When Italy remade Star Wars (Star Crash, 1979), they turned the character of Chewbacca into a sexy, sexy woman in a bikini and added David Hasselhoff. In Turkey, they turned Luke and Han into kung fu masters forced to battle armies of oversized fuzzy muppets while on trampolines (Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam, 1982). But in Brazil, they kept Star Wars more or less the way it was and just threw in four wacky idiots from Earth.

Brazilian Star Wars opens with a massive car chase. A lot of cars drive into a river for no discernable reason, so either half the people involved are narcoleptics, or more likely, the movie couldn’t afford any more stuntmen and had to fill a few driver positions with chimpanzees. Fifteen minutes of car chase later, it’s explained that one of the four tramps being chased slept with the girlfriend of the army doing the chasing. I wouldn’t put too much trust in this explanation, though. There’s a slight language barrier since the movie is in Portuguese, which I do not speak, and the subtitles are in English, which the person doing the subtitling does not speak. For example, when the tramps are discussing where to camp for the night, here’s how they reach their decision:
Tramp 1: “They wait for us there.”
Tramp 2: “This is full of gnats! Some are two-story tall.”

While the tramps are sleeping, a turtle with a candle stuck to its back wanders through their camp. Two of the tramps seem to think this is as strange as I do, but both of them go back to sleep hoping this supernatural horror will go away. Then the turtle waddles by and lights the third tramp on fire. While he’s running in circles and burning alive, it becomes clear that language barrier or not, this is going to be a seriously confusing movie.

Prince Flik (the Brazilian Luke Skywalker) comes out of his spaceship and tells the four bumbling idiots, one of whom was just nearly killed by a turtle, that he needs their expert help in retrieving half of the “brain computer.” Apparently, the mercenaries on Flik’s planet don’t slip on enough banana peels to be effective against the forces of evil.

The group boards the spaceship and meets Chewbacca. He and Flik have a long discussion in their alien language which, according my limited space linguistics, is just Portuguese played backwards. They paw at randomly flashing lights, which even in South America, are standard on all cinematic spaceship consoles. Meanwhile, the hobos use this time to fall over many times. To give you a mathematical idea of how torturous this movie is, I’ve broken down what’s gone on so far into statistical form:

Total amount of time spent in wildly pointless car chases: 14 minutes.

Total amount of time spent punching flashing lights and speaking backwards gibberish during a launch sequence: Nine minutes.

Total amount of time needed to explain the plot and convince four Earth tramps to engage in a suicidal brain computer battle against the dark army of Zuco: 90 seconds.

When the heroes get to Flik’s planet, the first thing they see is an army of Jawas attacking a group of Sand People outside some stone igloos. They land the ship and rush to the rescue, but during the brawl they forget which side they’re helping and beat the hell out of any alien that gets near them. For added drama, the film switches to super-slow motion every time one of them does a spectacular move like kicking clumsily or shoving someone into the sand. This technique is so overused that the fight drags out longer than the spastic disco song they use for background music and the last few minutes of the fight take place in silence.

During the thirtieth or fortieth minute of the fight, the Brazilian Darth Vader (Zuco) drags Princess Myrna from one of the stone igloos and escapes over a sand dune. As he steals her away in what looks like a flying bedpan, the rest of the aliens flee from the onslaught of wacky antics dished out by the tramps and Chewbacca. However, one stays behind to blow up an igloo with hand grenades. And since there hasn’t been a word of dialogue in twenty minutes, not even Brazilian viewers would have any idea what the point of that was.

The explosion, although pointless, does have an interesting side effect – it causes four hot ladies to appear. Flik maybe demands that the tramps ignore the babes to go rescue Princess Myrna, but it’s hard to tell since half of his dialogue is in backwards space-Portuguese and the subtitles to his regular Portuguese have reached a crescendo of madness. For example, when Didi, the oldest tramp, tries to drag the others away from the babes, they respond with the following comments: “Mine, strawberry flavored,” and “Leave the change in the drawer.”

The ten of them leave for the Star Wars bar in a jeep and a huge floating power drill with a convertible top. When they arrive, they somehow use only their sassy Earth attitude to magically replace the dance floor’s chirpy future music with good old-fashioned Brazilian disco. And for reasons we may never understand, the tramps pick a fight when the aliens start disco dancing. It’s about here where the rigors of space travel destroy the last remnants of the tramps’ sanity. They constantly stop fighting the bar creatures to choke each other or kick pillows across the room. Meanwhile, Didi goes outside to buy laser guns. While testing them, he murders five people, blows up Prince Flik’s flying power drill, and when he finds he doesn’t have enough money to buy the guns, kills the gun salesman. Ha ha h— you know, maybe it’s just me, but the comedic value of slapstick humor starts to deteriorate once it goes from head-slapping to physical disintegration.

Although already legally retarded, the film completely loses its focus after the cantina scene. While they search for Zuco, they run into random dangers like invisible men, flying fruit, a giant tarantula and a baby birdman. Each problem is solved in the same way – panicking, then going in the opposite direction of the menace. Although painfully long, all this searching is a total waste of time, because Zuco eventually just sends them an invitation to meet. The good guys are to come unarmed and exchange their half of the brain computer for the captive princess, but both sides end up tricking each other. The bad guys get a trunk with Didi hiding inside it while the good guys get a little green alien in a princess mask.

In the making of the final fight scene, the filmmakers use all the ineptitude at their disposal. Bad karate, a near-obsessive overuse of the slow-motion effect, costumes that fall apart, and antics about as funny as getting colon cancer and attacked by a bear at the same time. At the beginning of the fight, Didi freeze-rays Darth Vader and spends the next twenty minutes screwing around with his frozen body. So while everyone else is engaged in a terrifying hand-to-hand battle with Imperial soldiers for their very lives, the only good guy with a laser gun is putting funny hats on the disabled main villain and pretending to dance with him.

So far, the film has been a happy tale of idiocy and random violence. Unfortunately, it ends in tragedy. According to Zuco, Princess Myrna is gone. While his men were making a mold of her face to create the princess mask, “she disappeared.” Okay, so she disa— wait, what? Evidently, when you’re making space masks, human-vaporization accidents are common enough that Prince Flik doesn’t seem surprised. Here’s where it gets really tragic, though: According to planetary law, a mask-related disintegration means that Didi’s woman Loya has to take Princess Myrna’s place as Flik’s girlfriend. Okay, that makes sen— wait, what? Without a word, she leaves Didi’s lap and begins consummating this new relationship right in front of Didi. Didi watches them make out for a few minutes then leaves for Earth with his fellow tramps, crying tears of confusion and betrayal.

Os Trapalhões na Guerra Dos Planetas showed us all how wide the comedy barrier is between the people of North and South America. While we prefer people humping pies, most of the jokes in Brazil seem to be someone dancing where one would normally not be expected to dance or physically maiming someone. But even considering our culture’s vastly different views of hilarity, after two movies starring Jar Jar Binks, I still say the Brazilians are funnier than George Lucas.

Didi insults the other tramps, I think.

Didi finds a giant egg and imagines the omelette he’s going to ...

but inside he finds...

CAWW!!! CAWWW! ...the deadly dangers of Brazilian outer space!

And listen! The Silent Moon Creatures!

Didi stops running from a giant tarantula to come back and shake his groin at it. I dare not speculate why.