Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987) Starring Elizabeth Cayton, Cindy Beal & Brinke Stevens Directed by Ken Dixon Written by Richard Connell & Ken Dixon

The year was 1987 which if you lived through it you remember it being a time of giant hair and pants that came pre ripped and stone washed. Metal God’s ruled the airwaves, and the mullet was an unfortunate consequence of time and place. It was what it was and we who were there cannot deny it, nor can we deny having liked a little bit of it. Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity came out in 1987 and I saw it, I saw it and I liked it, and I won’t deny it because it is a big gorgeous sore pulsating right on the browneye of good taste!

The story really started 55 years earlier though when filmmakers Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel shot The Most Dangerous Game back to back with another picture you may have heard of, King Kong. The Most Dangerous Game is based on a story by Richard Connell about a group of people shipwrecked on an Island inhabited by an insane hunter. The hunter only enjoys hunting “the most dangerous game”, man. Pichel and Schoedsack’s cast was filled out with at least three of the same leads from Kong including Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Steve Clemente. More than Fifty years later these same parts would be transformed into space bimbos! This is where I come into the picture and why you’re reading about this “unique” remake now.

The Most Dangerous Game was a gritty horror story that has resurfaced more than just once over the years but never since with the same grit the 1932 original possesses. Sure Rory Calhoun gave the part some menace when he hunted Gilligan on the Island but it lost something in translation! Then in 1987 Ken Dixon (‘The best of Sex and Violence’, The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) decided that it was time for reimagining the scenario. If you were to take the lead characters and make most of them women, or better yet slave girls, slave girls with leather bikinis and big hair, it would play much better to a modern audience of aerobicizing hairfarmers with shoulder pads!

Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity, the title says it all doesn’t it? I would include this morsel of mediocrity in my collection for its stupid fuckin title any day! But that isn’t what this is about, this is about a movie that has survived for over twenty years and is still just as refreshingly entertaining as it was when it was first released. There are some things you should be aware of; if you take these things into consideration and proceed with caution you will probably come out the other side without a lobotomy.

This is The Most Dangerous Game if it was to be played by a gaggle of jiggler’s lost in space and forced to crash land in a jungle of rubber plants. Hell it all started to work for me as soon as I saw Elizabeth Cayton who plays ‘Daria’, rip some chains out of the floor like some kind of bionic space bimbo. Elizabeth Cayton or Kaitan was a familiar face in the 80’s B-scene and always brings a certain charm to any part she played. Her charisma joined to campy sets and a decent supporting cast lent some credibility to the stupidity at hand.

Daria (Elizabeth Cayton) and Tisa (Cindy Beal) are slaves being transported through space to prison. Thanks to the stupidity of a couple of slacker guards the girls easily escape in their space bikinis and steal a spacecraft. It just amazes me what girls in bikinis can do when they set their mind to it! Their reverie is short lived however as they soon run out of spacegas and have to crash land on a strange planetoid ruled by a guy named Zed (Don Scribner) who wears tight leather pants and lives in a space castle. Zed’s only companions in his exile are a pair of argumentative robot henchmen who for some reason seem as easily distracted by women disrobing as I am. Zed is very accommodating and takes the girls in. He takes them to his castle in the jungle where he introduces them to another pair of stranded travelers. ‘Shala’ (Brinke Stevens) and her brother ‘Rik’ (in the eighties it wasn’t cool to have a c in your Rick, Carl Horner) who have also found themselves the guests of Zed.

From this point I am sure you are all well acquainted with the remainder of the synopsis as the evil hunter then begins to hunt his guests for sport. This is obviously not a serious retelling and therefore does no injustice to either the film or the original story. It simply stands as a piece of pop culture firmly rooted in its own unique wretched excesses. Sure its fuckin tacky and yeah it represents all the worst trends of the time but it is also a valid time capsule detailing the true ugliness that stared us in the mirror every morning as we got up. Yeah you! You dressed like that or in a subtle variation, your hair was just like one of the characters wasn’t it? And didn’t you have that shirt? The indictment stands and even if I am older than these events I still bought into it a little myself. You can’t live through a decade and not suffer some kind of fashion scars. This film is a visual document of the level to which we were willing to stoop in the eighties for valid entertainment as well as fashion!

In my humble opinion Slave Girls was not only Dixon’s final film but his crowning achievement behind the camera. It’s true the special effects are lame, the acting sub-par, but despite those deficiencies the essence of Connell’s original story still shines proving that even a silly space opera like this can have a certain degree of charm. This is the film he will be most remembered for due in large part to the casting of Cayton whose cult following still persists. Cayton, who simply beams in anything she appeared in, has sadly retired from the business as well. The Hungarian born actress left a handful of memorable performances behind though and Slave Girls is one of the best. Oddly enough it is also one of the least revealing appearances of the buxom eighties B Queen. Ken Dixon may not be making films anymore and Elizabeth Cayton may not be starring in any but we will always have the legacy of Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity!

In Space no one can hear you scream but we can still see your boobs!