SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY (1987)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*


SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY has a spoofy title, and there are many risible lines that suggest that writer-director Ken Dixon wasn't taking the project too seriously. (It seems, incidentally, to be Dixon's final work in films or TV, according to IMDB.) However, though SLAVE GIRLS isn't particularly riveting, it aligns more with adventure than with comedy.

The basic plot is transparently lifted from the 1932 film-adaptation of Richard Connell's THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, aside from the opening. Two scantily-clad women, Darla (Elizabeth Kaitan) and Tisa (Cindy Beal), are chained in a cell on space-prison ship. Darla-- who is clearly the stronger and more combative of the two, and thus lines up with the Joel McCrea role from GAME-- breaks loose from her chains with no help from Tisa, who is more or less the Fay Wray of the movie. Darla helps Tisa break Tisa's chains, and the two prisoners escape in a shuttlecraft. (There's no mention of what offenses the women committed, nor do any authorities pursue them.)

Darla and Tisa crashland on an obscure planet, where a recluse named Zed-- the film's version of Count Zaroff-- lives in a fortress, served by two intelligent robots and (to some extent) a cyborg-alien, who are presumably loose approximations of Zaroff's servants. Zed has a couple of guests, who are also brother and sister like the cannon-fodder from the 1932 film. In GAME the fate of these guests foreshadows the battle of the McCrea and Wray characters against Zaroff, but in INFINITY the guests serve little purpose beyond eating up a little time before the climactic scene in which Zed hunts both Darla and Tisa, just as Zaroff hunts his principal victims. There's a minor SF-trope thrown in, in that Zed warns the girls to stay away from a mysterious area called "the Phantom Zone." (The context makes this seem unlikely to be a conscious homage to SUPERMAN comics and more likely to be an accidental duplication.) The girls fight off a couple of zombie-like aliens, who aren't explained any better than the cyborg-guy, and get some weapons. However, their next encounter with Zed ends with Darla apparently falling to her death, and the villain taking "the girl" back to his fortress to be raped. As in the 1932 film, Darla heroically returns and fights Zed, the robots, and the cyborg, who turns against Zed for no stated reason. Then the "slave girls"-- who are never said to be have been slaves, nor get treated as slaves during the story-- swipe a ship and escape into space while Zed perishes.

This is harmless fluff with a few cute lines. Elizabeth Kaitan isn't all that good in the fight-scenes, but she at least puts more effort into this film than she did in the VICE ACADEMY entries.