For its first five or ten minutes, Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity is the best SF movie involving slave girls ever, and yes, that includes Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi. It goes straight to hell shortly thereafter, but even after doing so it gets the matter of slavegirl appearance right to a greater extent than any mainstream film dealing with slave girls as important characters ever has.

The first scfene we see in the film is a Star Wars style spaceship cruising the depths of space, its body a mottled mass of this and that, colored gray and black for the most part. We see the usual slo-mo scan past the ship so we know it's REALLY big and VERY technical and detailed. Then we pan to a crewman in a bulky suit inside the ship walking down a corridor with many grates underfoot.

We go through one of the grates and discover that it is the roof of a cell in which two slave girls -- Daria, played by Elizabeth Kaitan and Tisa, played by Cindy Beals, are sitting, chained at the wrists to a ring set in the floor of the cell via a long, very thick chain. (Not to be confused with this Daria.)

Chained and helpless in their dank cell, the two skimpily clad slavegirls could only sit and wait for the inevitable photographer to happen by.

We know they're slave girls by the way they're dressed -- skimpy bra on top, skimpy thong on the bottom with a butt flap that fails to cover their luscious butts. (And we have to compliment the slavers on their taste in slave girls -- Kaitan and Beals are top-of-the-line, first-class slave girl merchandise.)

I'm going to write about the circumstances of their escape here, which won a Loosie Award on my Jolly Roper site way back when, because it's still an example of hilariously bad filmmaking.

The only light in the cell comes from corridor lighting caoming through the grate above them. Unfortunately for Daria and Tisa, there's also a constant trickle of water coming down through the grate, dripping steadily on the rings set in the floor of the cell and leaving things kinda dank and smelly, I imagine.

Daria is working furiously to escape from her chains, pulling and tugging on them in an attempt to break free. In order to do so, she has pulled her metal wrist cuffs well above her wrists to her forearms.

Check out the cuff on Daria's left wrist. If she isn't careful, it might fall off before she can break the chain.

Of course, with a moment's thought Daria could have saved herself a lot of tugging and pulling, as cuffs that are big enough to slide almost all the way up to the elbow on Daria's well-muscled (for a woman) arms would undoubtedly have easily slid off her wrists if she had bothered to slide them in the other direction.

Now, when I saw the water dripping on the iron ring in the floor, I figured the filmmakers were setting us up for Daria succeeding because the water had rusted the iron. (Why a culture capable of building interstellar craft were using iron chains is a matter for conjecture, so let us not go there, since conjecture is perilously close to thought, and thought is typically not compatible with B movies.)

And Daria does eventually succeed in pulling the ring from its rusty bracing on the floor, but not before we see one of the links of inch thick steel chain being broken and twisted out of shape by Daria's efforts.

That snapped MY suspension of disbelief.

To get some idea how stupid this is, if you have a slave leash, or dog leash, you know, the ones made with those dinky little links maybe an eighth of an inch thick, try breaking one of its links by securing one end to something and pulling on the other end. Even if you succeed, it will be a real bitch. Now think about a chain made of links an inch thick. King Kong couldn't break it.

But Daria can. Maybe it was the power of her mighty breasts, which were awesome in every sense of the word. I don't know. I just know that the scene would have made one HELL of a lot more sense if they hadn't shown us that link breaking and deforming, and instead just showing her ripping the rusty hasp from the floor -- which they also did, mind you. That's bizarrely stupid.

By comparing the thickness of the chains with the roundness of Kaitan's breasts, we can ... we can ... do SOMETHING or other.

Next, Daria helps Tisa pull her chain from its hasp and soon both are free of their chains, except for the chains themselves which are still dangling from their wrists, since neither has figured out that they could remove the chains by just sliding the large cuffs off their wrists. (I guess there's a reason they're slave girls, eh?)

But the slave girls are still locked in the bottom of a holding pen. They can reach the steel grate above them if one stands on the other's shoulders, but it's electrically activated. (Man, these interstellar captors are into SECURITY, except for that matter of their chains having the tensile strength of string cheese.)

Fortunately, Daria figures that if they hold their chains up to the lock on the grate, the metal might reverse the lock's polarity and open the grate. And that's exactly what it does, lots of sparkly lights, then the grate slides open and their manacles also open, so they can get them off without bothering to slide them over their hands.

Darned thoughtful of those slavers to leave that device right there where a chain could easily turn it to open. Even more thoughtful of them to have it open the captive's manacles. (Thinking about it, I take back what I said about the captors being into security.)

Darned nice of those captors to leave the controls to the grate right where they could be shorted out by the chains they have also generously provided to their prisoners.

After climbing out of the cell, our two scantily clad slave girl cuties next outfight two armored guards, board a small spacecraft in the hangar of the giant spacecraft they're confined in, and escape because apparently one of the slave girls is an experienced spacecraft pilot.

And if your eyes are spinning in their sockets like the roulette wheels at this point, I don't blame you, so were mine when I watched the movie. But hang on, the worst is over -- from here on out, the film does a 180 degree turn from absurdly unpredictable to totally predictable -- which is not a good thing, not at all. More about that later.

The escape craft so nicely stored in a bay near the slave pens, and which one of the slavegirls just happens to know how to pilot. That said, some very nice model work, sets and CGI work are in this film, which one former cast member claims was made for $90,000.

In the depths of space in their tiny escape shuttle, they are relieved to find a radio beacon issuing from a nearby planet, giving them a place to land. Unfortunately, as they approach the planet a tractor beam seizes their craft and brings it in for a crash landing.

When we next see Daria she's wandering along the shoreline of an ocean, perhaps the only human being on the planet other than Tisa, who's missing and probably dead.

Here Daria is sunbathing when she should have been looking for succor. It's this kind of behavior that probably got her enslaved in the first place.

Daria wanders along the shore and then through the jungle that fringes the shore. Eventually she comes across a huge castle. Fortunately, the owners of the castle has an open-door policy, and Daria is able to get in just by ringing the doorbell. She enters the castle and finds a great hall full of odd-looking stuffed animals (must have been Castle Ripley.)  Daria wanders around a bit and encounters a humanoid robot (Pinocchio Model 1365-00-9325b, for those who keep track). The robot turns out to be friendly or at least not inimical to human life as so many movie robots are, and leads Daria to the castle's owner, Zed, a well-mannnered but creepy guy. At the castle, Daria is happily reunited with Tisa, who has already found her way there. There's also a third woman there, Shayla, played by cult movie stalwart Brinke Stevens, and her brother Rik, survivors of an earlier spaceship crash.

I'm going to have to do some major spoileration here to let you know just how bad the movie is from here on out. Some B movies are so bad that nothing you can do to them, including totally spoilerating them, can do them any harm, and porn has plots that exist only to string the sex scenes together so you can't really spoil them, but Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity isn't in that territory, bad as it is, and if you think you might ever want to watch it as a movie, you might not want to read the spoiler text below (highlight the text if you do want to read the spoiler text):

SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER!

Shortly after Daria, Tisa and Shayla hook up at the castle, they discover that their host, who lives alone on the planet, is a big game hunter. And that he considers the most dangerous game he can hunt to be human beings, especially female human beings, whom he considers to be especially duplicitous.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. It's about the bajillionth remake of The Most Dangerous Game which was probably a ripping story when it was first published, but has been done to death in about every medium imaginable and hence is now a blazing beacon that the story you are about to read/movie/TV show you are about to watch is the product of dull, tired, stupid minds.

(Full disclosure: I am fucking sick of The Most Dangerous Game being remade. It just wasn't that fucking good of a story to begin with, now every time I see the plotline coming I wince because I know what's coming. It's just as predictable as what the horny housewife will do with the pizza delivery guy in vanilla porn.)

Even worse than that, the opening scene of Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity, showing a very busty cutie in a slave girl outfit being hunted down by Zed and his droids, is a dead giveaway of what is to come. It's like they couldn't wait to fuckify the story.

Having told you that, you now know everything you need to know to predict the plot that follows. The only thing you don't know is which slave girls will survive the hunt, if any, and which won't, if any. And you could probably do a pretty good job of predicting that if you gave it any thought at all because from there on out, the movie is all about being predictable. Faugh, what a piece of crap.

Yes, I am bitter, why do you ask? This could have been an imaginative movie, something that would just rock right along, based on the first five minutes. It's like after filming the first five minutes of the story someone said, "Hell, I'm tired of doing original, creative stuff, let's do a tired remake of The Most Dangerous Game instead." More about that later.

What a wasted opportunity. Faugh. Idiots. And the unimaginativeness doesn't end there, but I can describe THAT unimaginativeness without spoileration, so here ends our spoiler section.

SPOILERS END SPOILERS END SPOILERS END SPOILERS END SPOILERS END SPOILERS END

In the first few moments of the film, a dead giveaway: skimpily clad hotties with extremely large breasts will be in this film. You can imagine my disappointment.

OK, if you read the spoiler you know why I think the rest of the movie sucks, or you can take my word for it, and you might as well because I am dead right on this one.

However, there are a couple of very nice bondage scenes after things go to hell, as so often occurs in movies, so I'll describe them in lascivious detail, just because it's fun.

First of all, Zed has his androids pick up Rik, and they haul him off for his role in the game Zed is playing.

Next Zed has his androids grab Shayla. When she comes to, she's chained to a pillar in her nightie, which Zed shortly rips off.

Next thing you know, Shayla is lying naked on a table, chained arms overhead, with an android holding her ankles down. And apart. Zed removes his shirt. Clearly rape is on the agenda. We don't see it, but in a subsequent scene we see Zed standing at the table still shirtless and smoking a cigar with great satisfaction while Shayla lies around all naked and stuff, so it's not hard to figure what went down.

Though we don't see the rape, we do get a nice, long panning shot from Shayla's held feet to the chains holding her wrists over her head, with all that naked body writhing in between. And Brinke Stevens has a body well worth looking at.

In our next bondage scene, we find Daria, Tisa and Shayla chained to the same pillar. They're all wearing big iron collars -- collars so big in fact, that they could easily slip over their wearer's head, I mean, without any discomfort or even mussing their hairdos.

Apparently, the only metal collar prop they could find for this scene was a horse collar. And check out those manacles Kaitan is clinging to so she won't slip out of them. Really, is doing this kind of thing right so hard?

Inexplicably, Daria and Tisa are wearing their leather slave girl bikinis (see vidcap at top of page). Even more inexplicably, the recently raped Shayla is wearing a matching leather slave girl bikini. Where did it come from? We don't know. Maybe there's some sort of standard slave girl outfit in this civilization and Zed keeps a few on hand just in case he has enslaved guests. Any sort of hand waving would do to explain it but as usual we get nothing.

Zed spends some time philosophizing with his captives, explaining that he's not a bad guy, just a guy with a philosophy, one of those philosophies that makes it not just all right but good to be a serial killer and rapist.

The slave girls aren't buying it, but chained up and half naked as they are, there's not much they can do about it, so they just argue philosophy a bit, without anyone really changing positions, just like in real life. (Note: much of the language in this philosophizing scene and some of the other scenes is so completely over the top that you pretty much have to assume that it was written as deliberate camp, but with the exception of Zed the delivery of the lines is so flat that the camp intent just doesn't come across.)

In the next scene the three slave girls are standing outside the castle, their hands tied behind their backs, still in their slave girl outfits. Unfortunately, the lighting is rather dim and you can't really make out their bonds even though the initial point of view is from behind the slave girls -- it's a lengthy shot but in the middle distance.

I THINK the slavegirls' hands are tied behind their backs behind their scene ... I know we're SUPPOSED to think they are. But I'm not SURE.

However, from the way the slave girls' arms move when they're freed, I'd say they probably are really tied, possibly with some really easily undone knot since the android that frees them doesn't seem to have very flexible hands. Possibly the actresses were holding the ropes in place and released them after the robot freed them, making it look like they had been bound.

That's it for bondage scenes, but there are a couple of classic scenes of a non-bondage type that bear mentioning.

Hey, ma, lookit me, I'm a real space moster with an Earth girl in his arms and everything!

First, there's the classic "space alien carrying a half-naked Earth Woman" image that's been an icon of the genre since the pulps of the 1930s. It's obviously staged as the iconic image it is, and a nice little homage it is.

Second, there are several very nice scenes involving half-naked chicks, i.e., slave girls, with big guns, holding big guns. There are a lot of fans of this sort of imagery, and the movie's creators have done them a very nice turn.

Hot bikini chicks with big guns. Tisa is looking worried, and I don't blame her ... Daria appears to like having a gun just a LEETLE too much.

There's also a mild Skinamax style sex scene between Daria and Rik, presented almost as an after thought.

Despite all its flaws, Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity does one thing better than any other movie involving slave girls has ever done -- the slave girls are half naked almost throughout the entire movie. There is a brief scene in which they're having dinner with Zed, wearing very nice evening gowns at his request, but it's very brief, less than five minutes, and after that, they're half naked.

I can't say how many sexy mainstream B-movies there are in which the opposite is true -- the female leads are naked or half naked for about five minutes, other than that, they're fully clothed -- but it's MOST of them. They're all decoration, no cake.

This puts Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity far ahead of any slave girl-centric film I have reviewed in terms of understanding the nature of slave girl costuming. The slave girls look beautiful, vulnerable and sexy throughout the movie -- even in the dullest scenes, there's always something to look at due to the near-constant half-nakedness of the slave girls -- and they're in almost every scene in the movie. If they're standing facing you, you can see most of their bodies and half of their breasts, and if they're standing facing away from you, you can see most of their bodies, including a goodly portion of their butts.

"But wait," you may be thinking. "Have you, Pat Powers, not practically guaranteed success for any sword and sorcery film that follows your recommendations about the appearance of slave girls? And do these recommendations not state that, absent dramatic contraindications, it is good for the movie to crank up the hottitude by having the slave girls appear naked or half-naked as often as possible? And does Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity not follow your advice most stringently, with the slave girls half naked in almost every scene and fully naked in a few scenes? Did we not see a chained, naked slave girl prior to and after being molested, very high on your hottitude scale if we recall correctly? Did we not see the attempted molestation of a half-naked slave girl?"

"And," you might continue, "if this is the case, why is Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity not the most successful B movie ever made? Why is it the relatively obscure B-movie that it is? Could it be that your much-vaunted advice is worth every penny anyone has ever paid for it?"

And of course, I have a response: What the hell are you doing going around asking questions like that, you bastard? Are you trying to make me look like some kind of an idiot? I can do that all by my lonesome, thank you very much!

Now, it's true that Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity has gone far beyond any other slave girl-centric film I know of that isn't actual porn in properly portraying slave girl dress. But I never said that cranking up the hottitude where possible would guarantee a film's success, only that it would improve its chances.

When Tisa goes out to investigate the creepy mansion while its creepy owners is out somewhere doing creepy things, this is what she wears. Sheer slavegirl imagery brilliance.

And I think the technique worked very well for Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity. Several of the reviews I read while researching for this review approvingly mentioned the charms of the female leads. One reviewer even twigged to the fact that the slave girls spend almost all of their onscreen time either naked or half naked (though most didn't really do a lot of twigging to anything, especially the mainstream reviewers).

Many reviewers cited the campy charm of the movie, and there is some over-the-top dialogue, but not enough to make up for the horrible plot problem in the spoiler box. More to the point are those who said the film was a good background film, something you could easily watch and keep up with while doing other things, and those who recommended watching the film while getting drunk or high or whatever with buddies and MST3King the film. It would be a great film for that.

The horrible flaw in the plot alluded to in the spoiler box isn't the only issue the film has. There's also the matter of the jungle chasing and walking scenes. Starting about the middle of the movie and going on to the end we have interminable shots of people walking and running through the thick vegetation that comprises the planet's jungle. It's incredibly boring, mainly because it's just a blur of pink and brown splotches moving through green and black blotches. It's about the nearest thing you can get to pixilation without using digital special effects. And it sucks, it sucks hard, rendering the movie almost unwatchable during theses scenes because it's so freaking boring.

This whole movie would have been unneccesary or at least a lot shorter, if the slavegirls had been properly restrained. Or at least the escape sequence would have been longer and a lot more interesting. For example, here's a more futuristic approach to restraining a prisoner. Note that the prisoner is resting comfortably on a padded chair and is ready to receive visitors at a moment's notice.

Image courtesy of sponsor Sex and Submission.

Other reviewers have noticed this -- they say the movie drags in places. I wouldn't say it drags so much as it sort of collapses into video mush at times, sort of like an alien shape shifter that can manage a reasonable approximation of a human being most of the time but occasionally dissolves into a mass of goo.

In addition, thereare no gag scenes anywhere in Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity. This was a definite mistake -- as I note in the photo captions above and below this text, gags always make a captive look more helpless and vulnerable, ramping up the drama and also the sexy. And the movie had a great opportunity for a gag scene: at one point Zed tells his android minions, "I think we shall have to keep Shayla in restraints, lest she alarm our guests." Talk about your natural segue into a gag scene, but the filmmakers took no advantage of it.

I think that if Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity didn't have all those tasty naked slave girl scenes featuring Kaitan, Beal and Stevens, it would be as utterly forgotten as most every other cheesy SF film produced since the advent of Star Wars back in 1976.

Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity is not a household name, but it is considered a cult classic by some. There are plenty of reviews of it out there in cyberspace, plenty of copies available on DVD, and perhaps most telling of all, it has a relatively active message board on the IMDB, plenty of action around this twenty-plus year old B-movie. Most 20 year old B movies don't have ANY activity on their message boards, ever.

My suspicion is that Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity has made one hell of a lot more money in video and DVD rentals and sales than it ever did on its theatrical release, if only because the title is brilliant -- a lot of people will grab it off the shelf or the website based on the title alone. And those who are attracted to the film for all the wrong reasons will find recommendations on its IMDB user comments and reviews section saying that its full of nudity. Who could resist?

And here's the thing: without the half-naked slave girls, this movie is nothing -- just another SciFi Channel movie of the week fodder to be seen once and then forgotten, if it's seen at all. The crappiness of the plot and the dragging middle section would make it unendurable without its lovely slave girls keeping things interesting.

So, yeah, I'd say the half-naked slave girls worked for this movie.

Ah, you might then ask, being the naturally suspicious person you are, what about Skinamax films? Surely they are much more chock full of nudity and sex than Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity. Why don't THEY do a lot better than Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity ever did?

OK, it's true that the picture above is a more futuristic vision of restraint that that shown in Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity, but that said, I LIKED the casual, grungy look of the slavegirls' dank cell. It said that this cell had transported a LOT of prisoners in complete discomfort. However, even in a grungy environment, gagging and total nudity really increase the prisoners' helplessness and vulnerability, visually speaking. Of course, it's probably not NECESSARY to gag a prisoner held in a dank cell deep in the hold of a ship, where cries for help would be ignored by all, if heard by anyone). But it's the imagery that counts -- film is a visual medium.

Image also courtesy of sponsor Sex and Submission.

The answer is simple: they don't do better than Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity because they are clearly and unambiguously porn, and some guys and gals who won't buy porn WILL buy sexy B-movies. It's that whole plausibly deniable thing I've mentioned in several articles, explaining the success of the Gor novels, the Ginger movies and Slave Leia. While Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity has a piss-poor excuse for a plot, it DOES have a plot -- things happen to advance the story, not just to get to the next sex scene. This not only helps maintain that old plausible d eniability thing but also makes the movie watchable as a movie.

ALSO FROM PAT POWERS

And for all its faults, Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity is an actual movie -- it's not porn. It's just that -- it COULD have been one hell of a movie. If the movie's creators just followed through on the storyline they'd developed during the first five minutes of the movie, they'd have had a real hit.

The story of two desperate, half-naked slave girls trying to escape their captivity with slavers/cops/whatever on their tails would be a topnotch movie. If they'd just bothered to make the movie that naturally follows from the opening five minutes instead of morphing it into a remake of The Most Dangerous Game, they could have had a HELL of a movie that WOULD be remembered as a topnotch B-movie.

Because as absurd as the first five minute storyline is, this is about the best slave girls-of-the-future storyline ever. It offers so many intriguing questions for the connoisseur: Why are interstellar spacecraft transporting half naked slave girls across the galaxy? Are they part of some interstellar slaving operation? Or did these two women do something really horrible to merit such treatment? Maybe there's a political element -- they're rebels captured by the bad guys and enslaved and transported to another world to work as sex slaves. Or maybe the crews of some interstellar craft routinely grab a few slave girls to make the long voyage between planets less dull.

There are all sorts of intriguing scenarios here, all sorts of great adventure possible as the slave girls flee their relentless pursuers, but we don't get that. And I, well, I don't know why the people who made this movie didn't get it. But they sure didn't.

Another one of the many almost nude scenes from Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity means this is the end.

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