This Italian no-budget (and now no-copyright) sci-fi flick is incredibly maligned out there on the internets. (You can read amusing and detailed reviews numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) but I want to be honest with you: it is a very rewarding film. Yes, like Brainiac, Robot Monster or the films of Ed Wood one could turn this on with a group of friends and chuckle at the inscrutible plot and awful dialogue. And, indeed, we did. But . . .and, again, I’m not shitting you. . .there is an undercurrent of inadvertent artistry here. By whatever fluke of nature — the bad editing, crummy photography, pitiable acting, miserable Nth generation DVD conversion or hallucinatory story leaps (no doubt due to unshot or removed sequences) — I found myself (four beers in, I grant you) swirling in a surrealist stream-of-consciousness epic. Whether by accident or design “Cosmos: War of the Planets” has festered into some sort of artistic text worthy of consideration. On a strictly visual level (and you are not seeing this in the above images) there are many striking moments — the washed-out grain, the bars of flashing light, the juxtaposed random found footage, the unexpected color saturation that may or may not be an on-set gaffe or post-production error. I want to watch this again for two reasons. One: I want to see if there actually is a story and not just baffling scenes strung together. Two: I want to double check, but I really think there are moments of actual beauty here.
Some movies this reminded me of on a visual level: Galaxina, Dark Star, Saturn 3, Demon Seed (a little), Outland (a tiny bit) and the Tarkovsky version of Solaris. But, like, *my take* on it I’d compare it to the films of Jodorowsky or of Lynch or of, at times, Hollis Frampton or other non-narrative artists. But. . . that may be just because I saw such a shitty transfer!