Star Warp'd
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Movie Reviews of Star Warp'd
Movie Review: Low-brow humor, true, but still some good parodies
Summary: 4 Stars
Unlike some of the other reviewers here, I liked BOTH this film and "Spaceballs" -- for different reasons. "Spaceballs" is live action satire with plenty of Jewish in-jokes ("Druish princesses" and all). It is exactly what we have come to expect from producer Mel Brooks. "Star Warp'd," on the other hand is a fan-produced parody that is low-budget, low-tech and, in places, low-brow in its "Dark Smell of the Force" fart-and-poop humor -- but I found it funny just the same. (After all, "Spaceballs" stooped to low-brow puns, too -- only they were mostly sexual double entendres.)
Granted, the claymation is rather crude. If you watch the behind-the-scenes feature included on the DVD, you will see that parts of this were literally filmed in somebody's garage. Other parts were generated on home computers. The puppets were made out of Sculpy, and the sets were put together in a couple of days by guys pulling all-nighters (by their own admission.) If you read the credits, you'll see the same half-dozen or so names over and over, filling in all the different production roles -- that in itself struck me as a hilarious satire of blockbuster movies.
The producers themselves called this "guerilla filmmaking" and it should be viewed as such. A film by fans for fans. As such, I think the primitive puppets and homemade sets only add to the satire. This is definitely not the slick product of Paramount or LucasFilms.
For all its primitiveness, "Star Warp'd" does do some original things in terms of effects. It's the first claymation I've seen that combines realistic CGI with puppets. In the opening scene we see a parody of the Star Wars crawl text. (When Spock asks "how did we get into this situtation?" the captain tells him to read the crawl on the viewscreen. Later on, when there's a dogfight, the ships fly through this same text -- after all, it must still be floating around out there somewhere... or was this a reference to "Contact", the film where old TV broadcasts were eventually picked up by aliens in star systems light years away?)
Next comes the title, "The Fandom Menace," and a pretty good rendition of Dark Vapor's ship chasing the ConsolationPrize (The Enterprise with propellers!) From here, it cuts to the Trek puppets -- but only two of the ConsolationPrize's crew, because, as they explain, the rest just weren't in the budget. Future scenes combine CGI with physical sets, spoofing Star Wars, Star Trek, The Terminator, X-Files, RoboCop, 2001, etc. and ending with the destruction of the Terrible Thing that caused the rift in the Space-Time Continuum in the first place. (Sorry, no spoilers here --you'll just have to watch the movie for yourself.)
Movie Review: Oh, Give Me a Break.
Summary: 4 Stars
There are a lot of parody films out. The bulk of these are sci-fi parodies, poking fun or hilariously saluting great sci-fi movies. Many of them are just plain awful, with terrible writing and bad acting. STAR WARP'D isn't like that. The acting can't be bad because it's just a bunch of clay puppets and the writing is great, stealing not only characters but lines from great movies as well.Now, granted there are a lot of poop jokes here. Farting falls in the realm of very crudish, low brow humor. It's the kind of thing that little kids find funny. It's also the kind of thing that shows you aren't taking yourself too seriously, thereby avoiding possible legal troubles while at the same time expanding your potential market base.
Anyway, the plot of the story basically has characters (well, they are warped versions of the characters) from several sci-fi movies in the same universe because the space-time continuum has been torn apart by a mysterious object, a Monolith. The good guys from Star Trek are trying to keep the Monolith from being stolen by the bad guys from STAR WARS. What ensues is cool, hilarious parody.
The DVD includes a four-minute preview of the possible upcoming sequel, an audio commentary by the film's makers, and some behind the scenes footage.
Movie Review: love the behind the scenes
Summary: 4 Stars
The other reviews here already cover the basics. Yes, there are childish fart jokes (which seem lame to me). Yes, the storyline is kind of basic and the humor falls flat in places.
But, I gained a new appreciation for the movie when I watched the behind the scenes and listened to the commentary. I love working on my own projects and I love to see a small number of people do big things. The entire movie seems to have been created by 6 people on a very shoestring budget. I feel different about the movie because of that.
Some people wouldn't judge a movie in that way. For those types of people this movie is probably 3 stars. (And that's what I was going to give it before listening to the commentary.) If you give extra appreciation to projects done by small numbers of people then I think it's worth 4 stars.
Movie Review: Star Warped
Summary: 4 Stars
I thought the movie was great. Involving all those characters in one movie was brilliant. I recommend it if you want to laugh at some stupid stuff or just laugh in general.Movie Review: Star Warp'd Succeeds Where Spaceballs Failed
Summary: 3 Stars
This 32 minute Claymation movie, which bears all the signs of being a student film project produced on a budget of four packs of bubblegum and a cheese sandwich, does have a redeeming virtue. Unlike the live-action, multimillion dollar budgeted Spaceballs from Mel Brooks, this offering by Pete Schuermann & his band of fellow SF fans is moderately amusing instead of draggingly dull. It's clear that they, unlike Brooks, actually understand the genre, a necessity before it can be sent up.
The plot is simple. A warp in the fabric of spacetime has thrown Darth Vader, James Kirk and Mr. Spock (Star Warp'd uses satirical names, but it's easier to write it this way) into our universe in the present day. Kirk and Spock are informed by 2001's Starchild that the Monolith controlling spacetime is broken and they must fix it before the multiverses fall into a state of complete higgledy-piggledy. (Starchild sounds and acts remarkably like Sean Connery, by the by.) Vader summons the Alien, the Terminator and the Predator to fight for the Bad Guys; while Kirk and Spock summon Robocop and E.T. to fight for the good guys, and they have it out in a way that suggests Celebrity Deathmatch at the World Science Fiction Convention.
The action is mostly an amalgam of the high points in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back; but there are cameos and homages to The X-Files, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, The War of the Worlds, Dr. Strangelove, T.J. Hooker and even the old Roadrunner-Wile E. Coyote cartoons. The most satisfying moment, however, may be in the tag, where the Starchild requires both sides to cooperate in the elimination of the greatest menace the universes have ever known.
All in all, it's moderately amusing and fun to watch to pick up the references. Best viewed with a bunch of friends after consuming a six-pack of beer and with popcorn to throw at the screen.
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