YMMV / Starcrash

• Accidental Innuendo: "It's so nice to be turned on again."
• Ass Pull:
  • "Imperial battleship! Halt... the flow of time!" Never brought up before the planet is about to blow up in 35 seconds, the Emperor's explanation about how it works takes longer than those 35 seconds (so the world should have exploded already), and is never mentioned again.
  • Really, just...everything about Akton and his "abilities." The movie kills him off because he would solve the big climax in seconds.
  • Elle the robot turning up whole and unharmed after being smashed to pieces by cavemen. Putting a robot back together isn't normally an asspull, but it is when his many pieces were left behind on an exploding planet, and the only way the other characters escaped was by breaking time.
• Awesome Music: However John Barry got convinced to do the score, he didn't half-ass it. The music is still up to his high standards, and one might say it's far too good for this kind of film.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Caroline Munro in a space bikini is one of the things people remember most about this film.
• Common Knowledge: The film's colloquially referred to as "Italian Star Wars" and perceived as a cheap, Italian-made cash-in on Star Wars. However, it was actually an independent American production by Film Enterprises Productions, albeit one with an Italian director, parts of it were shot in Rome and its director actually conceived it as closer to "Sinbad on Mars" and a love-letter to all things sci-fi and fantasy.
• Complete Monster: Count Zarth Arn of the League of Dark Worlds is a Evil Overlord with ambitions of taking over the entire universe. Armed with a weapon capable of inducing horrible Mind Rape in its targets, Zarth Arn introduces the weapon's capabilities by mentally torturing a spaceship full of people to death once they try to destroy the weapon. Zarth Arn plots to oust the Emperor from power with his weapon and eventually opts to blow up the planet his weapon is located in by luring the Emperor there with the prospect of finding his own lost son. Once thinking the Emperor dead, Zarth Arn proceeds to try and obliterate the Emperor's own home planet and the billions on it to secure his reign on the universe and slaughters all the fleets that comes between him and victory in the process.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Elle the robot. He's a super-competent badass who saves the day several times, and has a likeable personality and a fun (if completely out of place) Texas accent. It also helps that he has the voice of Gizmoduck.
• Ham and Cheese: Christopher Plummer is deliciously hammy. He proudly said he only did the film for the chance to vacation in Rome, even noting that he'd do porn if a trip to Rome was involved.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: The Emperor and the Count? VOLTA... I MEAN ZOLTAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Swords made of lasers? That is so obviously ripped off from Star Wars. But, then a character shows up with a laser beam coming out of, what appears to be, a ring on his finger, which seems like anticipating Mel Brooks' Spaceballs.
  • With his quasi-Mandalorian outfit and the Dual Wielding blaster pistols, Elle actually looks remarkably similar to Jango Fett.
  • During the MSTing, one of the riffers quips that this movie is the "Community Theater version of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)." A few months later, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 would come out, and would feature David Hasselhoff in a memorable cameo as well as singing the ending credits theme. Not only that, Thor bears a notable resemblance to Drax.
  • Visual Novel VA-11 HALL-A released almost 40 years after this movie and features a character named Stella Hoshii. What does it translate to? Stella Star!
  • One scene includes a spacecraft that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Prometheus from Stargate SG-1.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Caroline Munro and Elle the robot are likely the main reasons why people would sit through this.
• Narm: Thor's death: "These deadly rays will be your death!" Also, pretty much anything the Emperor of the Galaxy says.
• Narm Charm: Despite Plummer clearly being bored with the dialogue, his Expo Speak delivery still makes his character more interesting than most the cast.
• Padding: The loooong, sloooow shots of spaceships flying through space. Especially during the climax, which consists of many more loooong, sloooow shots of spaceships launching from the Emperor's Space City, which is even more ludicrous considering how quickly they get their butts kicked. Plummer's slooow, sloooow delivery, with dramatic pauses about every third word, also counts as this.
• Retroactive Recognition: Hamilton Camp voices Elle, over a decade before he'd voice robotic fowl Gizmoduck.
• So Bad, It's Good: You really have to admire the amount of Ham and Cheese this whole movie contains. It's glorious. It's even better with the botched English dub. There are scenes that are literally just the audience watching the characters do nothing. Several more are just scenes of the characters walking, and not nearly as exciting as The Lord of the Rings.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Like Star Wars, the first minute or so of the film consists of shots of a giant spaceship. Unlike Star Wars, the spaceship looks like it's made of Lego (you can actually see they used model-car runners pasted intact on the ship sides) and space looks like it's full of Christmas lights. Later, during the space battles, you can see the strings the ships are moving on (and don't worry if you miss them the first time: the scenes are reused). Also, halting the flow of time (for three minutes) is accomplished by bathing things in green jello.
  • At one point late in the movie, the good guys see a crashed spaceship at the bottom of a hill. Said "spaceship" is obviously a small prop made of plastic. The shot is supposed to use Forced Perspective to make the ship seem big, but it doesn't work.

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