The Girl From Starship Venus — The Girl From Starship Venus(DVD)
Now here’s something you don’t often come across- a 70’s British sex comedy, that’s actually funny, and to boot also rather inventive, at points even oddly thought-provoking. The Girl From Starship Venus aka The Sexplorer blends in low-budget Sci-fi parody, an effective enough cast, and of course a fair bit of female flesh- though it’s all very much in the tame softcore side of things. Here from the folks at Cheezy Movies is a region-free DVD release of the film.
The Girl From Starship Venus is from the year 1975, and is filmed in and around London- with a focus on the then-adult entertainment district of Soho. It was directed and written by Tilbury, Essex-born Derek Ford. In total, he had fifteen features to his name, with many of these being on the sexploitation/ sex comedy side of things. With his output going from A Promise of Bed (1969), extra-marital sex anthology The Swappers(1970), Keep It Up, Jack(1974), hair metal backwoods slasher Blood Tracks(1985), and apartment computer goes highwire sexy horror The Urge To Kill (1989).
The film opens with a selection of interstellar pictures with a male voice doing a Star Trek captains log send-up. The voice informs us that they and their crew are from Venus, and have been watching the earth, which they call the planet of the doms, for many years. They now have decidedly to properly investigate the planet for themselves.
As the film opens we see gliding down from above shots of the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus, and one wonders how are they going to do this with such a small budget, and we get a very inventive & amusing turn. Their spaceship is a marble on an unseen string. At first, they fall into puddle, the ship's captain panicked voice-over saying that they "landed in a big body of water", they re-land on the slightly drier ground- with a cheapy effect beam coming out of the side, and slow but sure a naked blond hair woman materializes in the nighttime streets of the city.
The woman who is known as Explorer (Monika Ringwald) goes on a series of cheeky adventures in and around Soho- with her giving largely voice-over dialogue and debating with the ship's captain. By great luck she lands just near an all-female gym, where all the members workout in the nude- so she doesn’t stand out, and just as she is about the leave the staff think that the seemingly mute woman has had her clothes stolen- so give her some. As the film unfolds she visits a dirty magazine shop, a seedy sex cinema where she has an amusing encounter with one of its mack wear denizens, and drifts into an all-night laundrette where she meets big sideboard sporting nice guy Alan(Andrew Carter) who keeps poping-up in the film.
She also attends a wedding, meeting a randy best man who has a penchant for balloons. Has a gin ‘n’ tonic in a bar- causing her to turn green ‘n’ sprouting an afro, and generally wonders around pondering the oddness & ridiculousness of human life. Ringwald is most effective as the deadpan Explorer, coming off like a more playful and sexy version of The Terminator. The small surrounding cast is all good too- Carter plays well the nice guy whose father owns a department store. Mark Jones is the randy best man who gets more than a few shocks when he tries to get on with the Explorer. Most of the actors are largely unknown, the only person I recognized was Michael Cronin playing a bumbling Dr in the film. He's been acting for years in both British TV and film, but is probably most known as the uptight games master Mr Baxter in TV kid's school drama Grange Hill, appearing in a total of seventy-one episodes between 1979 and 1986.
The film soundtrack is rather good too- moving between mellow jazz rock jams, trippy synth scaping, and even a theme song which is sort of a blend of cheeky-chappie 70’s singer-songwriter fare meets spacy synth woozy & whiz.
Moving onto this recent DVD release, and as with all of Cheezy Moive's releases this is a barebones affair- with just a few trailers for other films on the label. The print is just a step up from VHS, and at points, it does become very washed out & seemingly over-red in some scenes- but I guess it’s nice just to get to see the film, and as the release sells under the $10.00 mark you can’t complain too much.
I’ve always had a soft spot for British sex comedies of the 70s, but more often than not they are neither funny, sexy, or competently done- which I guess is part of their charm. The Girl From Starship Venus is most certainly one of the better examples of the genre- with more than a few chuckles to be had, some charming low-budget invention, and a generally all round entertaining slice of 70’s softcore exploitation.