I never wanted to believe all the bad things that I heard about this movie -- I mean John Agar is the star, the spaceships and spacesuits look cool, the title is cool, etc. But Sidney Pink has got to be just one of the worst directors to ever try to foist a movie on the general public. There's absolutely no imagination in any of the set-ups, although the film's color is beautiful (the print I saw in the theater looked brand new, probably because nobody would order this movie except my friend Will Viharo) the film's look ultimately becomes just as dull as its story. As for the story, it's such a tired affair that I can barely remember it 2 days after seeing it. Basically it's a knock-off of "Forbidden Planet", which means it feels a lot like Star Trek in the early parts. Agar is the horniest member of a crew that flies to Uranus, as the title would have you believe. When they get to the planet, it looks just like the Pacific NW basin. Evergreen trees, etc. This cheapness is explained away by the fact that, like in "Forbidden Planet", a lot of the things that the crew are seeing seem to be created by some kind of omnipresent intelligence. The effect used for the "alien" is incredibly inept, basically it looks to me like they just shone a light through some lenses and thought that would qualify as a special effect.
Sid Pink has his fans but I'm not one of them. His movies are ugly and there is very little intelligence in them. This is the kind of bad movie that makes me realize how actually good people like Roger Corman and Ed Wood are. At least their movies had some imagination and were watchable. This movie was just a trick, I can't imagine audiences not being disappointed by the poor quality of the production. Poor John Agar really looks like a lost soul, surrounded by all these Scandinavian actors. Interestingly I didn't notice any dubbing issues, so I think Pink had the actors speak their lines in English despite the fact that this was obviously a European production. This isn't a movie that's aged poorly, it's a movie that would have deserved derision at the moment it hit theaters.
The only positive aspect of the production is a sequence that lasts about 1 minute with a really bizarre and well done stop motion animation. I wasn't surprised in the least to see it was Jim Danforth's work, it's really excellent. If the movie had a few more monsters like that, I would even tend to forgive its many faults. But as it is it seems like they just commissioned Danforth to do that one really brief sequence so they could put it in the promo trailers and make the movie look more expensive. One of the other monsters in the movie I recognized as the same monster from Bert Gordon's "Earth Vs. The Spider", cheezy scratchy sound effect and all (Gordon said in interviews that he didn't think monsters were scary unless they made noise, so even his snakes and spiders growl and roar). I mean, that monster was barely even viable in the first place in Gordon's movie. I guess they thought they could get away with this because VCR didn't exist yet so the movie might have faded from people's minds -- that doesn't excuse the extreme cheapness and lack of imagination that recycling footage that was bad in the first place entails.
If the movie didn't have a few amusing moments with Agar and the one really neat animation by Danforth, it would be a total waste of time. This movie actually makes me sad. It's a rip-off, and it's movies like this that gave "science fiction" a bad name with movie audiences. With so much fascinating sci-fi coming out in literary form in the 50s and 60s it boggles the mind that Pink couldn't come up with something better than this. Shame on him and shame on AIP for distributing it as a movie, I hope they stuck it on a double bill with something that was at least watchable.
Sid Pink has his fans but I'm not one of them. His movies are ugly and there is very little intelligence in them. This is the kind of bad movie that makes me realize how actually good people like Roger Corman and Ed Wood are. At least their movies had some imagination and were watchable. This movie was just a trick, I can't imagine audiences not being disappointed by the poor quality of the production. Poor John Agar really looks like a lost soul, surrounded by all these Scandinavian actors. Interestingly I didn't notice any dubbing issues, so I think Pink had the actors speak their lines in English despite the fact that this was obviously a European production. This isn't a movie that's aged poorly, it's a movie that would have deserved derision at the moment it hit theaters.
The only positive aspect of the production is a sequence that lasts about 1 minute with a really bizarre and well done stop motion animation. I wasn't surprised in the least to see it was Jim Danforth's work, it's really excellent. If the movie had a few more monsters like that, I would even tend to forgive its many faults. But as it is it seems like they just commissioned Danforth to do that one really brief sequence so they could put it in the promo trailers and make the movie look more expensive. One of the other monsters in the movie I recognized as the same monster from Bert Gordon's "Earth Vs. The Spider", cheezy scratchy sound effect and all (Gordon said in interviews that he didn't think monsters were scary unless they made noise, so even his snakes and spiders growl and roar). I mean, that monster was barely even viable in the first place in Gordon's movie. I guess they thought they could get away with this because VCR didn't exist yet so the movie might have faded from people's minds -- that doesn't excuse the extreme cheapness and lack of imagination that recycling footage that was bad in the first place entails.
If the movie didn't have a few amusing moments with Agar and the one really neat animation by Danforth, it would be a total waste of time. This movie actually makes me sad. It's a rip-off, and it's movies like this that gave "science fiction" a bad name with movie audiences. With so much fascinating sci-fi coming out in literary form in the 50s and 60s it boggles the mind that Pink couldn't come up with something better than this. Shame on him and shame on AIP for distributing it as a movie, I hope they stuck it on a double bill with something that was at least watchable.