Starring Karla Conway, Cara Peters, Merci Montello, Fancher Fague
Unrated
USA
“This 'love' thing was getting out of hand.”
A Diane Lane-esque ginger beauty lays in bed next to her shlubby middle-aged hubby Jim (Steve Vincent), who's embroiled in his science fiction magazines. He loves 'em, can't get enough, spends most of his time thinking about space travel and babbling about alternate dimensions. She's had enough of it, and tells him that if he doesn't pay her some attention, she's throwing all his goddamn sci-fi bullshit out. So he bangs her to shut her up. She's appreciative, but even as they bathe in the aferglow, he finds himself distracted by his outer space stuff.
Soon, he drifts off to sleep, dreaming about his life in another galaxy. Cue the Laugh-in-esque credits, scrawled in dayglo swirls on the bodacious bods of the the space girls.
In Jim's dream, he is a Captain Kirk-esque starship captain, the victim of a mutiny by “rapscallions” and set adrift in his “space canoe” to fend for himself. He spots an enemy ship and, bravely, steers himself into its orbit. Then he attempts to board.
Connie (pint-sized Playboy playmate Karla Conway), who is naked except for a constantly slipping towel, lets him in. Through the front door. How else? They are soon joined by Captain Mother (Cara Peters, another playmate), who, by her name and the looks of her ridiculous/bonerific outfit, is running this ship, and a chubby oaf named Willie (Dan Martin). On the voiceover, Jim talks about how repulsed he is by these disgusting creatures. Damnit Jim, have you gone space-mad? Anyways, he tells Capn' Mother that his ship was blown up, but he escaped using his supersonic sneakers. She tells him he can stay and do her grunt work. He tells her he's a Colonel back in Kansas, and therefore not required to do any heavy lifting. She laughs in his face.
Meanwhile Connie gets dressed. Sort of. I dunno if an outfit that skimpy counts as 'dressed'. Then she wakes up her roommate Portia (Merci Montello, playmate number 3), to let her know there's a handsome man on board. Portia doesn't like getting up without a good reason.
Jim wanders around the ship and finds a mirror. He is shocked when he sees what he looks like as a “Terranian”. So that's why he was freaked out by bare-assed Connie! Maybe he's usually a lizard?
Anyway, man-hungry Portia sidles up to him and tells him she's from Kansas, too. Then she makes out with him, but her jealous boyfriend Cadet (Stan Isfloride) shows up and knocks Jim the fuck out.
She runs to Captain Mother and tells her it was all Jim's fault. Capt Mother storms off to deal with him. Too-tan Astrid (the incredibly named Fancher Fague) rolls her eyes and calls Portia a liar, so they tussle a bit until Willie breaks it up. Don't you know the rules of girl-fighting, Willie? Nobody breaks up a, sexy girl fight!
To keep himself out of trouble, Jim pops invisibility pills, and then just skulks around the ship, watching all the amorous antics. Like when Portia and Cadet get it on while wearing silver boots that I'm pretty sure are covered in duct tape.
Or later on, when Portia and Captain Mother canoodle.
Willie sticks around to catch that one, too.
Things get a little weird when Captain mother pulls out a whip, but that's space love, baby.
Apparently there's a “no men” rule on the ship, and Portia's been breaking it all over the place.
And then an asteroid smashes into the ship! Which I think is a meatball pinging off a pie plate.
Luckily they all survive. Connie celebrates by seducing Jim while wearing what looks like a torn-up green curtain.
Then everybody sits down for dinner. Their futuristic space stools are very clearly garbage cans. They eat steak-flavored jelly beans. On the voiceover, Jim complains that he misses “juicy meats”. Then he storms off, sneaking into the control room to fiddle with some knobs. What are you up to, Jim from Kansas?
Turns out, Captain Mother is on a mission to Kansas to scoop up some 'specimens' for experimentation. When Jim found this out, he figured the only solution was to alter the ship's course so that it would smash into an asteroid and kill them all, thereby sparing Kansas from an attack by hot chicks with space leotard wedgies. But Mother orders Willie to land on the nearest planet before they can crash. Thwarted!
The planet turns out to be pleasantly warm, so they lay down some blankets and mellow out. Captain Mother gets it on with Astrid, which is nice, because I was beginning to think she wasn't going to get naked like all the other girls. Whew.
But what about poor Willie? Doesn't he get to bang somebody? He runs into Connie, who's been running around in circles, topless, with Portia for the past ten minutes, and offers his services. She just shakes her head at him and wanders off. Sorry, Willie.
Meanwhile, Jim has sex with Portia while wearing shiny gold pants. “This is ridiculous,” he says. No kidding.
Captain Mother, determined to keep her ship strictly lesbianic, decides to have sex with Jim, just to prove...well, I'm not sure what it's supposed to prove. But she does it. And then she realizes that maybe men aren't so bad after all.
And then she gets back in her space ship and blows up the Earth. Or something like that. The end.
Directed by the same nutball that made the infamous She Freak, Space Thing is incredibly cheap and clunky and stupid. There's no getting around that. However, the film looks great (camerawork is credited to 'Sy Klops', who is most likely sludge-flick DP wizard Gary Graver), and the girls are hot and naked for pretty much the entire running time which, mercifully, is only 80 minutes. If I saw this when I was 14, I'd probably think it was the greatest film ever made. I sorta feel that way now. Boners will be popped!
Space Thing is available from Something Weird.
- Ken McIntyre
One day a creaky old space wizard named Zaal shows up (Sleazemania curator Johnny Legend) to eat dog food with his bony fingers and to complain about Space Tax. 
Just then Bantor the Space Tax man (60's biker flick vet Ross Hagen) arrives - with a pink zoot-suited Dukey Flyswatter in tow - to steal the midgets' precious Space Crystals. When Zaal gives them some guff, they use their laser guns to blow him into space dust. And then they do the same thing to the midgets. Taura uses her plastic axe to fight 'em off pretty good - she even mmages to cop off Bator's hand - but they eventually overpower her. 
And then John Carradine shows up via videotape to tell Taura she's been sentenced to seven years on the Prison Ship. Or the Star Slammer. Whichever works better for you. 
Long-gone scream queen Marya Gant (
And then Muffin (Dawn Wildsmith) saunters in. She's the She Boss of the prisoners. Muffin tosses a couple rags at Taura and tells her to get into her new prison threads. This affords us a decent peek at Taura's swollen rack. Thanks, Muffin!
By the way, whatever happened to Dawn Wildsmith? She acted almost exclusively for Fred Olen Ray, and appeared in nearly two dozen of his films between 1985 and 1995. And then she vanished. Wildsmith was one of the most memorable B-queens of the era, largely because she could chew scenery like nobody's business. It did not matter how small Wildsmith's role in any given film was; if she was in the scene, it was her movie. She pretty much just always acted like she wanted to eat your face. Dawn Wildsmith was a bad-ass.
Dear Miss Wildsmith, please come back and eat our faces again. We miss you.
Anyway, then everyone has lunch. It ends in a food fight. This is followed by some S&M tinged spanking. Then the prisoners have to fight the monster from The Deadly Spawn while Muffin and the Warden watch. And then Taura gets attacked by Muppety rats in her cell. And ten they all get drunk on booze made of engine coolant. Space antics! 
Bantor - now sporting a robot hand, since Taura hacked his off - shows up on the ship with his gang. Everyone proceeds to fuck, get whipped/maced/spanked, experiment with strange new drugs and bio-weapons, and hallucinate.
Also, there's a transmission from the Queen of Outer Space (Bobbie Bressee, Evil Spawn), but I'm pretty sure that was just to pad the time. There's also a cameo from 50's sci-fi champ Aldo Ray that amounts to little more than a still photo and a couple mumbled lines. Eh, it's a living.
So anyway. Mike (Susan Stokely, Phantom Empire) squares off with Muffin, and ends up chopping her hand off and stabbing her to death. With the wicked witch dead, the girls mutiny and bond together to try and escape the wretched Prison Ship.
Along the way, Sandy Brooke changes her shirt again. Most gratuitous wardrobe change ever!
There's also a hot Asian chick wearing half a leotard. She doesn't last long, though.
So, how does it all end? Pretty much exactly like Star Wars. Only with more cleavage.
There's also the threat of a sequel, Chain Gang Planet. Sadly, it has yet to surface.
Although it sorely lacks the wall to wall nudity of latter-day Fred Olen Ray movies, Star Slammer gets by on pure gusto. There is something ridiculous happening in nearly every frame of this film, and just when you think you've reached the sub-cellar of absurdity, a trap door opens and something even more ludicrous occurs. The continuity errors are headache-making - the interior of the ship is never the same twice, Sandy Brooke's haircut changes radically from one scene to the next, and characters undergo dramatic personality changes from one line to the next - but it's not like a linear plot or a coherent presentation was ever a top priority anyway. No, this is pure 80's junkfilm, a fizzy, sugar-sweetened, VHS valentine to space operas, women in prison flicks, and teenage losers with nothing better to do than wade through 90 minutes of muck for two brief titty-flashes.
Mandatory viewing, in other words.