Saturn 3 (1980)

Excellent but underrated film

Did you people see the same film I saw?

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Before there was "The Terminator", and after "Alien" a year earlier, there's "Saturn 3". Saturn is the 6th planet in the Solar System. The second biggest planet. And has a lot of moons there. On Saturn 3, two scientists Adam(Kirk Douglas) and his lover and partner Alex(Farrah Fawcett, 1947-2009) are living there because Earth is very much overcrowded over the years. Their bliss is interrupted by the presence of Captain Benson(Harvey Keitel) who appeared at the station with a replacement robot named Hector. Unbeknownst to the two, but Captain Benson has murdered a colleague at a station. So when he used a neural link, Hector sensed his tendency to kill. So when Hector tried to kill Alex, he was dismantled. However, he was able to control the other robots to have him reassembled. Then more chaos comes in. I liked it when Alex had that lab accident, and Hector was able to remove the particle from her eye. I know that Farrah was known for her hair. She was also known for her eyes. It was a decent sci-fi/horror film. And that Hector was a very menacing character. It was a fine film. 3 out of 5 stars

Saturn 3 (1980) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Adam (Kirk Douglas) and Alex (Farrah Fawcett) are lovers who are working on a space station right outside of Saturn. The two of them spend their times working as well as messing around but they're thrown for a loop when Benson (Harvey Keitel) shows up. What they don't know is that Benson has killed the real Captain that they were expecting and he's brought on board a new robot that can think and act for itself.SATURN 3 is a film that was released to some really awful reviews with most critics calling it one of the worst films of the year. Even worse for the filmmakers was the fact that people believed the critics and stayed away from the pictures making it a huge disaster at the box office. The film eventually gained a cult following on video but there's no question that this is one of the weirdest movies released from this era.The film was released early in 1980 but there's no doubt that it has a 70's vibe to it. The film is without a doubt one of the dumbest science fiction movies ever made. You can read Roger Ebert's review where he points out countless flaws with the scientific aspect of the film including such easy stuff as gravity. I will admit that the film is really dumb and there's an even bigger problem with the screenplay and that's the fact that we don't really know why Benson wanted on the spaceship and we really don't know why the robot goes crazy.Speaking of the crazy robot, the final twenty-minutes of the movie are basically like a slasher as Alex and Adam must run, hide and try to fight the robot that is after them. What's even stranger is the three-way love story that blossoms and the fact that the robot wants to join as it falls for Fawcett. Douglas, for the most part, gives a good performance and Fawcett does what she was paid to do and that's look sexy. Her role doesn't really allow her much to do but the two stars do show off some nudity. I think Keitel was good in the part but the awful dubbing really hurts the film. I'm familiar enough with his voice where I could picture it saying the lines in the movie and I can't help but think things would have played out better with it.SATURN 3 has a lot of bad things in it but at the same time it's weirdly watchable. Some of the special effects are good, although quite dated. Some are really lousy looking but at the same time they're still fun. The film really does play out like a film that tries to be intelligent and thinks that it is intelligent yet most people are laughing. It certainly takes itself way too serious but overall the film is mildly entertaining as a cult film.

Saturn 3 is a sci fi thriller about a robot that goes insane. The film succeeds on its cinematography, the robot, some of its violent content and story. I was, however, disappointed with films approach of being isolated with limited amount of characters. I would of preferred a higher body count. But oh well. I guess I'll wack it to Aliens. At least more people die in that movie. To conclude: Saturn 3 is nothing special but it's a fun space age thriller.

I was one of the few heterosexual teenagers of my generation who was never in love with Farrah Fawcett. Yes, I did watch "Charlie's Angels", but only for the lovely Jaclyn Smith. Farrah always struck me as the ultimate manufactured plastic bimbo- big hair, big teeth, big boobs, small talent. That supposedly iconic poster of her wearing a red swimsuit and a cheesy grin may have sold God-knows-how-many copies, but it never came anywhere near my bedroom wall.By the end of seventies, however, Farrah had become a leading sex symbol and a well-known figure on television. There was just one world left for her to conquer, Hollywood, although the transition from big-name television actress to Hollywood goddess is not always an easy one. (It eluded, for example, most of Farrah's fellow-Angels as well as Pamela Anderson, who was to the nineties what Farrah was to the seventies). "Saturn 3" can be seen as Farrah's bid for big-screen stardom. It was, admittedly, made in Britain rather than in Hollywood, but had a legendary American director in Stanley Donen and a legendary American leading man in Kirk Douglas.The immense success of the original "Star Wars" in 1977 had led to a vogue for science fiction, previously a little-regarded film genre associated with cheap fifties B-movie shockers. "Saturn 3" was one of a number of British attempts to cash in on this vogue. ("Flash Gordon", also from 1980, was another). The original idea for the film came from John Barry, better known as a composer, who was its original director before he was replaced by Donen at Douglas's insistence. (Like his friend Burt Lancaster, Douglas had a reputation for pulling rank to ensure he got the directors he wanted).The film is set in an agricultural research station on the third moon of Saturn. For the purposes of the film we are asked to accept that, at the future date when it is set, useful agricultural research can indeed be done on an airless, lifeless lump of rock many millions of miles from Earth, although we are never given details of the science involved. We are also asked to accept that although the work done at this station is of immense value it can be run by a team of only two people, an ageing scientist named Adam and his younger colleague and lover, Alex. (Yeah, I know. "Eve" would have sounded a bit too obvious). Adam and Eve- sorry, Alex- live happily together in Eden- sorry, Saturn Three- until their idyll is interrupted by the arrival of a serpent. This particular serpent comes in the form of Captain Benson, a homicidally psychopathic astronaut sent by the authorities to check up on Saturn Three.Let me clarify that a bit. The authorities have not knowingly sent a homicidal psychopath to Saturn Three. Benson was originally slated for the mission but was not allowed to fly when he failed a psychological assessment test. The enraged Benson reacted by murdering his replacement and then taking his place on board the spaceship, without anyone apparently noticing. Benson brings with him a robot named Hector who, having been programmed from Benson's brain patterns, has acquired his psychological instability. From this point on the film becomes an extra-terrestrial chase thriller, with first Benson and then Hector pursuing Adam and Alex with a view to killing the former and raping the latter.Barry originally conceived the film on a much grander scale, but after the production company ITC Entertainment made a massive loss with "Raise the Titanic!", one of the biggest financial flops in the history of the British cinema, the budget for "Saturn 3" has to be pruned drastically. Barry had wanted to entice the young male audience by putting Farrah in revealing costumes throughout, but the more puritanical Donen vetoed this, and although there is the occasional glimpse of bare flesh (both from Farrah and from Douglas) her normal clothing is fairly modest. As a result, the young male audience stayed away in droves. Mind you, so did most of the population, meaning that "Saturn 3" was nearly as big a flop as "Raise the Titanic!" Its failure, however, cannot be wholly blamed upon Farrah's clothing. The screenplay was written by the prominent novelist Martin Amis, but one would hardly have guessed this from the finished film. The acting (apart from Sally the dog) is poor. This is by some distance the worst performance I have seen from Douglas. I assume that the sexagenarian actor was only induced to appear by the prospect of a love scene with an actress thirty years his junior, something which at 63 presumably did not come his way every day. Fawcett is even more wooden here than she was in "Charlie's Angels". Even the thought that she and her lover are in mortal peril from a murderous lunatic and a paranoid android cannot elicit much feeling from her. So emotionless is she that I was expecting a plot twist (which never actually came) whereby Alex is revealed to be a robot herself. As for poor Harvey Keitel, he was not even trusted to speak his own lines. (Apparently Donen objected to his New York accent and had his lines dubbed over by a British actor). The one thing you can say in the film's favour is that, despite the low budget, the special effects are reasonably good.In the fifties Donen was regarded as a Hollywood whizz-kid, a specialist in musicals and the man responsible for films as good as "Singin' in the Rain". By 1980, however, the screen musical was largely dead and Donen was starting to look like yesterday's man. Although he is still alive, "Saturn 3" was to be his penultimate feature film. His last was to be "Blame It on Rio", a film every bit as dire as this one and a sad end to a once distinguished career. 3/10