Starting out like some demented Oriental episode of 'The Girl From Uncle' in which a cat is thrown over a wall to distract the guard's dog and a hapless passer-by is garroted with her own pigtails, this movie quickly segues into 'Operation Petticoat' in Space, and, when the entire world blows up and floods space with 'omnipresent radiation', shifts gear into a souped up version of the Tom Godwin classic SF story 'The Cold Equations' before going totally off the rails at the end culminating in an incredible, so far off the belief scale it doesn't bear thinking about, coincidence and an off-screen Deus ex machina followed by several long static shots of nothing at all happening very very slowly.
There are pleasures to be had here. The lighting is incredible in the ship sequences - with 1960s groovy flower power lighting effects splashed all over the place. It's weird seeing all these military types getting all macho when you keep expecting Hendrix or The Grateful Dead to appear on the soundtrack
There are some classic bad SF gobbledygook lines to be enjoyed too (some even better than the average badly dubbed Italian space movies of the period). Like this exchange between two of the crew:
Captain: What do you read on the Doplerscope?
Crewman: It's been throwing out a good spectrum - the ship is declining. Velocity seventeen thousand five hundred ... I'd say we were forty thousand miles out.
Captain: Hmm... Put it in the ship's computer and see what we get...
This is great stuff, pure Grade A meaninglessness. This isn't SF movie babble written by people who had English as a second language, or who had to make whatever they wrote fit the mouth movements of existing footage. This is the real thing. Pure Gibberish.
Some of the on-screen science is equally baffling. Just what was in that roll of heavy duty Turkey Foil two of the crew men put up against a wall that cut out 95% of the radiation? if it was that good a radiation barrier why wasn't it there in the first place? This movie also contains the the most misunderstood and hilarious explosive decompression ever put on screen as two of the crew partially solve the overmanning problem by accidentally ejecting themselves into space. Life Tip: Demented spacers trying to rape less than genius level Space Bimbos shouldn't drag them into an airlock, shut the door behind them and then push their intended victim backward onto elbow-hight Big Red Buttons.
This registered as a 7 on my Doplerscope.
There are pleasures to be had here. The lighting is incredible in the ship sequences - with 1960s groovy flower power lighting effects splashed all over the place. It's weird seeing all these military types getting all macho when you keep expecting Hendrix or The Grateful Dead to appear on the soundtrack
There are some classic bad SF gobbledygook lines to be enjoyed too (some even better than the average badly dubbed Italian space movies of the period). Like this exchange between two of the crew:
Captain: What do you read on the Doplerscope?
Crewman: It's been throwing out a good spectrum - the ship is declining. Velocity seventeen thousand five hundred ... I'd say we were forty thousand miles out.
Captain: Hmm... Put it in the ship's computer and see what we get...
This is great stuff, pure Grade A meaninglessness. This isn't SF movie babble written by people who had English as a second language, or who had to make whatever they wrote fit the mouth movements of existing footage. This is the real thing. Pure Gibberish.
Some of the on-screen science is equally baffling. Just what was in that roll of heavy duty Turkey Foil two of the crew men put up against a wall that cut out 95% of the radiation? if it was that good a radiation barrier why wasn't it there in the first place? This movie also contains the the most misunderstood and hilarious explosive decompression ever put on screen as two of the crew partially solve the overmanning problem by accidentally ejecting themselves into space. Life Tip: Demented spacers trying to rape less than genius level Space Bimbos shouldn't drag them into an airlock, shut the door behind them and then push their intended victim backward onto elbow-hight Big Red Buttons.
This registered as a 7 on my Doplerscope.