You have to admire this for sheer bare-faced cheek, if not much else: a post-Star Wars ‘sequel’ (in an entirely unofficial and very Italian sense of the word) to the 1975 surrealist-porno classic The Beast, the film transplants Borowczyk’s dreamy, off-kilter fairy tale to the intergalactic future with predictably sleazy and ludicrous results.

Once again, the film focuses on its heroine’s recurring dream of being pursued and ravished by a priapic, hairy man-beast, and the film’s producers even retained the services of Finnish sexpot Sirpa Lane from the original. Here, she’s saucy space cadet Lt Sondra Richardson, seen within minutes shagg­ing space hunk Captain Larry Madison (Vassili Karis) before embarking on an important mission to find a rare mineral on the planet Lorigon.

From here on in, things get increasingly bizarre; the intrepid crew, dressed in costumes that would have looked more than a little retro in the era of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, find themselves stranded on a host­ile planet full of robotic Jimmy Saville look-alikes and copulating horses (the latter inserted via a bit of wrong-ratio stock footage and getting the female crew members very hot and bothered indeed).

Despite the success of Star Wars being the obvious ‘inspiration’ for director Alfonso Brescia’s series of no-budget space operas (including Star Odyssey, Battle of the Stars and War of the Robots), much of the demented plot of The Beast in Space seems to derive from hazy memories of Star Trek: The Orig­inal Series – so we get a gay Harry Mudd, a mind-controlling beardie-weirdie alien and an ancient, demented computer that’s actually running the whole shambolic show.

Why this should involve said bearded bloke suddenly sprouting the hairy legs, clomping hooves and outsized organ of a satyr is anyone’s guess; there’s a point where the film just seems to give up on making any sense at all and turns into a 30-minute sequence of orgiastic activity as the cast disrobe and disport themselves among, variously, the soft furnishings and the forest glades.

With laughable special effects, glaring continuity errors, appalling performances and atrocious dubbing, this has pretty much every­thing you could ask of an enjoyably bad film. The copious sex scenes even include a repeated close-up of a pair of parti­cularly bounteous breasts that I, for one, couldn’t match to any of the three naked females in the cast – truly baffling, but worth an extra point.