Sex Galaxy, which its makers call the world’s first “green” film, is also a blue movie. A feature-length mashup of copyright-free stock footage, the campy sci-fi comedy splices together strippers, Martians, rocket ships and robots into a semi-coherent romp.
Sex Galaxy director/producer Mike Davis, who collects old movies, said his film is 100 percent recycled. “The cheesy B-movies I love to cannibalize were never properly copyrighted,” he told Wired.com in an e-mail interview.
The burlesque queens and ’50s sci-fi straight-arrows in the semi-NSFW Sex Galaxy trailer (embedded above) are a hoot, though watching the entire 78-minute opus — a crazy-quilt mashup of bouncing boobs, herky-jerky robots and hygiene films culled from the public domain, overlaid with a nonstop string of dirty jokes — would probably be more entertaining if you sneaked a flask of Saurian brandy into the theater. (Not that Wired.com advocates that type of misbehavior.)
As sloppily dubbed as any Japanese sci-fi import from the ’50s, Sex Galaxy’s pinball dialogue comes off like a cross between Mystery Science Theater 3000 and an R-rated Futurama. It’s an amusing trip down memory lane, complete with a robotic pimp and cheesy kaleidoscopic freak-out scenes.
Davis’ movie screens Sunday during Another Hole in the Head, a sci-fi/horror film fest that runs June 5 through 18 at the indie Roxie Theater in San Francisco. The festival’s slate of blood-gushing zombie flicks, sexed-up sci-fi, Japanese imports and grindhouse treasures includes shorts and a couple of live performances (Brain Dead Alive! and Conanator) as well as feature films.
For Sex Galaxy, Davis primarily plundered 1968’s Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, which is itself a cannibalization of a 1962 Soviet sci-fi epic, Planeta Bur.
Where does Davis find this stuff? “Boarded-up libraries, abandoned schools, decaying drive-in movie theaters…. These are the realms in which I unearth my wares,” he said. “And actually, many of these films are available on the internet. You can find amazing collections through the Library of Congress.”
Davis notes that even George A Romero’s groundbreaking 1968 zombie flick Night of the Living Dead was never properly copyrighted, and is therefore fair game for remixers.
“I also recycle weird old industrial promos, grainy educational classroom flicks, nudie stag reels and commercials,” he said. “I’ve been collecting the things on VHS and DVD compilations for years and I finally found a good use for them. Good for the environment, too.”
Approaching sci-fi from the opposite end of the spectrum, the documentary Monsters From the Id, also screening at Another Hole in the Head, takes a scholarly approach to ’50s screen gems filled with radioactive lizards and brainiac scientists.
Director Dave Gargani’s says sci-fi flicks of that era made a positive impact on society with their pro-science message, something that’s missing from modern movies.
“I think we’ve kind of lost that today,” Gargani said after his movie premiered earlier this year at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. “We didn’t feel fearful. We felt hopeful.”
Sex Galaxy isn’t the only racy outer space fare on Another Hole in the Head’s slate.
Also screening at the festival:
Machine Girl 2 (trailer above), a short spinoff of Japanese action/horror/comedy The Machine Girl, about a female ass-kicker who sprouts automatic weapons.
The Future of Fucking, a short set in 2035, when “sex is voice-activated, but orgasms are still earned the old-fashioned way — with machines.”
The Silence of the Sushi Rolls, a feature-length Japanese art-porn flick about a Tokyo sex crimes investigator who is targeted by a molester with a nasty contraption.