By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 1 hour ago
Sci-fi fans expect to come across bad movies, from the legendary Plan 9 From Outer Space to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker; it goes with the territory when you’re a genre fan. Even then, it’s amazing that you can’t stream Cocoon, but the 1978 disaster Laserblast is free to stream. If you consider yourself to be someone who loves bad movies, this one will put your conviction to the test.
Laserblast is a sci-fi revenge tale about a teenager named Billy who finds an alien arm cannon out in the desert and proceeds to use it to get revenge on everyone who has wronged him. In the process, he turns into one of the aliens, losing his grasp on humanity, the more he fires the alien weapon. There’s the potential for a good morality tale to be told with that premise, but it’s buried beneath horrible dialogue, acting, music, and editing. The only redeeming part of the film is the alien special effects.
It doesn’t help that Billy is made out to be such a loser; it’s hard to have any sympathy for him as he’s bullied, including by legendary 80s character actor Eddie Deezen (you know him as “the nerd” from every 80s movie ever made), yelled at by his girlfriend’s grandfather, and stopped by the cops. Billy’s only character trait before picking up the alien weapon is “doormat.” It doesn’t even matter in the end, as Laserblast makes it clear that Billy really is a loser, and everyone was justified in being against him when the smallest taste of power turns him into a literal monster.
The aliens themselves are actually adorable, portrayed by stop-motion puppets, in the only part of Laserblast that holds up. Even by the standards of late-70s sci-fi, which includes Star Wars: A New Hope, Alien, and the unbelievable Sean Connery disaster film Meteor, the film was considered to be one of the worst movies ever made. The only positive review came from Leonard Maltin, who gave the film two and a half stars, which became one of the greatest recurring jokes on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Laserblast was the final episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000’s original run on Comedy Central before moving to The Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy), and to say that the crew wasn’t kind to the movie would be an understatement. Then again, the film was low-hanging fruit; the editors even misspelled Roddy McDowall’s name in the credits as “McDowell.” The Season 7 finale is the best way to watch Laserblast, but whatever you do, don’t watch it alone.
Bad movies come in all shapes and sizes, and for a zero-budget production like Laserblast it’s absolutely a case of punching down to make fun of it. Yet, get together with some friends, pop it on, and you’ll see why in the last few years the film has started to become a beloved bad movie. There was talk of a sequel back in the 80s, and action figures were even made of Billy with his weapon. The horrible dialogue, plot holes large enough to drive a spaceship through, and poor acting give the film a cheesy sort of charm lacking in today’s bad movies, which, like The Electric State and Borderlands, are mostly just boring.
An ambitious, microbudget failure that tries to tell a story well beyond the capabilities of the cast and crew at that time is at least more exciting than the latest CGIfest that’s been focus-group tested to the point of having zero creativity. Laserblast is a bad, bad movie, but it made an attempt with only $280,000, roughly the cost of three minutes of an episode of Stranger Things. They don’t make bad movies like they used to.
Laserblast is now streaming for free on Tubi, Plex, and Amazon Prime Video.
