Wednesday, January 12, 2011

STARSHIP INVASIONS - Gil Mellé - "Proceed With The Attack" (1977)

Talk about your wacky!! "Starship Invasions" is about as wild as anything I've seen lately, and it's all once again, courtesy of the man with the best, worst taste around, hows about a 21 Death-Ray salute for Professor Grewbeard??

The fine gentleman who composed the music for "Starship Invasions" was Blue Note jazz musician, film composer, and artist, Gilbert John Mellé, who, in reality, is much bigger than this movie! He played the baritone and tenor sax with his own group, and also with such greats as Zoot Sims, Max Roach and Tal Farlow. As an artist, he designed the covers for record albums by Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and Sonny Rollins. He was an early pioneer of electronic music, to which he scored Rod Serling's TV chiller classic "Night Gallery," and he also wrote the scores for "The Andromeda Strain," "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Night Stalker," just to mention a few! Gil passed away in 2004, but what a legacy he left behind!

"Starship Invasions" had a budget and a vision, but "Star Wars" had just been released like 5 months earlier, and this thing although very fun to watch, is just pretty silly by comparison. The bar had been raised, and the playing field was anything but level!

Just for starters, they should have fired the pinhead costume designer!

This lucky stiff got to have sex with a good lookin' alien, and they didn't even dissect him or anything!

Normally a guy that can save any movie, Christopher Lee as Captain Rameses just looks as silly as the rest of them! Chris is 6'5" and with that stupid looking hat on, he had to be pushing 7 feet!! Part of the problem is these aliens are telepathic, so the normally eloquent Chris Lee, can only think his lines! What a waste!!

These aliens are so wicked, they even zapped a little boy and his family!

Now her they want to run some more tests on! That makes sense!

I just like this photo, it's pretty neat that they got a picture of the flying saucer with their Polaroid!

You know the story, Chris Lee and his Legion Of The Winged Serpent Brigade(The Men In Black)need to take over Earth because they need a new planet to move their dying civilization to! The twist is there's another laid back and tolerant alien group, called the League Of Races also known as the LOR, living here beneath the waters of The Bermuda Triangle, and their job is to protect the lesser intelligent earthlings!

Captain Rameses and his team come to the underwater base and tell his LOR counterpart that they come in peace!

Captain Rameses is impressed, the LOR are no slackers, they've got hookers to keep them entertained in this lonesome outpost!

They are starting to get the vibe that Captain Rameses and his crew are up to no good, but that's a pretty cool background!!

No more subtleties, now it's time to break out the death rays and take over this joint! In the process, they even fry the robots!!

Oh, No, don't kill the hookers, that's way over the top evil!

Captain Rameses has a little one on one battle with who I think is Sherri Ross as Sagnac! As you would suspect, she loses!!

The Legion Of The Winged Serpent takes complete control of The League Of Races stronghold, and sets this saucer orbiting around earth emitting rays that makes humans kill each other and also commit suicide! Mass carnage breaks out on Earth!

Actually, you can pretty much tell the whole story with just these three magazine covers!!! Renowned UFOlogist Professor Allan Duncan played by "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." Robert Vaughn is brought in to save the world, because he's the only one who knows anything about UFOs! Robert Vaughn will always be my hero, just for being the member of "The Magnificent Seven" who lost his courage!!

One LOR ship escaped, and they too ask for the professor's help, but he wants to bring along his buddy, to help him in case there's any math involved!

One of the LOR's robots wasn't completely destroyed, and comes back to life, and messes up the whole plan, just like that!!!

Two years later, writer and director Ed Hunt, would make a documentary movie entitled "Flying Saucers Are Real!" Imagine that!!

10 comments:

Prof. Grewbeard said...

that info on Gil Melle was very interesting, guess i wasn't paying attention to the soundtrack!

Eegah!! and Tabonga! said...

Gil was a pretty impressive cat! A couple of things I did leave out, he was also a sculptor, and he made his own electronic instruments!

The Creeping Bride said...

Wow.
Just... wow.

My life will be empty until I get a copy of this movie.

...and as an aficionado of paranormal documentaries of the 1970s such as FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL!, the desire to see STARSHIP INVASIONS burns within my brain like a blow torch.

Eegah!! and Tabonga! said...

It makes it worth all the time we put into this thing to get a reaction like that!

Darius Whiteplume said...

I guess they wanted Lee to pull off his silent Dracula menace. The is The Voice though.

It is always fun to see the stuff that competed (sort of) with Star Wars.

TABONGA! said...

I love Captain Rameses' lumpy head!
And, those uniforms, carrumba!!

Will said...

I remember reading about this this movie in Starlog. The thing about this movie was it was based on "real" UFO encounters. So blame the costumes & sets on the contactees.

Greg Goodsell said...

ZOWIE! this FAR RACIER than the G-rated version I saw in the theater!!!

Anonymous said...

Saw it at the theater back in the day. DVD release now!

Anonymous said...

Great post!

The redhead is Victoria Lynn Johnson (playing Gazeth), Penthouse Pet of the Month for August 1976 and Pet of the Year for 1977. She also appeared in Grizzly (a jaws rip off thereby appearing in two ripsoff B movies of the mid seventies) and was the body double for Angie Dickinson's shower scene in Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill

Monster Music

Monster Music
AAARRGGHHH!!!! Ya'll Come On Back Now, Y'Hear??