My recent purchase of the DVD gave me the answer why: It's so bad that it actually stands out which makes it good, and it really is quite good, despite how bad it really is. (Did that make any sense at all?)

Coming out just on the tail of the eye candy "Star Wars" craze, "Laserblast" was a break (refreshing?... doubtful) from all of the space fantasy knock-offs which deliberately tried to be good (and usually weren't) and all of the space spoofs which deliberately tried to be humorous (and usually weren't). "Laserblast" clearly knows that it's nowhere on the same level as "Star Wars," and it never tries to kid itself otherwise, although there is clearly a fair bit of resentment toward the LucasFilm epic.

"Laserblast" almost revels in its cheesiness. With a little refinement of the special effects, scripting and camera work it could have actually been a pretty good movie that could have done okay at the box office, and I'm actually hoping that someone (other than myself) comes up with the idea to do a decent 'remake.' But even as it stands, it's an enjoyable film.

The late Richard Kim Milford does a decent job portraying "Billy," the neglected introvert living in a dead-end desert town where he is treated as an irrelevant entity by just about everyone except his girlfriend. One day he finds a long plastic and metal tube-thing and a grenade-looking neckace-thing lying around in the open desert, which were left behind in a panic by a couple of turtle-faced space aliens that speak turtle-faced space alien language without English language subtitles who were in a hurry trying to avoid detection by an airplane flying overhead just after they vaporized some green-faced guy with a happy trigger finger. (You got all that?)

The space turtles have to do a quick 180* when they get their reptilian butts chewed out by the 'BiG Boss' space turtle who shows them that another one of 'Those Obnoxious Earthlings' like the one they derezzed earlier has found the 'weapon-things' which turn unsuspecting Earth people into laserblasting rampaging green-faced monsters. So now the reptile people from outer space have to save the day yet again by destroying another one of the terrestrial mammal people in order to save all the other mammal people of Earth from the laserblasting rampage of the Billy mammal person who will soon transform into a green-faced alien monster person with sharp teeth. (With me so far?)

The "MIB" (not "J" "K" or "L" this time) catches up with the now transformed green-faced laser cannon toting rampaging Billy before the space turtles do, but when the aliens finally do get there it's apparantly during one of the biggest celebrations of the year, because the entire residential area is empty (they're probably all attending the parade or something), and when the claymation aliens destroy the rampaging Billy they use this special 'ray gun' thing which they now seem to have fixed so that it kills the monster-man but leaving his "Billy" body intact while vaporizing or digitizing both the laser cannon thing and necklace thing, instead of the other way around, which is how they got into this mess in the first place. (Um... I haven't lost you yet, have I?)

And THIS is the movie that stuck in my mind for so many years? I guess it's obvious to see why. It's good bad stuff.

* * *

This is a movie in the general genre of 'Star Wars', but with no budget, script, or talent. Fortunately, it falls into the sub-genre of sci-fi movies so bad that it's entertaining. I remember first seeing this movie with the MST3K treatment, and enjoyed the cheesiness immensely. When I came across it on Amazon, I had to see it again, and was not disappointed. The plot involves a lost laser cannon and pendant set left accidentally on earth by two stop-motion turtles without shells from space and found by Billy, a reclusive loner who is taunted by the always annoying Eddie Deezen in his big screen debut. There is a scrawny love interest, a retired colonel who is nuttier than a fruitcake (hilariously portrayed by Keenan Wynn), a sinister government guy in a black Cadillac, a screen chewing performance by Roddy McDowall as a doctor, and perhaps the most irritating sheriff's deputy in screen history who gets exactly what he deserves in a most entertaining manner. In other words, every dopey stereotype in sci-fi is present and accounted for. Also featured prominently are some of the worst special effects in modern motion picture history.

Altogether, this is a laughable effort, played very seriously by all involved, thus further adding to the entertainment value of the DVD. The script is awful, the characters very over the top (especially Billy and Roddy McDowall), and there are some scenes so bad that you may have to watch them several times to really get their full effect, notably the explosions (always shot from multiple angles), and the aliens speaking their own language. This is a true sci-fi classic, just like the box claims; just understand that it's a classic because it's so bad it's good!