STAR FORCE (1979) is a thing I’ve seen recently thanks to Sinister Cinema, and their catalogue entry is right — this is deeply obscure, has apparently left no internet trace, and is absent from the filmography of its director (who, to my amusement, is also the co-author of the film history textbook I use).

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#ScienceFiction #ScienceFictionMovies #Documentaries #ufos #CultMovies

Even by the standard of UFO ”documentaries,” this is weird. The narration varies from the vague to the WTF (“Could there possibly be life on the sun? Or at the centre of the sun? Where a UFO launching pad could be hidden, sending alien scouts to spy on Earth?”), and long passages go by with no narration at all, just a parade of images, some which appear to be very random.

The UFO pictures, which the echoing narration is very enthused about, are blown up to such grainy abstraction they could be stills from Antonioni’s BLOW UP. Extensive footage from the Apollo 11 mission, from take-off to return, pads out the running time for no particular reason.

Charmingly bizarre, and apparently made by and for the deeply stoned. Yet, despite talking about lava on the sun, it still somehow manages to seem more sensible than almost any conspiracy theory today.