Starcrash from Roger Corman, directed by Luigi Cozzi and starring Marjoe Gortner, Caroline Munroe, David Hasselhoff and Christopher Plummer is probably my favourite Star Wars cash in film of that era. It sits awkwardly between two eras of sci-fi imagination. There’s clear influence from the more lived in and realistic appearance of Star Wars, and then there’s the retro or pulp aesthetic still coming through:

The room above looks a what you’d expect from a low budget Star Wars cash in, but the costumes are more Flash Gordon:

Did I mention I love this film? It’s got Amazons, giant robots and David Hasselhoff shooting lasers from his eyes at Cavemen. The costumes were a major influence on early Deathzap too, here are the men of the League of Zandor:

But I’m not bringing Starcrash to your attention because of any of that, as you probably guessed from the title of this post it’s all about the sprues, the glorious sprues!
It’s common within sci-fi film making when building spaceships to buy a few model kits and glue random parts of tanks and planes to your model for additional detail. It’s just that your supposed to hide or transform the parts into something new. In Starcrash however they don’t. The tank track headbands of the stop motion Golems are one of my favourite details:


And some of the ships don’t look too bad, but towards the end of the film it does look a bit like they just glued entire sprues on without removing any parts or even getting them to properly fit. Play spot the sprue below:



It does make me want to build a ship model for Deathzap though. But that’s not a project I’ll be doing anytime soon!
Thanks for drawing my attention to this film as I don’t think I have seen it before and, from what I can see, I’ll like the style.
I hadn’t heard of this one either – checked out the YouTube trailer https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0pRKIqByJFg
Curious film – like you say somewhere between Flash Gordon / Battlestar Galactica and some thing more gritty, rusty sci-fi like Star Wars.
It’s definitely up there as one of my favourite so bad it’s good movies. It’s on YouTube for free right now, or if you have Amazon Prime it’s on there too.
Well spotted! Is that the side of a Churchill tank top right in the final picture?
It certainly rips off a lot of different films. The opening scene reminds me of Space 2001. Then the reference to counts and emperors harks to Star Wars. The outfits remind me of Vampire Planet as well as the earlier Buch Rogers, Flash Gordon and even Flesh Gordon. There is certainly plenty of female flesh..
Incidentally, those space rifles look very cumbersome with all those ‘wings’ or projections.