Saturn 3 (1980)

It's Thanksgiving and your guests are Homicidal, Horny, and Harvey Keitel.

Saturn 3 (1980)
Directed by Stanley Donan
Written by Martin Amis

This film was created by a trio of literary and cinematic titans: legendary director Stanley Donen (Singing in the Rain), distinguished novelist Martin Amis, and Hollywood icon Kirk Douglas. And guess who got top billing? Farrah Fawcett. Don’t ever let anybody tell you the Eighties didn’t suck.

Our movie begins inside a spaceship. A pasty Brit named Captain James is suiting up for his flight when Harvey Keitel walks into the locker room, dressed in a space suit and wearing a weird black helmet that makes his head look like a cross between a microwave oven and a ball peen hammer. “So, you failed the mental test, huh,” the Captain joshes him. “Potentially unstable,” he adds with a chuckle. Given that Captain James has apparently passed the mental test, it seems obvious that it doesn’t test for stupidity. Because seconds later, Harvey opens the air lock, and James is sucked across the room until he hits a cable and shatters like a porcelain figurine. It’s a bold prediction, but Time may yet vindicate the filmmakers’ vision of a day in which manned space exploration is conducted entirely by Hummels.

Harvey blasts off and flies through the rings of Saturn, which turn out to be composed of dust, ice, Fiddle Faddle and popcorn balls. He dives toward a moon and flies low over somebody’s skin condition before landing at the Saturn 3 installation, which is comprised of an omnidirectional microphone and some Speidel watchbands embedded in nougat. Farrah and Kirk are the resident staff of this “experimental food station,” and are striving to perfect a vending machine that will work in zero gravity without having to shake it really hard.

Anyway, in the future, it seems that Earth is hungry for snacks, and Harvey has come to help. He’s strangely terse and aloof though, and won’t let anyone touch his lunchbox. He is willing to share his stash of hallucinogenic “Blue Dreamer” pills with Farrah, however, and after briefly examining her dog’s anus, asks if he can use her body. When she declines, he looks aghast and retorts, “That’s penally unsocial on Earth.” So this film envisions perhaps the darkest dystopia yet—a future in which it’s illegal not to have sex with Harvey Keitel.

Harv starts to unpack and reveals that he’s brought them an enormous robot. “It’s the first in the Demi-God series,” he says, eliminating any annoying guesswork about what’s coming next. Then we cut to a tense scene in which Harvey takes inventory, while the soundtrack creates a sense of impending doom by playing the music from “Pac-Man.”

Harvey hits on Farrah again, and again strikes out. In order to put things on a more professional footing, Farrah dresses up like a pirate, while Harvey finally opens his lunchbox, and pulls out a three-foot Thermos full of brains. Once he’s installed the gray matter in the robot, it will take the place of Kirk, who is nearing his “abort time,” despite being in his 240th trimester. Now Kirk’s only hope to remain on Saturn 3 with Farrah is Operation Rescue. Or he could just flush Harvey into space. After all, he tells her, “People are being flushed all over the solar system,” implying that Man’s knowledge of toilet technology has advanced far beyond his wisdom in using it.

Cut to Harvey, whose efforts have produced “Hector,” an 8-foot tall robot with human brain tissue, which Harvey begins to program directly from his own psychotic cerebellum via a serial port in the back of his neck. Unfortunately, as Harvey is transferring his consciousness to Hector, he suddenly remembers Farrah’s swimsuit poster, and gives the robot a virtual boner.

Harvey tries to push more drugs on Farrah—this time, “Earth greens,” which, while not hallucinogenic, are an important source of roughage. Meanwhile, Hector pretends to be nearly out of power so that Harvey will plug a suggestive-looking hose into its groin.

Kirk goes outside to collect nougat samples, and Hector makes a pass at Farrah by killing her dog. When it then tries to comfort her by dislocating her shoulder, Farrah hits the Horny Robot alarm. Kirk and Harvey hogpile Hector and pull his brain out, a technique that was earlier used on the screenwriter.

Hector lies dismantled and brainless, but as soon as the humans leave he somehow persuades the kitchen appliances to reassemble him.

Harvey empties his pillbox and swallows the whole pharmacopoeia—Earth greens, yellow moons, pink hearts—then barges into the bedroom and announces that he’s taking Farrah back to Earth with him. Kirk and Harvey stage a lame re-enactment of the nude wrestling scene from Women in Love, then Harvey knocks Kirk out with a cardboard wrapping paper tube, grabs Farrah, and whisks her away for six days and seven fabulous nights on Earth. But Hector suddenly amputates Harvey’s hand and offers it to Farrah in marriage. Meanwhile, Kirk realizes he was hit with a piece of cardboard, so he slips on a pair of bun-hugging polyester bellbottoms, and takes control. He devises an escape plan that involves duck-walking like Chuck Berry, while Farrah tries to help by falling down and screaming a lot.

Kirk switches to Plan B, and uses Farrah as bait while he cowers behind a desk. This doesn’t work too well either, but they do manage to knock Hector into the cesspool. Unfortunately, the robot succeeds in climbing out with no ill effects, except that he’s now flocked like a Christmas tree.

Intrigued by this heretofore unknown concept of accessorizing, Hector takes to wearing Harvey’s severed head as a hat. But Kirk is outraged by this ostentation, especially on a Casual Friday, and blows up the robot (and himself).

Farrah is grief-stricken, but goes on that cruise to Earth anyway, since the tickets were nonrefundable.

So, Saturn 3—evidence that Michael Douglas’s butt-baring compulsion is probably genetic. But this film is also an allegory about adolescence, with Hector the Robot representing all those clumsy boys on the verge of manhood who saw Farrah’s swimsuit poster and felt strange longings they didn’t know how to deal with, and in their confusion killed their dad and used his head as a fashion statement.

Besides Saturn 3, Farrah is also remembered for starring in Charlie’s Angels. This ’70s TV series about three female private detectives was a breakthrough for working women, since the lead characters were portrayed as strong, competent professionals who could hold their own in a man’s world. It’s true that each of their cases required them to go undercover as lingerie models, strippers, or topless stockbrokers, but this was not gratuitous T&A, since male private detectives of the time, like Cannon and Barnaby Jones, had to wear the same outfits.

However, Farrah is best known among robots for being the wife of Lee Majors, the Six-Million Dollar Man. As you may recall, Majors played Col. Steve Austin, an astronaut injured in a plane crash. But fortunately for him, during the opening credits some government scientists announce, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” And hey, what good is technology if you can’t use it to play god? So while Steve is in a coma, he is given nuclear-powered legs, a super-strong arm, and a peeping-tom eye. When Steve wakes up and gets the bill, he tries to commit suicide. There’s no way he can afford a $6 million medical bill on a government salary—especially since his HMO has ruled that bionic enhancements are “cosmetic surgery.” Steve protests that he never agreed to these options (bionic parts, rust proofing, extended warranty), they weren’t on the initial estimate, and he won’t pay a lot for this muffler, so OSI repossesses him and he is forced to become a secret agent.

But Steve was smashed up pretty badly in that crash. Is it possible that more than his limbs and eye were damaged? Well, since Steve is soon given a bionic girlfriend, there seems to be more to the story than we were told as kids. We located Oscar Goldman and asked him for the truth. After telling us that we can’t handle the truth, and later, that we couldn’t afford the truth, Oscar finally confided what we suspected all along: Steve was also given a bionic penis (yes, OSI stands for “Office of Sexual Implants”).

Per Oscar, Steve’s first wife, Farrah Fawcett, just couldn’t handle the bionic sex, and, as we saw in the movie, hooked up with an elderly Kirk Douglas who wasn’t nearly so energetic in the sack. So, to keep Steve happy, the OSI guys rigged a sky-diving accident for tennis star Jamie Sommers, and while she was unconscious, gave her nuclear legs, a super-strong arm, a Miracle Ear, and a bionic vagina (able to withstand up to 4000 ergs of torque, and exert 1200 p.s.i. of suction without a significant loss of viscosity). They used generic parts on her, but she too was forced to become an indentured spy (protecting Ojai’s tennis courts and fighting off Vegas’s fembot armies) in order to pay for her surgery.

Eventually she and Steve got married, acquired a bionic boy, bionic dog, and bionic Sandra Bullock, and lived happily ever after until Steve contracted cyber clap from one of the fembots.

As for Farrah Fawcett, she went on to achieve critical acclaim in The Burning Bed, and later to become crazy and scary. But in her day, she had what it took to sell a million posters (and launch a thousand wet dreams), and to win the hearts of both Steve Austin and Hector the Robot. Clearly, there’s just something about Farrah that appeals to men who are mostly mechanical. Probably her acting.