ane Flower is a bounty hunter with a no-nonsense ice-queen attitude and the body of an overinflated blow-up doll. Cobra is a smirking, musclebound rebel with a large gun for a left arm and the biggest bounty in the universe on his head. They live in a big, messy universe full of big, messy problems, but it's still only natural that they'd eventually bump into each other (in a Star Wars-esque alien cantina, of course) and sparks would immediately start to fly.
As it happens, they've got more in common than stunning physical proportions and larger-than-life personalities. They've both made deadly enemies in the Space Mafia Guild, a massive, inimical organization headed by a spooky translucent monstrosity called Crystal Boy. As Jane understands it, Crystal Boy is holding one of her two identical sisters prisoner, and only Cobra has the weaponry, the experience and the studied nonchalance under fire to smash his way into the ultra-high-security floating prison and break her out. Of course, he'll have to blow up a few million killer robots along the way, but hey, isn't that what a universe-renowned space pirate is for?
Unfortunately, when Cobra finally finds Jane's sister, she doesn't want freedom. And as the weird truth about her family comes out, what starts off as a big sloppy guns-and-glory shoot-em-up turns into a big sloppy interstellar space opera, complete with wandering planets, doomed galaxies, psychedelic space sex and a lot of silly malarkey about the Power of Love to transcend space, time and nasty evil robotic Mafia guys.
A movie for those distracted by shiny objects
This sprawling 1982 sex-and-lasers space fantasy, the spiritual sister of Barbarella, has a very high cheese factor but can be fun if taken in the right spirit--specifically, the spirit of 1981's Heavy Metal. The swirling '60s drug-trip imagery and swinging '70s sexuality would have fit into Heavy Metal perfectly, as would the frighteningly pneumatic bodies, the ubiquitous gratuitous nudity thereof, and the thin but vividly energetic plot.
The visual design, on the other hand, looks like something Ralph Bakshi might have done in his heyday. The video box's promise of "hyper-dimensional multiplane animation" that lets viewers "experience 3-D depth with your naked eyes" is vastly overoptimistic, but the detailed, heavily textured backdrops give the movie a commanding visual weight. The characters look impressively like Bakshi's Frazetta-inspired supermen from Fire & Ice, rather than the usual big-eyed anime superkids. And Crystal Boy, despite his goofy name, is actually fairly frightening, thanks to the unusually complex ink work that makes him convincingly inhuman and inorganic.
The visuals--later used extensively in Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend" video, which is included on the tape--have a lot to compensate for, however. The story is over-emotive and gushy, the characters are shallow stereotypes, and the magical-energetic-power-of-love dreck is as ridiculous here as it was in the similarly gushy-but-fun Fifth Element. But this isn't meant as a thought piece. It's a classic head trip, and the sheer shiny prettiness of its surface appearance strongly implies that in this case, the surface is all that matters.
