For my third entry into SEVEN SAMURAI stuff, we watched BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS.

Does this need a compare-and-contrast with SEVEN SAMURAI and THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN? Well, I suppose I could talk about how, in SEVEN SAMURAI, the bandits are really just treated as a malevolent force to be overcome rather than as characters, and in both BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS and THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, they're given personalities and motivations. I could talk about how they re-wrote Robert Vaughn's character from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN to be pretty much the same character for BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS.

Or I could just mention that one of the characters wears a belt that dispenses scotch, soda, and ice.

And that last sentence says it all for me. I think you have to be truly heartless to dislike a movie with a scotch-dispensing belt in it.

Honestly, it holds up just fine as the third of a back-to-back-to-back showing. Is it as good as the other two? Hell, no. SEVEN SAMURAI is one of the great noir films of all time; THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is considered to be one of the last great Hollywood Westerns. BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS? It's not really a critical film to watch to understand anything else in film history.

And yet, it IS good enough on its own terms. Its villains are appropriately scenery-chewy; the rubber-masked aliens are in particularly terrible rubber masks. The acting is Roger Corman level.

And it works. It would be wretched with high production values. But, the way it is? It is charming, and over-the-top, and fun.

You could MST3K it, if you wanted to. But it'd feel unfair. It seems to know what it is, and enjoy what it is. It is a very good bad movie.