Science Fiction Pint and Pizza Night featuring The Last Starfighter (1984)
6 PM to 10 PM
All ages
FREE with minimum $5 food or beverage purchase
Beer and Pizza specials all night long
The best in B science fictions movies, drive-in classics, psychotronic weirdness and more. We’ll also do raffle prizes throughout the evening so expect some very cool, very strange science fiction prizes including figurines, posters, books, cards, VHS movies and more for that inner science fiction enthusiast in us all. Sponsored by La Dolce Video, The Arcata Eye, Daisy Drygoods, Vintage Avenger, Tin Can Mailman, The Clothing Dock and more.
In his wildest dreams Alex never suspected that tonight he would become…The Last Starfighter
The Last Starfighter (1984) is a science fiction adventure film directed by Nick Castle. Trailer-park teenager Lance Guest regularly escapes from his humdrum existence by playing the video game Starfighter. His expertise at this recreational endeavor attracts the attention of affable stranger Robert Preston. Before he knows what’s happening, Guest is whisked by Preston into the outer reaches of the galaxy! It turns out that the Starfighter game is being played in deadly earnest in outer space, and that Guest is expected to join Preston’s Star League, then do battle with the wicked Kodan forces. Guest’s principal ally is the lizardlike Grig (Dan O’Herlihy). His great rival is the traitorous Xur (Norman Snow). The contrast between Guest’s earthbound life as the son of single-mother Barbara Bosson and his new position as Starfighter is daunting at first, but soon the boy is manning a spacecraft and zapping the baddies as though he’s been doing it all his life. The Last Starfighter was clearly designed with “sequel” in mind: giveaways include the resurrection of a “dead” character and the surprisingly casual escape of the villain. While the film didn’t stir up enough business to warrant a sequel, the Starfighter video game remained a much-sought-after commodity by joystick-happy “warriors” all over the country.
The gigantic battle! – which race will win … and rule the universe?
Battle Beyond the Sun (1959) is a Soviet science fiction film directed by Mikhail Karyukov and Aleksandr Kozyr. Roger Corman and future super director Francis Ford Coppola (using the pseudonym Thomas Colchart) are behind this sci-fi adventure of two warring hemispheres competing to be the first on Mars. Instead, they end up lost and landing on a small moon where monsters (suspiciously shaped like male and female genitalia) constantly battle it out. The bulk of the scenes come from the Soviet sci-fi adventure Nebo Zovyot, which Corman had purchased a few years before. He dropped the cold-war aspects and assigned young Coppola to rewrite, edit and produce the film. The Soviet cast was given “American” names like “Edd Perry” and “Andy Stewart”.