Touches You

Good concept, poorly executed.

Crappy film

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

This film isn't as bad as some people would have you to believe.Unfortunately, It isn't very good either. That is one of it's problems. If it had been a little worse than it ended up it might have been better in a more incredulous, but more memorable, way. You can see it wants to be either Demon Seed' or 'Alien' but comes close to neither or even a parody of them (which could have worked). Unfortunately, it is not imaginative enough to be the former or frightening enough to be the latter. The films performers are left floundering.As ever Kirk Douglas is over the top. This time in a sort of Action Grandad role which I presume he thought would show him (at 62 years old)still capable of playing energetic, love interest, leads. Unfortunately, the part isn't meaty enough to let him give his full throttle Kirk Douglas macho-man big screen shtick. Meanwhile Farah Fawcett is wasted. Yes, of course, she's good to look at, and although never a great actress, FF does, often, have a notable presence. This time she is just decoration given baby doll nighties and bra-less t-shirts to wear. Rather than being a main protagonist with a distinct character she is mainly just good to look at. I didn't really care what happened to her except, perhaps, that I'd miss the occasional flash of flesh . The biggest puzzle is why did Harvey Keitel agree to this? He does his best to keep the role believable but fails and once again a worse performance, or a worse actor, in the role may have helped make the film better by making the part more extraordinary but Keitel does just enough in the part to give it any credence but can't make it memorable.These are major flaws and Saturn 3 is therefore a film that you would only watch either because you like the actors and watch them in any roles or just fancy a bit of science fiction whimsy that won't task your brain to heavily. Perhaps, it is a film that needs a big budget remake. It could work!

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

Saturn 3 is one of those lousy science Fiction movies from the late 70's that deserves to be ridiculed. Unfortunately, it wasn't bad enough to be featured on SNL, but definitely not good enough to be remembered. Somewhere in the remote future a Human inhabited spacecraft, Saturn 3, is occupied by the stunning Alex(Farrah Fawcett) and her pre- geriatric lover, Major Adam (Kirk Douglas). They are visited by an anal technocrat from Earth (The Captain) played by Harvey Kietel. He is proposing to construct a high tech robot for research and to serve as an assistant for his new home. Unfortunately, things don't go as planned. The Captian is taken by Alex's ethereal beauty. He wishes to severe the tie she has with the aging Kirk Douglas to have her for his own. His method? To live vicariously through the robot (Hector) in order to overtake Adam's position as lover. Now I know the appeal of beautiful woman can be a plot driven device if used tastefully and if it doesn't dominate the overall theme. But this seems to be the only thing going on here beside the development and fine tuning of the poorly constructed robot. Now I thought the robot was pretty cool looking and reminded me of a more fragile version of The Terminator. But Hector, albeit striking in appearance, is poorly designed with all of its loosely fitted wires, exposed valves and hollow frame. He could have used a more sturdy core to withstand blows. Modern Sci-Fi movies take the attractive woman's beauty as incidental and give the poor gals a bit more brains, substance, authority and toughness. But Farrah was just being used for eye candy while she titillated us with her sexy pouts, lilting voice, gorgeous figure and dazzling eyes. Harvey Keitel is wasted in this role where he plays against type. Here he chooses to use an uptight voice and speech pattern which sounds more robotic than military. And Kirk Douglas? Okay, I don't really have anything personal against the guy, but watching him cast with a woman thirty years his junior is both disheartening and fairly grotesque. Much like his son, he was the kind of actor I felt I had to put up with when watching a movie rather than ever truly enjoying or liking him. Saturn 3 is a snooze fest. But that's not to say that I completely hate it. It boasts some pretty cool production qualities and some admirably constructed set designs. This movie could have done better if they made a porno where Farrah gets accosted by some Technocrat or alien. It's that bad

I have this film on VHS, bought it so cheap through Amazon, and I am such a sucker for sci-fi movies. I watched this movie last night and thought it was OK. I remember seeing this when I was only 10, on TV and thought it was really cool; but it was on TV and I was so young. It's one of those sci-fi pictures U would find on Mystery Science Theater late at night, but I never considered it awful. Yes, the special effects are lacking and some of the scenes U can tell are filmed in miniature. It's a B sci-fi movie but it's not bad, considering most of the cast just consist of 3 main characters and a robot. The plot is a basic one, a not so stable astronaut, kills one who is going to Saturn 3. He takes his place and the terror is about to begin. Once there you can tell Capt. James is a few shy of a six pack when he meets Adam and Alex. The 2 scientists who reside there and who are conducting new ways of food production for Earth from Saturn 3, an outpost hydroponic food production . Once settles in Capt. James begins to build a robot, named Hector, a new model the company is starting to use. Once complete, he shows off his creation to Adam and Alex. Capt. The robot is creepy enough; but what's creepier his his direct input to the robot, by taking information from his brain into Hector's. Hector eventually turns on Capt. James and eventually comes after Adam and Alex. It's up to Alex and Adam to stop this robot from hell and try to escape with their lives. This movie is far from Star Wars, but give it a try.THX, -Kris L. CocKayne-