Here we go again. Another patch-em-up job with abandoned footage being taken up years later and edited together with new footage in a sadly misguided attempt at making a saleable project out of leftover film scraps. As usual, it doesn't work out, just like "They Saved Hitler's Brain," or "Hell's Bloody Devils," two notorious re-edited clunkers.
We start out with the "new" footage from 1972. Two spies (ours) in China (they are Chinese Americans I guess) find a "Doomsday Machine" that the Chinese have made to destroy the entire Earth. Why they would do this is never explained, but I guess every movie has to have a bad guy, and the Chinese were in the news in 1972 with Nixon visiting them for the first time.
This footage lasts about 10 minutes or so. Then we cut to the 1967 footage. Easy to tell the difference between this and 1972 footage: different fashions, different hair, the women wear mini-dresses and giant bubble hair-dos, and everyone's driving cars from 1964, which look pretty new. We're at some type of NASA facility, where a crew is to be launched on a mission to Venus.
After a laughable press conference (where the general takes a phone call and talks about classified information right in the middle of the room), half of the crew are substituted with women. The male astronauts don't like it, and we get a bunch of Battle-of-the-Sexes dialog that would have been dated even by the 1972 release of this turkey. (Hey, this would make a great double bill with "Space Probe Taurus," which has a lot of the same dialog!)
Pretty soon the real plot is revealed: the six astronauts are Earth's last chance to repopulate the human race on another planet. The Earth is destroyed soon enough, which eventually leads to existential crisis amongst the astronauts, more bad dialog, a hilariously bad spaceship set with psychedelic lighting, and an ending clearly cobbled together from leftover footage and voiceovers by "omnipotent aliens."
Wonder what the original ending of this mess was supposed to be? A crazy cast here, with Bobby Van and Ruta Lee (who I know better as game show panelists from the 1970's on Match Game), Casey Kasem as a control room operator, and a brief bit from MASH's Mike Farrell as a reporter. I should also mention the special non-effects by Bad Film legend David L. Hewitt, also a director of such legendarily horrific outings as "The Mighty Gorga," "Journey To The Center of Time" and "The Tormentors."
It gets a 3 for the entertainment value of its horrible attempts at serious science fiction scenarios on a laughably low budget. If only the pace was quicker and SOMETHING ACTUALLY HAPPENED during the last half of the film I would have been prepared to give it a higher rating. At least the title is appropriate: don't doom yourself to wasting 72 minutes of your life watching this mess. (Another public domain title, this flick is available from different companies for $1, or in a cheap 20 film multipack called "Strange Tales," from Mill Creek Entertainment, which is where I got it from. That set me back 6 bucks...)
We start out with the "new" footage from 1972. Two spies (ours) in China (they are Chinese Americans I guess) find a "Doomsday Machine" that the Chinese have made to destroy the entire Earth. Why they would do this is never explained, but I guess every movie has to have a bad guy, and the Chinese were in the news in 1972 with Nixon visiting them for the first time.
This footage lasts about 10 minutes or so. Then we cut to the 1967 footage. Easy to tell the difference between this and 1972 footage: different fashions, different hair, the women wear mini-dresses and giant bubble hair-dos, and everyone's driving cars from 1964, which look pretty new. We're at some type of NASA facility, where a crew is to be launched on a mission to Venus.
After a laughable press conference (where the general takes a phone call and talks about classified information right in the middle of the room), half of the crew are substituted with women. The male astronauts don't like it, and we get a bunch of Battle-of-the-Sexes dialog that would have been dated even by the 1972 release of this turkey. (Hey, this would make a great double bill with "Space Probe Taurus," which has a lot of the same dialog!)
Pretty soon the real plot is revealed: the six astronauts are Earth's last chance to repopulate the human race on another planet. The Earth is destroyed soon enough, which eventually leads to existential crisis amongst the astronauts, more bad dialog, a hilariously bad spaceship set with psychedelic lighting, and an ending clearly cobbled together from leftover footage and voiceovers by "omnipotent aliens."
Wonder what the original ending of this mess was supposed to be? A crazy cast here, with Bobby Van and Ruta Lee (who I know better as game show panelists from the 1970's on Match Game), Casey Kasem as a control room operator, and a brief bit from MASH's Mike Farrell as a reporter. I should also mention the special non-effects by Bad Film legend David L. Hewitt, also a director of such legendarily horrific outings as "The Mighty Gorga," "Journey To The Center of Time" and "The Tormentors."
It gets a 3 for the entertainment value of its horrible attempts at serious science fiction scenarios on a laughably low budget. If only the pace was quicker and SOMETHING ACTUALLY HAPPENED during the last half of the film I would have been prepared to give it a higher rating. At least the title is appropriate: don't doom yourself to wasting 72 minutes of your life watching this mess. (Another public domain title, this flick is available from different companies for $1, or in a cheap 20 film multipack called "Strange Tales," from Mill Creek Entertainment, which is where I got it from. That set me back 6 bucks...)