Director/Screenplay – Brett Piper, Photography – Ron Wyman, Music – Zon Vern Pyles, Special Effects – Cheap Tricks Unltd.. Production Company – Horror Enterprises II.
Matt Mitler (Harry Trent), Denise Coward (Dana), Joe Gentissi (Mad Dog Kelly), Bill McLaughlin (Professor Isaac Hoffenstein), Saunder Finard (Old Man), Helene Michele Martin (Toni)
Harry Trent flees with a cassette tape containing vital information. Pursued by security, he hides in a hangar that turns out to contain a shuttle. Cornered, Harry instead launches the shuttle. With the ship’s control system damaged by gunfire, he has no choice but to settle in as the shuttle travels on a five year course around the Solar System. He is witness as Earth comes under attack by an armada of alien ships. He returns to Earth at the end of the five years to find civilisation collapsed and Earth under the yolk of the alien Izak where the remnants of humanity are hunted by mutants and unleashed monsters.
Brett Piper is a director known for a series of ultra low-budget genre films that include the likes of Mysterious Planet (1982), A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1990), Mutant War (1988), They Bite (1996), Drainiac (2000), Psyclops (2002), Arachnia (2003), Screaming Dead (2003), Bite Me (2004), Shock-o-Rama (2005), Bacterium (2006), Muckman (2009), The Dark Sleep (2013), Queen Crab (2015), Triclops (2018) and Outpost Earth (2019). Elsewhere, Piper does effects work for other low-budget filmmakers quite frequently for Z-budget filmmaker Mark Polonia. The Galaxy Destroyer was Piper’s second film.
The plot of The Galaxy Destroyer is a mangled melange of elements. The conception of a futuristic world seems rather absurd watching the film in 2024 – where humanity travels throughout the Solar System but information is still stored on cassette tapes. The film was made back in the mid-1980s where Brett Piper was clearly influenced by the post-Star Wars (1977) science-fiction film. He constructs a mildly imaginative journey through the Solar System with very low resources. If anything, the set-up of the man on a shuttle getting trapped on a solar journey and then returning to find the Earth devastated and under threat of alien invasion is very similar to the film Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979), which became the basis of the tv series.
In the latter half of the show, Brett Piper falls back on the standard Post-Apocalyptic setting. It is one that Piper has not placed much effort into bringing to life – the attacking mutants have plaid shirts and jeans clearly visible underneath their rags. There is zero depiction of the collapsed civilisation beyond a few people wandering around in fields and barns. It is Piper in essence trying to conduct a Mad Max adventure on an ultra-low-budget.
Brett Piper usually conducts his effects work himself. It is not clear if he has here as there is no credit for effects supervisor (either visual or special). The models built for the film are in themselves not too bad, the main problem is that they are poorly photographed and just end up looking like models shot with the wrong type of lens. The destruction of the Earth is cheaply depicted in scenes that consist of no more than silhouetted outlines of buildings with fiery flashes from behind and animated raybeams coming down from above. Later in the film Piper tosses in a really impoverished Star War-type dogfight between ships. There is an interesting looking stop-motion animated monster with a giant cranium that turns up but the quality of animation is rather shoddy.
Brett Piper and Matt Mitler made a sequel with Mutant War (1988).
Full film available here