ianchris-60131 Although Saturn 3 is clearly a low-key effort I think it really manages to be an entertaining picture.Regarding sci-fi movies people seems to always expect too much on the basic elements associated to the genre, like special effects and scientific accuracy.Since the movie doesn't try to explore deeply the latter the special effects are the real story here.It is dated alright, but there are great movies that were made decades ago that we considere dated and don't hold any prejudice against them like the Christopher Reeve-Superman films which are still the best out of the Superman movie franchise.If we watch a movie even if its inept in some aspects but we still try to understand what the makers of the film were trying to tell us them we can start appreciating a movie that in other way we would most likely look down without trying to give it an open-minded view.I was open-minded enough to see how the robot Hector was one of the most menacing space robots ever and how dark and claustrophobic the movie was.Do not expect a rumination about future, space or other common themes expected in sci-fi movies here this is basically a slasher film with a robot as villain that only happens to be on space, but that doesn't mean it's not entertaining, cause it is.It has the legendary Kirk Douglas but still the movie is so dark that even Spartacus himself is unable to defeat the enemy ( Hector the robot ) without sacrificing himself in the process.The movie has a bizarre almost dream-like feel I think it's part of the films ineptitude that helped it being atmospheric, and i'm not being sarcastic here.If you remember Alien that was released the year before Saturn 3 that movie was dark Ripley being the sole survivor along with Jones the Cat but at least she was able to escape from Nostromo and after a brief terrifying final encounter with the title character she escaped to safety.In Saturn 3 Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett ain't that lucky their spacecraft is destroyed by Hector while they're trying to escape trapping all three together in the space station in Saturn's third moon ( hence the title ) and by doing so one of them will have to sacrifice himself ( the man, of course ) to save it's companion ( Fawcett ). Well I would like to see Lieutenant Ripley in that kind of situation at the end of Alien, who she would sacrifice except her? Jones the Cat? I gotta say that this movie tried to be visually poetic at times for example Kirk Douglas imolation taking Hector with him with explosives was so visually grotesque.They exploding together inside on the water, slow motion, human flesh and robot parts flying with water splashing all over so grotesque it reminded me of the infamous nauseating death of the great white shark in Jaws 4 : The Revenge.Actually this scene specifically seems to be influenced by a similar scene from Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point.Overall this movie is inept, bizarre, grotesque, incomplete, ugly, laughable and unfocused, but is also ambitious, dark, cruel, unsensitive, cold, nightmarish, violent, transgressive and allucinating.It is not as sharp intelligent as Alien but still if your'e looking for a science fiction film that doesn't talk about science fiction but crazy murderous robots on the loose and Kirk Douglas giving a bizarre hilarious speech before killing himself, then this is certainly a great messy fun.

IanIndependent This film isn't as bad as some people would have you to believe.Unfortunately, It isn't very good either. That is one of it's problems. If it had been a little worse than it ended up it might have been better in a more incredulous, but more memorable, way. You can see it wants to be either Demon Seed' or 'Alien' but comes close to neither or even a parody of them (which could have worked). Unfortunately, it is not imaginative enough to be the former or frightening enough to be the latter. The films performers are left floundering.As ever Kirk Douglas is over the top. This time in a sort of Action Grandad role which I presume he thought would show him (at 62 years old)still capable of playing energetic, love interest, leads. Unfortunately, the part isn't meaty enough to let him give his full throttle Kirk Douglas macho-man big screen shtick. Meanwhile Farah Fawcett is wasted. Yes, of course, she's good to look at, and although never a great actress, FF does, often, have a notable presence. This time she is just decoration given baby doll nighties and bra-less t-shirts to wear. Rather than being a main protagonist with a distinct character she is mainly just good to look at. I didn't really care what happened to her except, perhaps, that I'd miss the occasional flash of flesh . The biggest puzzle is why did Harvey Keitel agree to this? He does his best to keep the role believable but fails and once again a worse performance, or a worse actor, in the role may have helped make the film better by making the part more extraordinary but Keitel does just enough in the part to give it any credence but can't make it memorable.These are major flaws and Saturn 3 is therefore a film that you would only watch either because you like the actors and watch them in any roles or just fancy a bit of science fiction whimsy that won't task your brain to heavily. Perhaps, it is a film that needs a big budget remake. It could work!

James Hitchcock I was one of the few heterosexual teenagers of my generation who was never in love with Farrah Fawcett. Yes, I did watch "Charlie's Angels", but only for the lovely Jaclyn Smith. Farrah always struck me as the ultimate manufactured plastic bimbo- big hair, big teeth, big boobs, small talent. That supposedly iconic poster of her wearing a red swimsuit and a cheesy grin may have sold God-knows-how-many copies, but it never came anywhere near my bedroom wall.By the end of seventies, however, Farrah had become a leading sex symbol and a well-known figure on television. There was just one world left for her to conquer, Hollywood, although the transition from big-name television actress to Hollywood goddess is not always an easy one. (It eluded, for example, most of Farrah's fellow-Angels as well as Pamela Anderson, who was to the nineties what Farrah was to the seventies). "Saturn 3" can be seen as Farrah's bid for big-screen stardom. It was, admittedly, made in Britain rather than in Hollywood, but had a legendary American director in Stanley Donen and a legendary American leading man in Kirk Douglas.The immense success of the original "Star Wars" in 1977 had led to a vogue for science fiction, previously a little-regarded film genre associated with cheap fifties B-movie shockers. "Saturn 3" was one of a number of British attempts to cash in on this vogue. ("Flash Gordon", also from 1980, was another). The original idea for the film came from John Barry, better known as a composer, who was its original director before he was replaced by Donen at Douglas's insistence. (Like his friend Burt Lancaster, Douglas had a reputation for pulling rank to ensure he got the directors he wanted).The film is set in an agricultural research station on the third moon of Saturn. For the purposes of the film we are asked to accept that, at the future date when it is set, useful agricultural research can indeed be done on an airless, lifeless lump of rock many millions of miles from Earth, although we are never given details of the science involved. We are also asked to accept that although the work done at this station is of immense value it can be run by a team of only two people, an ageing scientist named Adam and his younger colleague and lover, Alex. (Yeah, I know. "Eve" would have sounded a bit too obvious). Adam and Eve- sorry, Alex- live happily together in Eden- sorry, Saturn Three- until their idyll is interrupted by the arrival of a serpent. This particular serpent comes in the form of Captain Benson, a homicidally psychopathic astronaut sent by the authorities to check up on Saturn Three.Let me clarify that a bit. The authorities have not knowingly sent a homicidal psychopath to Saturn Three. Benson was originally slated for the mission but was not allowed to fly when he failed a psychological assessment test. The enraged Benson reacted by murdering his replacement and then taking his place on board the spaceship, without anyone apparently noticing. Benson brings with him a robot named Hector who, having been programmed from Benson's brain patterns, has acquired his psychological instability. From this point on the film becomes an extra-terrestrial chase thriller, with first Benson and then Hector pursuing Adam and Alex with a view to killing the former and raping the latter.Barry originally conceived the film on a much grander scale, but after the production company ITC Entertainment made a massive loss with "Raise the Titanic!", one of the biggest financial flops in the history of the British cinema, the budget for "Saturn 3" has to be pruned drastically. Barry had wanted to entice the young male audience by putting Farrah in revealing costumes throughout, but the more puritanical Donen vetoed this, and although there is the occasional glimpse of bare flesh (both from Farrah and from Douglas) her normal clothing is fairly modest. As a result, the young male audience stayed away in droves. Mind you, so did most of the population, meaning that "Saturn 3" was nearly as big a flop as "Raise the Titanic!" Its failure, however, cannot be wholly blamed upon Farrah's clothing. The screenplay was written by the prominent novelist Martin Amis, but one would hardly have guessed this from the finished film. The acting (apart from Sally the dog) is poor. This is by some distance the worst performance I have seen from Douglas. I assume that the sexagenarian actor was only induced to appear by the prospect of a love scene with an actress thirty years his junior, something which at 63 presumably did not come his way every day. Fawcett is even more wooden here than she was in "Charlie's Angels". Even the thought that she and her lover are in mortal peril from a murderous lunatic and a paranoid android cannot elicit much feeling from her. So emotionless is she that I was expecting a plot twist (which never actually came) whereby Alex is revealed to be a robot herself. As for poor Harvey Keitel, he was not even trusted to speak his own lines. (Apparently Donen objected to his New York accent and had his lines dubbed over by a British actor). The one thing you can say in the film's favour is that, despite the low budget, the special effects are reasonably good.In the fifties Donen was regarded as a Hollywood whizz-kid, a specialist in musicals and the man responsible for films as good as "Singin' in the Rain". By 1980, however, the screen musical was largely dead and Donen was starting to look like yesterday's man. Although he is still alive, "Saturn 3" was to be his penultimate feature film. His last was to be "Blame It on Rio", a film every bit as dire as this one and a sad end to a once distinguished career. 3/10

travisjdunbar By most metrics, this is a bad, bad movie. The plot is simple and predictable, the acting is bland and terrible, the action is boring, the special effects are bad (one guy explodes into a bunch of ceramic), the voices are dubbed, and badly, plus Harvey Keitel is dubbed over by someone else (like wtf), and all the characters are one-dimensional. I only found this movie because of references in MST3K, "Somethings wrong on Saturn 3," which ought to say a lot in itself, and could have been riffed on that show if not for the violence.BUUUT, whats good about the movie is more meta than the specifics, like they had a cool idea but failed on the actually making a movie part. Good movies are usually best understood when trying to imagine the vague thoughts of the creator(s) that caused them to make the movie in the first place. It's all about Benson, and how he, and the society he represents, are essentially Hector, a robot made horrible by it's blood tubes and a disembodied brain. These people think they can be pure and efficient and productive, but all that pesky human stuff can't be suppressed and ends up becoming horribly warped.