Verdict
Summary
Galaxy Warriors is already a bargain-basement production, but it doesn’t strike me as being intentionally bad. I believe Brett Kelly was actually trying to make a straightforward film here, but it’s not nearly good enough to cut the mustard, and it’s not nearly bad enough to be a “so bad, it’s great” type of movie. It falls in between, which is not where it needs to be.
Plot:
A female bounty hunter in the stars allows herself to be incarcerated in a prison in space to rescue her sister.
Review:
Space babe Artemis (Abbey Flockton) gets herself incarcerated in a floating penal colony for women, and her older sister Demeter (Christine Emes looking a lot like Dina Meyer) and her sidekick co-pilot Vesta (Alianne Rozon, pretty spunky) scour the galaxy to find her. When they show up at a dive bar in the cosmos somewhere where Artemis used to be employed, they learn that she’s been taken prisoner on the space prison, which gives them a mission. Since there’s no breaking into the prison, they can commit some bogus crime to become prisoners and maybe break themselves out somehow, and so that’s what they do. They book themselves a flight to prison after causing a ruckus or being “unruly” (a word that is used a few times in this movie), and they’re thrown into the space slammer, which is run by a bionic-enhanced, monocle-wearing tyrant named Enyo (Ellen Mildred) who puts on gladiator matches between the inmates on a rocky planet nearby, with the intent to turn a profit with the upper classes in large-scale betting matches. Sometimes she pits the inmates against monsters native to the planet, which include mutant dog people or even giant lizards. When Artemis realizes that her sister is there to save her, they join forces and do their best to become “galaxy warriors” and bust a move on outta there.
Look, I’m not in the business of trashing no-budget movies shot on crummy looking digital cameras or the lack of craft from filmmakers who have a clear passion to make movies beyond their means. I’m in the business of lifting up movies like Galaxy Warriors as long as the heart is in the right place, but while this film’s director Brett Kelly clearly has a passion and a go-get-’em motivation to make movies like this (and other ones like Spyfall, Homicycle, and Raiders of the Lost Shark, among other illustrious titles), he’s missing some very key ingredients that make movies like the ones he’s making should have. For starters, Galaxy Warriors needs nudity. I rarely say it, but in this case, it’s true. There are several opportunities in the movie where that should’ve been included, and because the movie is trying very hard to reach the demographic that loves movies like Galaxy of Horror, Forbidden World, or even Star Slammer, it should have what those fans crave. It also needs some quality control. The masks and makeup effects are pretty shoddy, and while you can easily say that it was intentionally bad, I would argue that if that were the case then the movie needs to be even stupider than it already is. Galaxy Warriors is already a bargain-basement production, but it doesn’t strike me as being intentionally bad. I believe Brett Kelly was actually trying to make a straightforward film here, but it’s not nearly good enough to cut the mustard, and it’s not nearly bad enough to be a “so bad, it’s great” type of movie. It falls in between, which is not where it needs to be. He hired Brett Piper to do the brief stop-motion effects in the movie, and I actually count myself among Piper’s fans, having absolutely loved his movies A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell and Battle for the Los Planet, among others. Piper’s work shows that he always goes the extra mile on no extra money, and his work on the whole deserves to be discovered, but from what I see of Kelly’s work here with Galaxy Warriors, he’s still in the beginning stages of working out how to make his limited audience happy and coming back for more.
The DVD for Galaxy Warriors comes with an audio commentary, shorts, and lots of bonus trailers. It’s affordably priced to own.
