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Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Full Moon Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (2nd August 2025). |
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The Film
 Daria (Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood's Elizabeth Kaitan) and Tisa (My Chauffeur's Cindy Beal) escape being sold into slavery by stealing an escape vessel but get caught in the tractor beam of a strange planet. They find luxurious shelter in a former pirate fortress now inhabited by charming host Zed (Moon in Scorpio's Don Scribner) and his bickering android servants Vak (18 Fingers of Death!'s Kirk Graves) and Krel (Randolph Roehbling). Also joining Daria and Tisa on the menu... erm, guest list are similarly shipwrecked siblings Shala (Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama's Brinke Stevens) and Rik (effects artist Carl Horner) who are already suspicious of Zed's intense passion for hunting by night since two of their crewmates have already disappeared. Daria and Tisa don't require much convincing and team up with Rik (when Shayla disappears) to set up traps in the jungle for when their time comes to be hunted; however, Zed has a few tricks up his sleeve too and the girls soon find themselves being hunted. Will they end up as trophies on his wall or will Zed discover that woman is The Most Dangerous Game? Count Zaroff meets starships, mutants, androids, and Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, a production of Charles Band's Empire Pictures off-shoot Urban Classics on which he was uncredited executive producer for presumably creative accounting reasons. The viewer will figure out the film's indebtedness to the uncredited Richard Connell source story (and more so the classic film) very early on but the film makes up for some of its poorly-written and -acted comic repartee with some nice old school visual effects, John Carl Buechler creatures, cool sets, and undraped Brinke Stevens. Like Creepozoids, the filmmakers seem to have been playing safe with the MPAA (although made for video, both films had some theatrical double billings with the same ten prints being shipped around the country). The grisly displays of Zaroff's... I mean Zed's secret trophy room are never shown clearly save for one waxy mounted head and the nudity is not nearly gratuitous enough (for a more sexualized Zaroff variation, see Jess Franco's earlier The Perverse Countess or the later Tender Flesh). Kaitan and Stevens have done better elsewhere, but Scribner is a nice discovery delivering cheesy dialogue without chewing the scenery. Ken Dixon's direction is also surprisingly good given his handling of the Charles Band property clipshows Filmgore, The Best of Sex and Violence, Famous T&A, and Zombiethon while Thomas Callaway's photography is another attractive aspect. 
Video
Although made for video, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity had some scant theatrical play before its tape release from Urban Classics in 1987. The same video master was used for the 1993 laserdisc under Full Moon "shadow company" Shadow Entertainment and then on tape again from resurrected pre-Empire Charles Band Wizard Video offshoot label Cult Video in 1997 as well as on DVD from Full Moon's erotica offshoot Surrender Cinema during their Koch Vision distribution deal in the early 2000s. Full Moon originally released the film on Blu-ray in 2019 and a listing mistake has lead to this same edition being reissued in August 2025 but the disc under review is identical to the earlier one. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen image reveals more information on the left side of the frame and a sliver on the right. The presentation is not that substantial an improvement over what came before in terms of additional detail, particularly noticeable when it comes to some of scenes that are top-lit with near-white highlights. The encode does not fare well in scenes with fog and backlighting, blacks range from inky to crushed, and a few bright exteriors look sharpened. A new encode might result in marginal improvements but it really needs a new scan. 
Audio
Audio options include Dolby Digital 2.0 mono as the default option and a 5.1 upmix which must be selected via remote since there is no setup menu. The sound design is a bit more ambitious than the concurrently-produced Creepozoids to support the film's visual effects and alien planet desert settings with the score by Carl Dante (Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death) providing support but not particularly energizing the action scenes. Unlike later Full Moon Blu-rays, there is no SDH subtitle option. 
Extras
Extras are rather paltry with what the main menu calls an original trailer (1:17) that has actually been created using the HD master but has none of the Grindhouse-y narration of the actual trailer available online, "A Tribute to Elizabeth Kaitan" (6:22) which is a montage of unidentified clips from her films created for Full Moon's softcore streaming/Roku channel site Exotic Movie House, as well as a selection of Full Moon trailers. 
Overall
In Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, "The Most Dangerous Game" is sexy but deadly.
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