The commander of Space Station X-7 has a nervous breakdown after astronauts returning from the moon accidently infect the station with a deadly lunar fungus. For a low-budget Italian-American space opera, 'Mutiny in Outer Space' is not bad. The film's look and script is much more 'realistic' than is typical for the genre and although the story's ultimate resolution is a bit weak, the parallel narratives (dealing with the fungus and dealing with the deranged commander) are reasonably well played out. The special effects are fairly rudimentary (images of the space station are occasionally reversed) and most of the spaceship footage is recycled from Antonio Margheriti's 'Space-Men' (1960), itself one of the less visually interesting space operas to come out of Italy in the 1960s. Although scenic, neither Dolores Faith nor Pamela Curran add much to the movie and the male leads are pretty much clichés (the only interesting character is Frank Cromwell (Richard Garland), the delirious commander who is suffering from "space raptures"). The film opens with the station being forced to dodge some space debris (also borrowed from 'Space-Men'), making it one of the one of the first sci-fi films to reference what is now a real problem: the accumulation of space 'junk' in orbit around Earth. 'Mutiny in Space' is a po-faced yet moderately entertaining 'realist' space opera - more like one of Ivan Tors' 'hard-science' OSI yarns than its silly but stylish Italian brethren.
Review of Mutiny in Outer Space
