The crew of an exploratory rocket deals with first a derelict alien spaceship and later giant crabs, as they search for inhabitable planets. The film is an odd mix of ambitious yet frugal, clever yet goofy, and interesting yet tedious. The spaceship (the Hope One) is a streamlined 50's-style finned chrome rocket but the take-off sequence is a batch of mismatched stock missile-launch footage. Details are given about the ships artificial gravity and how the crew-cabin rotates as the ship changes attitude but the narrator and the cast seem to mix up galaxies and solar systems to a point at which much of the 'astro-talk' is nonsensical (even by B-genre standards). Finding an ostensibly abandoned alien spaceship only to be surprised by a lone survivor is sci-fi gold, but the scene is undercut by the silly looking alien ('borrowed' from 1965's 'The Wizard of Mars') and the nonchalance of the crew after what would have been one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind. On the plus side, landing your rocket underwater and having it threatened by giant crabs is an inspired way to cheaply convey danger on an alien world (the motley looking gill-man that appears in the final reel (also 'borrowed', this time from 1965's 'War-Gods of the Deep') is a lot less inspired). The cast is fine for a cheap genre outing but the script is plodding and predictable (especially the interactions between the only female crew member and the misogynist captain, the lecherous scientist, and the avuncular scientist). Even the hoary old trope of 'pills for dinner' is dragged out in a feeble stab at comic relief. I saw some or all of 'Space Probe Taurus' decades ago and never forgot the image of the marooned spaceship surrounded by giant crabs and I really wanted to like the film once I found it again, so I forgave a lot of weaknesses in scoring it as high as I did. Flimsy execution aside, some credit is deserved for at least attempting to produce a real 'space opera' rather than yet another monster opus. Oddly memorable despite not being very watchable.
Review of Space Probe Taurus
