No Good Very Bad Movies 5: The one that cut Harvey Keitel's voice

 

Title: Saturn 3

What Year?: 1979 (preproduction and filming)/ 1980 (theatrical release)

Classification: Runnerup

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/3)

 

When I decided to do this feature, one major factor was that I had piled up quite a few movies I deemed unsuitable elsewhere, or simply set aside in favor of other material. With the present review, I’m going right to the discard pile, with one of the most notorious movies I had so far viewed without going to a full review. As we will see, it’s a very odd movie that is still weighed down by its own troubles and further unfounded conjectures. Even as I write this, I’m still debating just how to rate it. Here is Saturn 3, an egregious 1980s sci fi offering that was definitely not an Alien knockoff.

Our story begins with a gruesome murder in space, which will never be mentioned again. We then follow someone who might be the killer to a distant space station called Saturn 3, where a dapper old guy Adam is living in bliss with a space girl named Alex. The newcomer, named Benson, introduces the pair to a robot named Hector, in fact a cyborg with a sort of cloned brain with a further uplink to Benson through a hard-wired implant. Things get off to a rocky start as Adam dislikes the machine, and get worse as Benson hits on Alex with such lines as, “Your body is beautiful, I’d like to use it.” As tensions ramp up, even the robot becomes erratic, possibly corrupted by Benson’s deteriorating mind. Just when it looks like the bot is dismantled, the machine repairs itself and returns, fused with Benson’s personality- and willing to assimilate the rest of the crew as well!

Saturn 3 was a 1980 film from the British company ITC. The production was conceived as a story from distinguished production designer John Barry, who was chosen to direct the film. The film starred Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett, with Harvey Keitel (see Two Evil Eyes) as Benson. The score was composed by Elmer Bernstein (see… Robot Monster???). A difficult production history saw the replacement of Barry with Stanley Donen and the redubbing of Keitel’s lines by Roy Dotrice after the actor withdrew from the film in post-production. The film saw very negative reviews, notably from Roger Ebert and the Medveds’ Son of the Golden Turkey Awards, and a weak box office of $9 million against a $10M budget. It was released very successfully on VHS. Additional television rights to the film were purchased by NBC, which ultimately aired a significantly different cut of the film. The movie has remained available on disc and digitally, and has been offered for free streaming on certain platforms.

For my experiences, this is one of a stable of movies that I mostly know about from frequent sightings at 1990s video stores (see also Creature and Defcon 4). Anything further I knew or thought I knew about it came from hostile accounts. I got interested enough to look into it after seeing a relatively favorable video review that presented it as an Alien knockoff. What very quickly stood out is that the movie itself belies its reputation, not always in good ways. Among other things, the whole idea that it was copying any other film was not only wrong but getting things the wrong way around. Knockoffs usually have the relative virtues of a tried formula and close-to-mainstream narrative and filming styles (see Deep Space just for example). Most of the difficulties this one faced, on the other hand, rise from trying to do what nobody had tried to do before and relatively few ever tried to do again, a consideration that at certain points brought me close to setting up a whole feature around this and a few other select movies. It is also surprisingly restrained, particularly with gore and nudity, to the point that it would be pretty easy to “see” even less than there is on casual viewing. The overall effect is a unique, vaguely classy movie that continuously struggles to stand on its own merits.

With that said, all the pros are from the setting, the effects and especially the robot. The ships are well-done, as would be expected from Barry’s involvement, and the sets for the station are generally good. Then there’s the bot, and it is like nothing you have seen or ever will. It’s one of the most utilitarian designs on record, notably replacing a discrete head with a moving sensor that looks like a miniature pair of binoculars. It also has an unpleasantly organic feel, particularly thanks to a profusion of exposed wires and tubes that looked vaguely like exposed muscle tissue. Finally, it has a very unique concept that gets more unsettling as the story evolves. Its organic components are the standard “brain in a jar”, except the gray matter has been grown to fill a long, odd tube. The creepiness is matched by an implant that lets Benson connect with it, shown graphically inserted into a socket on the back of his neck. Most intriguing is the implied interplay between the pair, which resembles nothing so much as Alfred Bester’s classic story “Fondly Fahrenheit”. The highlight (and strong contender for the “one scene”) is an all too brief dialogue between the pair, with surely one of the greatest lines ever given to a robot: “I am not malfunctioning, you are malfunctioning.”

The most immediate problems, meanwhile, come from the story and characters. Douglas coasts along on charm; Fawcett musters some final-act vulnerability; and Keitel remains as inscrutable as the robot. This is where it would be easy to go with the lore of interference and clashing personalities, but my foremost suspicion lies with the fact that so much responsibility was given at the outset to a production designer. The evident and inferable issues are all in line with my own file of movies handed to effects guys (Silent Running remains the egregious example); the effects and production values are predictably excellent, but greatly at the expense of plot, character development, and even worldbuilding. I find it especially telling that we never see enough of the future Earth to get a frame of reference for how the characters got to be the way they are. This shows especially with Benson (if he is the real “Benson”!), the one character who would presumably have experienced the culture and mores of the home world firsthand. As it is, one can envision a society warped enough where his nearly transactional approach to social interactions and sexuality makes some measure of sense. Or, one can equally well grant that he was as dysfunctional back home as he is out here. With the right touch, not knowing could be as intriguing as any answer, but I don’t find it here.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with one that stood out right from the first viewing. Partway through, Alex has a lab accident that leaves some vaguely described piece of debris in her eye. Benson insists for no obvious reason that she allow Hector to remove it, and literally wrestles her into position. She continues to struggle in obvious and justified terror as the bot approaches. Amazingly, it turns out the machine is equipped for this work, extending a set of tweezer-like probes from its claw appendages. It’s surreal, terrifying and comical all at once, ultimately a glimpse of a movie that could have been.

In conclusion, I come to the rating. This movie has been a test of the scale I devised for this feature. Make no mistake, this is not a “good” movie. Still, it is at a minimum a competent and above all creative movie, and if I had reviewed it earlier, I could easily have talked myself into giving it 3 out of 5. In the topsy-turvy frame of reference for this new feature, after watching Dead Space, Ingagi, Robot Monster and the Gobots movie, this is a masterpiece I can praise to the skies. And with that, I’m done.