Galactress: Cosmonatrix Deluxe Review

Galactress: Cosmonatrix Deluxe Review

By Nathan Garden

Galactress: Cosmonatrix Deluxe Review

Sirens howl from every rooftop… A dark and distant object blots out the sun… Some run naked through the streets in hysterics while others dig bomb shelters in their gardens… It isn’t Armageddon, but instinct tells you to grab a gun and run for the hills because Galactress, science-fiction’s most feckless slattern, who never got so much as a sniff of the big time and scarcely earned enough from her creative talents to pay for a taxi home in the morning, has somehow appeared in her very own spin-off. And to judge from the results, it looks as if she has paid for the whole thing herself with savings scraped together from working two thousand consecutive night-shifts in a slew of snake-pit motels and clammy cowboy honky-tonks.

As I took my seat, I reached into my jacket pocket for a hip-flask and a box of painkillers, tearfully trying to reconcile myself to the fact that my quality of life would very soon be in irreversible decline. But it was all in vain. If, god forbid, you should ever suffer Galactress’ latest exploit yourself, might I suggest one dispense with placebos and false comforts, supress the will to survive altogether and instead heed the voice of wisdom which rather fiercely insists the brain save itself the trouble and quietly die?

Set long after the so-called ‘conclusion’ of Space-Related Space-Mis-Adventures and Space-Mis-Haps In Space, the gist is that Galactress now makes her living as a mercenary/private detective/masseuse (your guess is as good as mine). Recruited into a ragbag crew of mechanical galoots, she is soon embroiled in the mystery of the Gooba juice shortage which has brought the universe to a standstill. (What Gooba juice is, what it is used for, and where it has disappeared to is never properly explained.) After an hour or so of planet-hopping and frisky chance encounters, it is suddenly up to Galactress to foil the dastardly schemes of Awokka-wokka, a hammer-headed, lobster-shaped warlord from Dimension Z. (What his plan is, and what it has to do with the missing Gooba juice, is never properly explained.) Any questions so far? Okay, then. Onwards and upwards…

A strange thought occurred to me as I sat down to write this review. Out of politeness, I’ll phrase it as a question: Is Galactress: Cosmonatrix Deluxe a spoof of itself? The idea is not entirely repellant. I rather like meta-narratives and will readily applaud the artistry required to skilfully break the fourth wall, a device which both expands and undermines conventional story-telling. Better than that, spoofs are a great excuse to sucker-punch sombre space adventures taking life too seriously, and they suffer nothing for parading silly gimmicks and unfeasible plot devices. I thought I had a case. The truth is that there is nothing iconoclastic or mischievous in any of this film’s ‘eccentricities.’ Only delight in human pain and discomfort.

I shan’t bore you with a gallery of the bunkum we have all become inured to, but there are always a few novelties worth pointing out to the unscrupulous collector…

From the mis-spelled opening titles to the triumphant closing dance number, every last frame is leprous with a fog of grain so thick it is as though we are watching Cosmonatrix Deluxe on a broken TV set, albeit one which obligingly springs into life from time to time to make sure we at least get our fill of icky nudity and spongey gore. There are, of course, the old, familiar sights of tottering boom mikes and clapper boards being whisked out of shot, but these are the least of our worries. Indeed, we realise very quickly that the director, whose name shall be omitted unless he offers to write it himself in his own blood, has put his trust in a slipshod special effects team of such hebetude and sloth that even gormless android barmen cannot take two steps in any direction without clattering apart.

I had never seen a film in which the screenwriter is the main villain, but here he has master-minded a whole roster of atrocities and unnatural disasters. Besides the poppycock spouted by Lt. Horus ‘Don’t let him sleep in the top bunk’ Crolix Jr. (the classiest side-kick Galactress can afford on a yard sale budget), we must endure the obscene prattle of dozens of inflatable aliens and gimcrack robots. There are octopi baristas who “don’t mate with nothin’ with six legs or less” and a platoon of reptilian war veterans boasting of “scars on organs you don’t have a name for”. (Why Galactress makes detours to their various hovels in the first place, and why she might want their opinion on “The worst dung-butter I ever tasted”, is never properly explained.)

We also bear witness to some of the most lamentable costumes ever donned by a crew of spray-tanned astronauts. This, as we know from experience, is a highly competitive category, but Cosmonatrix Deluxe, as well being tasteless, has absolutely no fashion sense. It is noteworthy that most of the crew are kitted out with glittering pelvic armour the shape and size of traffic cones, and yet Galactress somehow always hogs the spotlight for herself.

She stomps from one cockpit to the next sporting thigh-high pogo-boots and a shiny red leather bustier covered in dials and flashing buttons with a pair of solar-powered headlights installed on her breasts. But what of the actors playing her crew, you say? What about them? What can one say except that theirs is a pitiful lot? Not one of them seems savvy enough to read from the correct cue-card when it is their turn to speak, they are differentiated only by colour-coded antennae, and constantly steal homesick glances at the stagehands backing out of shot.

How did any of this posse of bootless goofballs find their way in front of a camera? What made them think being upstaged by Galactress would be a stepping stone to something better? But let’s not demean ourselves with such questions. Whatever excuse they blubber at their next self-help seminar, I would strongly recommend that they skulk back to the dockside dive bars to live out their days reminiscing about their snippet of seedy limelight over a nightly pint of gin.

I have conflicting feelings of sympathy and distrust towards anyone claiming to be aroused by the sex scenes in this film. But before we tuck in, let’s slow things down and try to talk our way through this. We cannot put our faith in the plot or dialogue. The costumes were thieved from the local slop shop, the props begged from the bargain basement next door, and the set-pieces centre around characters falling through pieces of the set. But it seems that during the production, the only resource available in abundance was naked flesh. And why not use it?

Call me old-fashioned, but I for one am perfectly happy for a film to pander to my base, primitive needs, and I am certainly not going to turn up my nose at some complimentary decadence. But needless to say, not a single bead of sweat was spent making any of the huffing and puffing and beeping and clanking even the slightest bit pleasant. Try not to lose too much blood or hair while Galactress rolls back the years after several millennia in hyper-sleep, corkscrews her legs into her favourite fish-nets and hits the town, blithely sauntering back to her vintage haunts of cathouse lounges and hair-metal bars. And wallowing at the bottom of the payroll, hoarding it all for the dankest dirty-video-store in the galaxy, are the cameramen: the creeps who have earned their rations force-feeding you gallons of goo and several metric tons of rubbery extra-terrestrial cleavage. True workhorses they must be because they also manage to capture multiple sightings of Galactress and her most recent choice of human male.

Unfortunately, this is usually the disgraced Venusian space admiral Kurt Spango, who she picks up in a Martian cocktail bar then pilots back to his apartment for perhaps a hundred seconds of “a little thing I like to call thunder-docking”. True to her roots, rather than seducing a hunk to come by her information, she bags herself this flatulent reprobate with clouds of hair all over his thighs, back and rippling buttocks and a flimsy toupée hanging off his forehead. “All part of the daily grind in Spango-town,” he purrs as he pulls his pinstripe trousers back on. It says more about Spango than Galactress that even she is far out of his league, but still she won’t toss him onto the landfill even after he gives away the coordinates of Awokka-wokka’s secret submarine/factory/discotheque (your guess is as good as mine). No, I’m afraid ‘Spanky’ Spango hovers around like his own bad smell until the end, walloping people’s backsides with his bionic claw and quacking endless space-themed puns and unsound allusions to Galactress’ stellar sexual performance.

I have seen many sorry sights in my time. Galactress: Cosmonatrix Deluxe is undoubtedly one of the most gruelling. At the outset, we can take heart in knowing that at least we are not in for the long haul, but time and space conspire to make a meagre ninety minutes seem like aeons. Although, perhaps this is not entirely inappropriate, since our relationship with Galactress has already gone on far longer than it should have. This is no one’s fault but our own. We knew it was a bad idea, but once she turned up once again with the unfeasible luxuries of a fresh layer of make-up and clean underwear, we could not for our own lives resist her questionable allure and a sultry invitation to “make up for lost space-time”. Although, far, far worse than the shame of knowing we could not restrain ourselves is the deflating sense of bereavement and loss, not for our innocence (which by now is long departed) but for our standards.

Perhaps I am over-estimating our resolve, but Cosmonatrix Deluxe must be the last straw. I’m sure you will agree, because as the projector flickers into darkness, curtains straggle across the screen and we are herded back through the foyer then tipped into the street, it seems that the best thing we can do is spend as many nights with other films as we can, get to know them, fall in love with them, share our lives with them, and thank our lucky stars that we only sat down of an evening with this crude, beastly oaf once.

Nathan Garden
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