Tuesday, May 21, 2019

SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY (1987) (Full Moon Blu-ray Review)

SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY (1987) 

Label: Full Moon Entertainment
Region Code: Region-FREE
Duration: 74 Minutes 
Rating: R
Audio: English Dolby Digital 2.0 &amp 5.1 
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.78:1) 
Director: Ken Dixon
Cast: Elizabeth Kaitan, Cindy Beal, Brinke Stevens, Don Scribner, Carl Horner


Cheese-tastic sci-fi adventure film Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (1987) is a fun bit of light-hearted space-fluff courtesy of director Ken Dixon (The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe), a real tongue in cheek space-romp custom made for love of b-movies. The film stars 80's blond-babes Elizabeth Kaitan (Friday the 13th VII) and Cindy Beal (My Chauffeur) as Daria and Tisa, both inmates on an intergalactic prison-ship. Together they manage to free themselves from what looks to be very medieval imprisonment, chained to the floor, and hot-wire a space craft, only to crash land on a nearby uncharted jungle planet. 


Surviving the crash the ladies - wearing bikinis naturally - arrive at a castle owned by aristocrat Zed (Don Scribner, The Cooler) who lives there with a pair of whirring androids who do his bidding. The seemingly generous host clothes them and introduces them to another shipwrecked couple who recently landed on the planet, siblings 
Shayla (Brinke Stevens, Sorority Babes in The Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama) and Rik (Carl Horner). The latter of whom lets on that their host is not as kind and benevolent as he first appears.


The rest of the film is pretty much a b-movie space-riff on the Richard Connell novel "The Most Dangerous Game" with Zed hunting each of his stranded guests through the jungle terrain outside of his castle. It's fun stuff, the film is very tongue-in-cheek and silly, it's not trying to do anything overly dramatic or serious, just having exploitative fun with tried and true premise, and being sure to show off plenty of T&A courtesy of starlets Elizabeth Kaitan, Cindy Beal and Brinke Stevens, who went not nude are strangely clad in rough-cut lambskin loins cloths or skimpy lingerie.


There's some fun sets throughout, the spaceships early on are cheesy, the jungle sets are fun, plus we get a couple of cool matte paintings that add production value. The castle fortress is realized rather well all things considered, they did a lot on what was surely a tiny budget. All three women deliver their unnatural sounding lines of dialogue woodenly, but this stilted delivery is pitch perfect for this bikini-clad b-movie. Don Scribner gets to chew the scenery a bit more with an overly-dramatic and campy reading as the baddie here, also tone perfect for this sort of film. 


The special effects while not great are surprisingly good, while there's no real bloodshed or gore, we do get some cool-looking androids, a vagina-mouthed alien and a pair of zombies that show up seemingly out of nowhere just for fun, these coming courtesy of John Carl Buechler (From Beyond) and Joe Reader (Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever). 


Audio/Video: Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity debuts on Blu-ray from Full Moon Features in 1080p HD framed in 1.78:1 widescreen. Grain is present if a bit uneven in places, colors are solid and blacks are much improved over the previous DVD version I've had for some time. It doesn't look like this is derived from the OCN, most likely a theatrical print in great shape or an interpositive. I thought it looked very good with decent clarity throughout, though we do get a a bit of dirt and debris in places, particularly in the optical effects shots, but overall this is a pleasing HD upgrade for this title.


Sadly we are only give lossy English Dolby Digital 2.0 & 5.1 mixes, c'mon Full Moon, you need to commit to offering lossless audio on your Blu-rays, it's been ten years after the launch of the format! That said the lossy audio delivers the trite dialogue and effects well, clean and without hiss or distortion. The score from Carl Dante (Cellar Dweller) sounds decent too, adding atmosphere to the proceedings without really drawing attention to itself.


Extras on this one are slim, we get a 2-min trailer for the film plus a 6-min clip tribute to bombshell star Elizabeth Kaitan by the Exotic Movie House. The single-disc release comes housed in a standard Blu-ray keepcase with a one-sided sleeve of artwork featuring the original movie poster, it's very cool-looking and is fairly accurate except for those one-eyed androids that aren't in the film. A commentary would have been appreciated for this one, the film garnered some notoriety in the early 90's after drawing the ire of North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms who attributed the delinquency of minors to having access to this sort of trash on late-night cable TV. 


Special Features:
- Trailer (1 min)
- Elizabeth Kaitan Tribute (6 min) 
- Full Moon Trailers: Subspecies 2 (2 min), Subspecies 3 (1 min), Castle Freak (2 min), Puppet Master III (2 min), Vampire Journals (2 min), Dark Angel (1 min), Trancers 2 (3 min), Spectres (2 min)


Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (1987) is a fun bit of sci-fi adventure that should appeal to anyone with cheese-loving tastes that range from Malibu Express (1985) to Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama (1987), highly recommended for fans of b-movie fromage and 80's babes. 

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