A hilariously cheesy Italian science fiction film, commonly known as a "space opera", in which overacting astro-nuts bite and chew their lips in fear whilst surrounded by appalling special effects work. The man behind this madness is Antonio Margheriti, one of Italy's most prolific cult movie directors and the man who gave us SPACE MEN and the same year's superior sci-fi effort, WILD WILD PLANET. This movie's charm comes from the horrendously tacky special effects, which really are poor even for the year in which this film was made, and the melodramatic acting of the participants involved which is all sweaty earnest and deadly seriousness without a hint of humour anywhere. This is a film where two rival macho men duke it out in the confines of a spaceship, where men are broken by news of their loved ones' death, where stock footage of natural disasters is sure to pop up in an instant to remind us of the danger that Earth is supposedly in.
Opening with a hilarious mock-serious voice-over explaining the plot's events to us, our first sight is of a couple of model spaceships lifting off with the aid of what appears to be a sparkler. Immediately after this we're treated to a shot of one of Margheriti's favourite film elements, the miniature city, a space-port full of Matchbox cars driving to and fro and a spaceship circling around overhead as if spun by a wire - Margheriti probably stole some toys from his kids for 'models'. A furrow-browed scientist says "We've got to get at the explanation for these astroloidal manifestations" (just one of the movie's many humorous lines of dialogue, other priceless examples being "I'm a light year ahead of you!" and one of the nastiest outer-space insults out there - the dreaded "HELIUM HEAD!") so this is basically an excuse to send a bunch of stuffy actors out into space. Headed by the so-wooden-it's-untrue Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (or Jack Stuart, as the English-speaking version calls him), himself a regular in Italian cinema but usually unnoticed, you won't recognise any of these Italian stars and for good reason. Let's just say that these guys make the actors in Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES look like they deserve Oscar nods.
After lots of padding and larking about in space, in which space-suited men are propelled around on visible wires and elastic to give the impression of zero gravity, an evil planet (!) is pinpointed as the cause of Earth's destruction so the toy spaceships land. Oops, one crashes into what looks like a bowl of raspberry jam (I think it's supposed to be magma) and sinks, soon followed by a toy action-man who also loses his footing and dies in the dessert. In the film's funniest scene, toy men zoom around in space unrealistically and at a fair speed. Finally they land on the surface and decide to set charges on the planet to blow it to smithereens in a plot point later "borrowed" in 1998's Armageddon. In a weird, dream-like sequence, the astronauts venture into a red-lit underground chasm full of bits of tubing and pipes which splatter blood-like liquid when axed (somehow this planet is supposed to be "alive") Actually this sequence deserves a recommendation as being pretty spooky and it has a distinct visual style all of its own; a cut-price vision of Hell that almost works.
After being repeatedly menaced by dry-ice at every interval, one man is attacked by a tube and fatally wounded, leaving the others to escape just in time as he blows the place (not before lots of tension-inducing shots of the big-wigs sweating back on Earth, debating whether to give the command or not) in another spectacularly bad special effects shot. Things are closed off by an epilogue brimming with pathos, in which Stuart tells the orphaned boy of one of the deceased space men not to forget that his dad was responsible for "saving our Universe". It nearly brings a tear to the eye - of mirth that is. I've not been very kind to this movie's special effects but to be honest they're what makes it mostly watchable - without them it certainly would be a lot stuffier and lacking in interest. With them, it's just another in a long line of unintentionally funny Italian epics from an era sadly long-gone.
Opening with a hilarious mock-serious voice-over explaining the plot's events to us, our first sight is of a couple of model spaceships lifting off with the aid of what appears to be a sparkler. Immediately after this we're treated to a shot of one of Margheriti's favourite film elements, the miniature city, a space-port full of Matchbox cars driving to and fro and a spaceship circling around overhead as if spun by a wire - Margheriti probably stole some toys from his kids for 'models'. A furrow-browed scientist says "We've got to get at the explanation for these astroloidal manifestations" (just one of the movie's many humorous lines of dialogue, other priceless examples being "I'm a light year ahead of you!" and one of the nastiest outer-space insults out there - the dreaded "HELIUM HEAD!") so this is basically an excuse to send a bunch of stuffy actors out into space. Headed by the so-wooden-it's-untrue Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (or Jack Stuart, as the English-speaking version calls him), himself a regular in Italian cinema but usually unnoticed, you won't recognise any of these Italian stars and for good reason. Let's just say that these guys make the actors in Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES look like they deserve Oscar nods.
After lots of padding and larking about in space, in which space-suited men are propelled around on visible wires and elastic to give the impression of zero gravity, an evil planet (!) is pinpointed as the cause of Earth's destruction so the toy spaceships land. Oops, one crashes into what looks like a bowl of raspberry jam (I think it's supposed to be magma) and sinks, soon followed by a toy action-man who also loses his footing and dies in the dessert. In the film's funniest scene, toy men zoom around in space unrealistically and at a fair speed. Finally they land on the surface and decide to set charges on the planet to blow it to smithereens in a plot point later "borrowed" in 1998's Armageddon. In a weird, dream-like sequence, the astronauts venture into a red-lit underground chasm full of bits of tubing and pipes which splatter blood-like liquid when axed (somehow this planet is supposed to be "alive") Actually this sequence deserves a recommendation as being pretty spooky and it has a distinct visual style all of its own; a cut-price vision of Hell that almost works.
After being repeatedly menaced by dry-ice at every interval, one man is attacked by a tube and fatally wounded, leaving the others to escape just in time as he blows the place (not before lots of tension-inducing shots of the big-wigs sweating back on Earth, debating whether to give the command or not) in another spectacularly bad special effects shot. Things are closed off by an epilogue brimming with pathos, in which Stuart tells the orphaned boy of one of the deceased space men not to forget that his dad was responsible for "saving our Universe". It nearly brings a tear to the eye - of mirth that is. I've not been very kind to this movie's special effects but to be honest they're what makes it mostly watchable - without them it certainly would be a lot stuffier and lacking in interest. With them, it's just another in a long line of unintentionally funny Italian epics from an era sadly long-gone.