The 1980s brought unto us the Video Cassette Recorder, also known as the VCR, and the Video Home System, also known as the VHS tape. Well, technically, these things were available way before the 1980s, but that decade made them popular, and it was then most people experienced home video. And technically Betamax came before the VCR, but it lost the Video Format War and so most people only ever had a VCR.

They say it was the porn industry that won the war for the VCR but that’s another story for another time.

My family was early adapters of the home video industry. We actually had a Betamax for a little while but eventually switched to VCR and never looked back.

Once the VCR took off it exploded onto the scene. Almost everybody had one. Video stores seemed to spring up almost overnight. The big sellers (or renters I should say for it would be many years before you could really buy a movie – I still remember seeing a price sheet once and the cheapest tapes were over $100, clearly they were meant to be purchased by stores and rented out) had a lot of shelf space to fill and while the big blockbusters and new releases were the reason most folks came into the store, they needed to fill those shelves to give the customers at least some semblance of major choices. Loads of small studios and big dreamers (or big pockets and a good sense that the home video market was a boon) started churning out low-budget movies to help fill those shelves.

Naturally, if you didn’t have a budget to make your movie then you had even less to market it, so you needed some reason for folks to buy your films and rent them. Exploitation cinema was nothing new, people had been making exploitative films for nearly as long as film existed. But the 1980s saw an explosion in the market. Sex sells, of course, as do naked boobs, blood-soaked violence, and big action. If you can make your audience laugh on top of that, then all the better.

I love that stuff. I especially loved it in the 1980s and early 1990s when I was coming of age as they say. There used to be a late-night cable show called USA Up All Night. It was hosted by Gilbert Godfried on Saturday nights and Rhonda Shear on Fridays. Godfried was very funny but it was Shear who always got my attention. She played a bubbly, innuendo-laden, hot blonde type and this pubescent boy watched her every weekend. Both introduced a series of films and then did various skits during the commercial breaks. The films were the types of films I’ve been talking about. My love for bad cinema can be traced back to watching Up All Night.

This (finally) brings us to Slave Girls From Beyond. I don’t remember if that film aired on Up All Night, but it could have. I felt I would be remiss if I didn’t have at least one film of this nature in my Awesome ’80s in April feature and here we are.

Slave Girls From Beyond is basically a retelling of The Most Dangerous Game, but in space with scantily clad babes. Daria (Elizabeth Kaitan) and Tisa (Cindy Beal) are captured by some mutant-looking dudes. Clad in rabbit-skin bikinis they escape their prison and flee in a rocket ship. Before long a mysterious force causes them to crash land on a jungle planet and they soon find themselves in the fortress of a strange man named Zed (Dan Scribner). He seems to be the only sentient inhabitant of the planet, though he has two robot guards.

A couple of other folks also recently crash-landed on the planet. The dude (Carl Horner) warns the girls that there were more of them, but one by one they’ve all disappeared. Soon enough he disappears and, yeah, I mentioned this is based on The Most Dangerous Game, so soon enough the three girls find themselves being hunted by Zed.

Before that though there is some naked frolicking, lots of running about the castle in their underwear, and a bit of comedy. Later, they will run into some mutants, zombies, and a hunch-backed alien with a laser rifle for an arm.

It is all very ridiculous and silly and kind of fun. There is nobody, and I mean absolutely no one who thinks this is a good movie, not even the people who made it. I do appreciate that the two leads aren’t the typical dumb bimbos. They are both rather intelligent and one of them often rambles off a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo to indicate she knows what she’s doing. They are both quite able to get out of scrapes as well.

If you can get into silly, low-budget, girls in outer space flicks, then you might find this one to be enjoyable.