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LASERBLAST
Rating: 
USA. 1977.
Director – Michael Rae, Screenplay – Ray Frank Perilli & Frances Schacht, Producer – Charles Band, Photography – Terry Bowen, Music – Richard Band & Joel Goldsmith, Stop Motion Animation – David Allen & Randy Cook, Laser Effects – Paul Gentry, Special Effects – Harry Wolman, Makeup Effects – Steve & Ve Neill. Production Company – The Irwin Yablans Co.
Cast:
Kim Milford (Billy Duncan), Cheryl Smith (Kathy Farley), Gianni Russo (Tony Craig), Mike Bobenko (Chuck), Eddie Deezen (Froggy), Roddy McDowall (Dr Mellon), Keenan Wynn (Colonel Farley), Dennis Burkley (Deputy Peter Ungar), Barry Cutler (Deputy Jesse Jeep)
Plot: Two aliens hunt down another alien in the Arizona desert, disintegrating him all but for a laserblaster and pendant, which he has dropped, unnoticed by them. Bullied, disaffected teenager Billy Duncan later finds the laserblaster and pendant and discovers that, while wearing the pendant, he can use the laserblaster. He wreaks havoc about the town the laserblasters, blowing things up and revenging himself on his tormentors. But the indiscriminate use of the laberblaster and the control pendant also starts to mutate him into an alien.
This was one of the first films to come from producer Charles Band, who has since become an extremely prolific producer of low-budget genre films in the 1980s and 1990s, heading studios like Empire, Full Moon Productions, Moonbeam and Pulsepounders. Before the establishment of Empire in the mid-1980s, Band was an independent producer, making various cheap genre productions such as Mansion of the Doomed (1976), the comic softcore Cinderella (1977), The End of the World (1977), Tourist Trap (1979), The Day Time Ended (1980), and directing the likes of the killer car film Crash (1977), The Alchemist (1981), Parasite (1982) and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983).
Laserblast was the quickest film to come out exploiting the massive success of Star Wars (1977). Surprisingly it received a number of positive reviews among the new fan publications that also popped up at the time, with most citing it on the grounds of the stop-motion animated aliens of subsequently regular Band effects man David Allen that appear in the first few minutes and the model alien ship designed by Greg Jein who had worked on the same year’s more high profile Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
Laserblast is a teen underdog empowerment fantasy. It really has more in kinship with the then recent hit Carrie (1976) than it does the intergalactic space opera of Star Wars. It is an incredibly badly made film on almost all counts. It is flatly shot and abysmally directed and looks like nothing more than a home-movie on the big screen. None of the cast actually appears to resemble teenagers – both Kim Milford and bully Mike Bobenko look at least 25 with their prominent sideburns. There are some incredibly bad performances – from Milford and bullies Mike Bobenko and Eddie Deezen, while the mugging of two stoned, overweight deputies played by Dennis Burkley and Barry Cutler is really quite fascinating to watch in a ghastly, corpulent way. Seasoned vets like Roddy McDowall and Keenan Wynn are employed for name value but squandered in wafer-thin roles, with McDowall being killed after only two scenes.
Despite being celebrated for its effects, these are rather terrible. The model alien ship is good, but the stop-motion animated aliens are jerky and ineffective. The alien makeup on Milford is most unconvincing – it ends at the neck and is sometimes there, sometimes not, as though the filmmakers simply forgot to apply it that day.
There is a certain amusement that can be gained at the film’s venting sarcastic spleen in the direction of the success of Star Wars and clearly its resentment at the fact that it is stuck down the low-budget end of the scale – Kim Milford is called a weirdo for having seen Star Wars five times and later the film indulges in a wish-fulfilment of blowing a Star Wars billboard to smithereens.
Band himself directed a sequel Laserblast II (1985), which is very obscure, so much so that one has yet to find a review from anybody who has actually seen it.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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