Battle Beyond the Stars

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), directed by Jimmy T. Murakami, Shout! Factory remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including 5.1 remaster, original theatrical mono, two commentary tracks, and subtitles in English, Portuguese and Spanish.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080421/

Video encoded in two-pass 13.0 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image. Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available.

Subtitles converted to VobSub and repositioned.

Note : I uploaded this a few hours ago with a corrupt torrent file, this is a corrected version. My apologies.

If you ever wondered “What would have happened if Roger Corman had made Star Wars?”, well, wonder no longer, because he kind of did, and it’s honestly not bad, possibly because the production involved quite a lot of both already and future famous people. Notably, John Sayles wrote the screenplay, James Horner did the score, and James Cameron did the special effects (which are generally really good, especially the miniature work), production design, and art direction, and the production manager was future Cameron producer and wife Gale Anne Hurd. Also, apparently Bill Paxton worked on this as a carpenter, of all things. On the cast side, there are a lot of well-established character actors like Robert Vaughn, John Saxon, George Peppard, and Sam Jaffe, as well as 70s sex symbol Sybil Danning. It’s pretty goofy, a “Seven Samurai”/”The Magnificent Seven” in space, but it looks great and is quite entertaining.

The Akirans are peaceful farmers who are threatened by warlord Sador, ruler of the Malmori empire. They decide to hire mercenaries to protect them, and Shad volunteers to pilot an AI-powered ship to pick up guns for hire. After a visit to a space station nets him a love interest and assistant, he hires a cowboy named Cowboy, a hive-mind of cloned aliens, Gelt, an assassin who want no payment other than to be able to live with the Akirans in peace, a Valkyrie named Saint-Exmin, and a lizard man named, I dunno, Lizardo or something. No, actually, “Cayman”. Together, they must stand up against the might of the Malmori, protect the Akirans, and put their lives on the line to liberate the downtrodden.

This Shout! Factory remaster is quite good looking, with a nice, fine grain, good contrast and saturation, and decent sharpness, although some colors are maybe a bit too saturated. Both the 5.1 track and the original mono sounds good, and the commentary tracks are very interesting.

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