If you ever find yourself leaning over a sticky pub table trying to explain Galaxina to someone who’s never had the misfortune of seeing it, don’t bother explaining the plot. The scriptwriters certainly didn’t bother writing one.

What we’ve got here is a 1980 exploitation Frankenstein that spends its first hour drifting aimlessly through deep space, burns a solid chunk of its runtime on sheer narrative padding, and then suddenly remembers in the final act that it needs to be a Wild West film because they’d clearly run out of ideas and had to find somewhere cheap to put everyone.

It all starts aboard the Infinity, a spaceship modelled so blatantly like a giant flying dick that Roger Corman would have told them to subtle it down a bit. The ship is helmed by Captain Cornelius Butt, played with raging, veins-popping exhaustion by Avery Schreiber, a man whose primary duty seems to be shouting abuse at his five-man crew. When he tells his co-pilot, “You know kid, you’ve got a bad habit. You breathe,” you realise this isn’t high-minded sci-fi.

It’s a workplace sitcom in cheap plastic corridors.

Topside, you’ve got Sergeant Thor flexing a square jaw alongside Buzz the pilot. Elsewhere on the ship you’ve got Maurice, who is literally a bloke in a bat costume, and Sam Wo, a vintage-exploitation Asian stereotype that feels like it was dragged straight out of a 1930s serial. Plus, there’s Galaxina herself, played by the late Dorothy Stratten.

She starts the film as a silent, synthetic French Maid serving dinner, equipped with a high-voltage anti-grope mechanism that electrocutes Thor the second he goes in for a kiss.

Before anyone even mentions the main mission, the film burns over a third of its runtime on utter nonsense. We get pit stops at dinner, holographic flashers keeping crew morale up, and an extended stop at an intergalactic space brothel.

Why?

Because when you don’t have a second act, you just let the cast wander around a set until someone remembers why they’re there.

Eventually, they utter the magic words: the Blue Star crystal. This triggers what is easily the single best joke in the entire movie.

Every time a character says “Blue Star”, a dramatic orchestral sting blasts on the soundtrack, and the entire crew physically tilts their heads up to stare at the ship’s ceiling, completely baffled as to where the noise is coming from.

Three times in a row.

Zero misses.

It’s fucking brilliant.

Classic comic timing in a movie that otherwise regularly forgets it’s supposed to be funny.

To reach planet Altar 1, the crew has to go into cryo-sleep for 27 years. But before Captain Butt climbs into his box, he eats a dodgy space egg, gets sick, and coughs up a tiny alien creature.

Now, in a proper film, an unmonitored chestburster loose on a ship leads to a bloodbath.

In Galaxina, this little mouth-baby spends nearly three decades doing very little that resembles hunting. Instead, it wanders around the ship and eventually starts messing with the temperature controls on Butt’s cryo chamber.

Meanwhile, Galaxina stays awake.

What follows is a montage of pure existential boredom.

For 27 straight years, she walks around, sits down, watches fake space adverts on TV and trades her French Maid outfit for a skin-tight white spandex catsuit.

Oh, and she reprogrammes herself.

She spends years modifying her own systems so she can learn how to speak, become more human and eventually disable the electrical defence mechanism that makes her impossible to touch.

All of this, essentially, so she can sneak into Thor’s room after the crew wakes up and drop a romantic confession on him the second he opens his eyes.

Twenty-seven years.

That’s a hell of a long-term relationship strategy.

After an hour of absolute death-drift, they finally arrive at Altar 1.

And what is Altar 1?

A dusty Wild West movie set.

Suddenly, we’re not in space anymore. We’re in a cowboy movie featuring a saloon serving human stew, a bargain-bin Spock clone named “Mr. Spot”, and a desert biker cult worshipping a vintage Harley-Davidson as an actual deity.

Because of course we are.

When the villain, Ordric, makes his move for the Blue Star crystal, the movie suddenly remembers it has an ending to get through and wraps up its loose ends with pure B-movie speed.

Captain Butt emerges from his cryo-pod as an ancient, decrepit old man because the creature spent 27 years fucking with the temperature of his chamber.

The knee-high alien, which considers Butt its mother, finally justifies its existence by stepping up and biting a massive chunk out of Ordric, killing him on the spot.

Galaxina uses her android karate to clean up the rest of the desert weirdos.

And then, because Galaxina apparently can’t resist one last fucking gag, the Blue Star ends up being eaten by the Rock-Eater creature anyway.

Captain Butt is left as an ancient, senile version of himself, while the film more or less shrugs, closes the book and wanders off into the sunset.

And that’s Galaxina.

It’s terrible. It’s disjointed. It’s incredibly lazy. Large chunks of it feel like somebody had a collection of cheap sci-fi sets, a handful of costumes, a half-finished script and absolutely no intention of letting any of those things get in the way of making a film.

And yet I can’t fucking hate it.

Because somewhere between the giant-dick spaceship, the three-way ceiling stare, the chestburster acting as an HVAC saboteur, the bloke in the bat suit, the Harley-Davidson religion and an android spending 27 years reprogramming herself just so she can flirt with a bloke, Galaxina becomes something far more entertaining than the film it was probably supposed to be.

It’s bargain-bin science fiction chaos.

And sometimes that’s exactly what you want.