There are bad movies and there are tantalizingly bad movies, and Saturn 3 is the latter-the type of bad movie that tickles the imagination and demands an explanation. On first blush, there’s nothing unusual about it. Released in 1980, it was clearly trading on the post-Star Wars mania for sci-fi movies. The casting of Farrah Fawcett, at the time a big star, was a reasonable commercial gambit. And the release of Alien a year earlier certainly explained the idea of a monster movie set in space. If you look at the credits, you simply get a sense of older Hollywood types-director Stanley Donen, actor Kirk Douglas-striving to keep up with the prevailing trends.
But then you watch the movie, and you wonder: what the hell happened here?