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John Barry is my top composer by a mile but I'm afraid I can't be with you. Starcrash the movie is embarrassingly poor. Starcrash the score is not crap. Some of it is OK. But it is bottom drawer Barry in my book. I personally think it's a rushed-together, autopilot, shallow, childish score. His poorest effort apart for the completely abominable Bells.
But I admire you! And I appreciate you supporting Barry.
Thank goodness that Barry duffers are few in number, and that most of his work is good to excellent.
Cheers
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I just watched Starcrash.
Oh man, what a slice of cheese this is. It's like, oh, would you like some ham with your cheese? It's so, so bad. It's one of those movies where every actor's lines have been obviously re-recorded and dubbed over the soundtrack and where whole scenes that would ostensibly lend some coherency to the plot appear to be simply missing. It also has David Hasselhoff in heavy mascara, looking rather like a humanized Thundercat, and Caroline Munro, scrumptious, as always. Oh yes, and plastic toy spaceships.
But I gotta say, the most embarrassing thing in all of Starcrash is that Christopher Plummer is actually acting. It's as if somebody forgot to give him the memo: "Dude, you're not supposed to actually be acting in this kind of picture. Check your gravitas at the door. The only one who gets to do gravitas around here and get away with it is the composer."
When I saw this film at my local library with its cool retro cover art and spotted Caroline Munro and David Hasselhoff in the cast list, I decided I wasn't going to look up anything about it online; I was gonna go in cold. So you can imagine how positively shocked I was when Barry's name came up in the opening credits. It's not his greatest score by any stretch of the imagination, and you can clearly see why he maybe wasn't straining to exhaust himself creatively on this one, but it's still far, far better than the film deserves, and there are surprisingly some moments of true musical gravitas, for instance: the death of Marjoe or the suicide run of the floating city. #spoileralert
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the score is the similarities to the yet-to-be-composed Moonraker and Until September. You know, Moonraker may not exactly be in the higher echelon of James Bond films as far as quality's concerned, but when you compare it with Starcrash just the year before, it's actually completely understandable how Barry would be inspired to write his magnificent 007 space opus. I mean, you ever just imagine Barry sitting there, appearing deep in thought with a fist curled before his mouth as he watches the rough cut of a film like Starcrash, and picture what he must be thinking: "You gotta be ****ing kidding me. Oh well, I'll build them a gold-plated flusher for their toilet if they really want me to."
Anyway, with all the talent attached, Starcrash is at least enjoyably really bad. I won't necessarily go out of my way to find this score––at least not immediately––or watch Starcrash again any time in the foreseeable future, but I might seek out more films with Caroline Munro from the same time period. 
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I encountered this film as a ten-year-old and LOVED it because it gave me more space opera and therefore made the wait between more STAR WARS movies tolerable for me.
Also, STAR WARS and JAMES BOND had turned me into a film score fan, and to find out that Mr. 007 Barry had scored this film I was immediately hooked. It was the time when little record shops actually offered soundtrack LPs, and when I asked my father to look for STAR CRASH and he actually got a copy and brought it home I was ecstatic.
Therefore, I will not say a bad word about the film or the score.
Having bought the blu-ray a couple of years ago and re-watched the movie now I must snicker at it constantly. But still, I find it enjoyable, being able to watch it through the eyes of the ten-year-old I was.
The score holds up much better, of course, and the main themes are pretty, pretty good.
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I posted my original comments ten years ago.
I still say it's one of the poorest scores by John Barry, but I'm enough of a sucker for John Barry's writing style to own the CD and play it from time to time. In other words, as I read my original comments, I'm thinking: I wouldn't be quite that harsh today. It's an unrefined creation for sure and I'm more likely to hide it than play to anyone I'm 'selling' John Barry to, but it does have some Moonraker-esque moments and the bottom line is it does get play time.
I also own the film on Blu-Ray and, again, I still say the film is BAAAAD, but, again, maybe I was too harsh ten years ago. I can watch it and have a good time, it's just I think I have a good time with it for all the wrong reasons.
Cheers
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The score isn't one of Barry's best, but it's still Barry. And it has its moments — the “Launch Adrift” cue is a gorgeous piece of music by any estimation.
I caught a good portion of this film on television many, many years ago. I found it very silly, but entertaining.
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Before the dark times. Before the Empire.
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Since Tango resurrected this after nearly 9 1/2 years lying neglected, let me just say that when I bought the CD with it and Barry's "Until September" many many years ago, I was never able to get past a few seconds of "Starcrash" -- it seemed like an assault on my ears. But I'm a bit more broadminded these days, so will try to force myself to listen to more of it and see if any of it grows on me!
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I saw this film when it opened in New York, MAY 1979, and the audience tore it apart, I didn't think to much of it, but I took the main theme melody with me from BARRY and hummed it all the way home.
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But then there's Christopher Plummer. What on earth was he thinking?
“Paycheck + paid trip to Italy.”
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