User Reviews

All the makings of a cult classic are here, yet this film is scarcely known to most viewers. In the not-too-distant future, someone is capturing various citizens of earth, leaving no trace. Buxom, bee-hived ladies cause a mild distraction while bald, sunglass-wearing, zombie-like men accost the victims, shrinking them to the size of fashion dolls. The pair then collect the victim's leftover clothing and skulk away. Russel plays a space commander who makes it his business to solve the mystery, especially when it becomes evident that a curvy Lieutenant (Gastoni) who he loves has become a captive as well. He encounters governmental resistance along with the forces of the party behind the kidnappings as he tries to rescue Gastoni. This film is filled to the brim with wacko, mod 60's clothing, make-up and hair. Though many of the actors are shown speaking English, virtually all their voices are (awkwardly) dubbed over, giving the film a strenuously cheesy feel. The use of miniatures is highly prevalent and obvious. (One could be forgiven for thinking this is a Gerry Anderson project at first, though Anderson would never allow some of the shoddier effects on display to be used.) The models themselves are okay, but the execution and the filming of them is pretty bad. One scene takes place during the day on the ground and during the night from above! There's also a red craft that flits around like a dangling yo-yo on a string and makes no sense at all. The vehicles in the film look neat, but can't possibly be taken seriously when they tend to zoom around slower than most people can walk! Russel is a handsome, but very bland, leading man. He rarely shows any personality or life, but he isn't offensively bad either. Gastoni has a fair amount of spunk at first, but soon becomes an inert piece of window-dressing. Serato plays a sinister-looking corporate employee with an interest in genetics and does a nice job. The biggest treat is seeing a very young and very delicious Nero as one of Russel's sidekicks. His role is small, but he's attractive and valiant. The men carry firearms (literally) that they call laser guns, but which actually come off like cigarette lighters that have been turned up on high! The music score is very unusual, but effective, mostly consisting of metallic hums and clanks. Several hysterical set pieces highlight the film. In one, a man is about to be taken, but the process is interrupted and he emerges as a half-shrunken dwarf, still wearing his full-grown clothes! In another, a (literally!) standing room only theatre shows a horrendous "show" involving a black man and several white women in tights and butterfly wings flopping around to music as the audience stares on, rapt with attention. There's also an extended, hooty, knock-down, drag-out fight between three officers and three nightgown-clad villainesses. The climax takes place in a massive facility that is flooded with red water, providing a certain amount of excitement. Best of all is the denouement when Russel appears in the teensiest, most snug little bathing suit (while, inexplicably, Nero's comes up to his chin!), showing off a nice physique that was covered up through the rest of the movie.

The mid-1960s was a very interesting time for Italian sci-fi on the big screen. In September '65, future giallo legend Mario Bava gave the world the artfully done "Planet of the Vampires," a film whose set design, it has been suggested, very possibly influenced the look of the movie "Alien" over a decade later. In December '65, director Elio Petri delivered the film that is, for this viewer, the best of the Italian sci-fi bunch to this date, "The 10th Victim," based on the short story "Seventh Victim" by Robert Sheckley. Starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress, the film remains a knockout more than half a century later. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, director Antonio Margheriti, once again working under his alias of Anthony Dawson, was working on a string of relatively low-budget films that would eventually become known as the Gamma One Quadrilogy. These four films were shot roughly simultaneously and, astoundingly, over a period of just three months! Originally intended for television, this quartet would eventually be released on the big screen around the world, those films being "The Wild, Wild Planet" (1966), "The War of the Planets" (1966), "War Between the Planets" (1966) and "Snow Devils" (1967). There seems to exist a great deal of confusion as to the order in which the films were released, and the order in which they were shot, a problem compounded by the fact that each picture has alternate titles and both Italian and U.S. release dates. The IMDb and Wikipedia give conflicting information in this regard; personally, I tend to trust Tim Lucas, of "Video Watchdog" fame, more than any other source, but really, no one source can be said to be absolutely conclusive. But what everybody does seem to agree on is the fact that "The Wild, Wild Planet" is the first of the four-part series, at least as far as internal chronology is concerned. Originally released under the Italian title "I Criminali della Galassia" ("Criminals of the Galaxy"), the film is fondly remembered today more for its unique set designs and color than for anything else.

As far as the plot of this truly wild, wild film is concerned, it just barely manages to hang together, but I will endeavor to boil it down for you...as far as I can make it out. The picture opens with a sequence that, for all I know, might very well have influenced Stanley Kubrick a few years later, when he shot "2001: A Space Odyssey." We see a ship approaching the enormous orbiting space wheel that is Gamma One, maneuvering ballet style in its approach while elegant music is heard in the background. Soon after, we meet the UDSCO (United Democracies Space Command) head of the station, Commander Mike Halstead (handsome, granite-jawed, Wisconsin-born actor Tony Russell), who is giving a tour to a visiting scientist, Dr. Nurmi (Massimo Serato, who had played a lawyer in "The 10th Victim"). Nurmi manages to disgust the commander with his talk of using living, pulsating body parts to create a more perfect human being. But soon after, Halstead is called down to the Earth's surface in the face of a worldwide emergency. It seems that thousands of people have been kidnapped mysteriously and have gone missing, the method of their abduction unknown. But a little sleuthing on Halstead's part reveals the truth: An army of deflatable (!) female robots, in tow with their bald and sunglasses-sporting male companions, have, by some means, been shrinking down their victims to doll size and bringing them to the artificial planetoid known as Delphus, a world owned by "The Corporations," of which Dr. Nurmi's CBM company is one. (These ill-intentioned corporations just might also have been an influence on the later "Alien" movie.) And when Halstead's own galpal Connie Gomez (the communications officer and martial arts instructor on Gamma One, and played by the luscious Lisa Gastoni) is lured to Delphus by Nurmi, on the pretense of it being a primo vacation spot (!), Halstead has no other choice than to follow, along with a few of his loyal buddies, including another hunky officer named Jake (Franco Nero, who, later that year, would enter the big time by dint of his starring role in the spaghetti Western "Django"). And once on Delphus, the team discovers the bitter truth: Nurmi is intent on creating a perfect race of humans, using his kidnapped perfect specimens as piecemeal grafts. And, for his latest project, he intends to surgically merge himself with Connie, to make the ultimate human...a most flabbergasting prospect, indeed!

As you might be able to tell, "The Wild, Wild Planet" really is a suitable title for this way-out conceit. The film boasts a lot of clever ideas that have been brought to the big screen with a minimum of lire expended (no wonder TCM's Jeff Stafford has called the movie's set designs "a consistent marvel of imagination over budgeting..."), and if you can overlook the cheapjack nature of the special FX--Earth's Gamma City, where UDSCO has its base, looks especially fake, but somehow, charmingly, surreally and dreamily so--you just might wind up having a good time here. The effects used to portray spacewalking, the exterior of Gamma One itself, Halstead's wobbly flying saucer and spacebound rocket ship, and the lasers that Halstead & Co. carry on their hips (these lasers look more like short-range flamethrowers than anything else!) are especially clumsy in execution...certainly of a caliber far lower than the effects being used at the same time in Japanese kaiju eiga films, as created by the master Eiji Tsuburaya. So yes, the film is better when it doesn't reach too far. But you know what? Some of the effects to be had here are actually quite fine, especially that Hall of Mirrors sequence on Delphus (a scene straight out of Orson Welles' "The Lady From Shanghai"), the destructive climax on Delphus, as oceans of what looks like blood cascade in torrents through Nurmi's installation (a destructive ending straight out of a Bond film...as done by Ed Wood, perhaps), and especially, those groovy, spaceshiplike ground cars that Halstead zips around in on planet Earth. The film is filled with bits of gross-out grotesquerie (a tray of body parts that Nurmi throws down a garbage chute; robots going up in flames under Halstead's laser beam; a botched shrinkage job on an Earth general, leaving him a wizened little person, rather than a doll; a room full of botched, mutantlike failures that Nurmi displays) and throwaway bursts of strangeness (such as a look at the Proteus Theater on Earth, where a standing audience watches dancers flit about dressed as butterflies). And speaking of Bond films, Nurmi himself, toward the film's end, comes off very much like a 007 adversary, not only giving our hero a tour of his secret lair, but declaring of his fiendish plot "It might seem the work of a sick mind; nevertheless, I've worked in my own way for the good of humanity..." The film's score by A.F. Lavagnino, its bizarre script by Ivan Reiner, and its direction by Margheriti (who'd previously given the world not only the sci-fi warmups "Assignment Outer Space" and "Battle of the Worlds," in the early '60s, but also such wonderful horror fare as the Barbara Steele Gothics "Castle of Blood" and "The Long Hair of Death") all result in a film that is moddish, trippy and disorienting in the extreme. Although I would never suggest the use of recreational drugs in this day and age, I will admit that "The Wild, Wild Planet" is a film that is perhaps best viewed under an altered consciousness. It might be cheaply made but it is assuredly colorful and imaginative, and its heart is surely in the right place....

**May Contain Spoilers**

A beautiful female alien shrinks scientists and takes them back to her home planet. Between abductions we're treated to bizarre experiments, four-armed mutants, insane victims crammed into a cell, and severed body parts. The villains wear costumes that would have been rejected by the makers of RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON. The heroes brandish so-called laser guns that look like miniature flamethrowers and only work from a distance of two feet; I've seen foolish kids do better with Bic lighters and aerosol cans. With all this going on, WILD, WILD PLANET is still a crashing bore due to drab sets, indifferent direction and lifeless acting by Todd Russell and Franco Nero. Looking at this it's hard to believe that Margheriti also directed the shock-packed CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE and, some claim, the Andy Warhol horrors. The characters in this flick insult each other with such epithets as "helium-headed idiot." Not a bad label for everyone involved with this movie.

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. A beautiful woman and a bald guy wearing sunglasses and a black leather trenchcoat seem to make people disappear. But, no! They are actually shrinking people (somehow) into dolls! Why, is never really explained to any satisfaction. There are more subplots going on that have already been mentioned in other comments, so I won't repeat. This movie doesn't make much sense, but that's what works for it. It is basically non-stop weirdness, and I can't recommend it enough for pure mind boggling entertainment. Unfortunately, as of this date it is not available on vhs or dvd, which is a real tragedy. I taped it off TCM in widescreen. So, keep your eyes peeled for it. If you like whacked-out Italian sci fi like this, I'd also recommend you see WAR OF THE PLANETS, WAR OF THE ROBOTS, and STAR CRASH. But really, this one takes the cake!

The fabulous use of miniature sets and battery operated toys makes watching this science fiction film a ton of fun. It's still a grim look at the future where beautiful women distract powerful men who are then abducted by creepy looking bald men wearing sun glasses and raincoats, then shrunk to baby doll size. Pre-"Camelot", Franco Nero is the only actor whose name I recognized, but he's supporting in this camp classic that deserves to be seen multiple times for its bizarre world.

Interpretive dances with women in freaky robes are a recurring element through this film, and the use of floating vehicles (barely off the ground) is an interesting visual as well. The film does get violent here and there but the dialog is so silly that it's difficult to take it all seriously. The photography is colorful but the film has a strange dubbing where the actors seem to be speaking English but the English voices coming out of the screen don't match them.

**SPOILERS** Dangerous psychopaths like Prof. Nels Nurmi, Massimo Serato, are hard to crack because of their fanatical dedication in enforcing their insane theories on the rest of us. Nurmi obsessed with eugenics and wanting to create a "Master Race" has had thousands of of human beings kidnapped and sent to his secret laboratory on the asteroid of Delphos where the kidnapped victims are to be made whole or perfect by him. Delphos is protected by Nurmi's army of goons,dressed up looking like Robin Hood's Merry Men, and it's there that Nurmi and his scientist are working around the clock to prefect a perfect race of human beings.

Put in charge of the missing persons phenomenon that's causing people to stay locked up and afraid to wander outside their homes is Commander Mike Halstead, Tony Russell. Commander Mike finally gets a big break in the case when one of Nurmi's Men in Black,a robot with two sets of arms dressed in a long black raincoat,messes up by unsuccessfully not kidnapping Dr. Fryd,Vittorio Bono,leaving him almost brain dead but still conscious enough to remember and talk. By examining the robot, who was short-circuited by one of Nurmi's superwomen, it's determined that he's from the Asteroid Delphos. It's then that Commander Mike is immediately sent flying to Delphos together with his two top lieutenants Jake & Ken, Franco Nero & Carlo Giustini, and a detachment of Space Rangers.

It doesn't take long for Commander Mike and his men to be taken captive by Nurmi's security team, The Merry Men, where their shown by Nurmi his grandiose plan of perfecting, in his image, the human race. Commander Mike hasn't gotten that well along with the crazed Proffesor Nurmi since he made eyes on his sweetheart the very psychically fit and gorgeous looking Lt. Connie Gomez, Lisa Gastoni, whom Nurmi by sweet-talking her,in what a perfect specimen she his, stole Connie away from him.

It's on Delphos that Commander Mike is doubly shocked, after finding out about Nurmi's plans for the human race, that Nurmi also kidnapped Connie and plans to fuses her together with him making what is to be, in Nurmi's sick mind, the perfect being: a both male and female humanoid who can duplicated itself without the means, of pleasure, of having sex!

Of course Commander Mike and his men don't take all of this baloney from Nurmi lying down and pull off their own "Master Plan" as their about to be done in by Nurmi and his boys by having them incinerated. Catching the "Merry Men" off guard Commander Mike & Co.break out of their imprisonment and cause havoc inside Nurmi laboratory and hideout on the "Rock" Delphos.

Commander Mike and his space rangers make short work of Nurmi's "Super" men and women with out as much as working up a swat. This humiliating defeat, by what he considers sub-humans, has the mad professor seeing that his dream of creating the perfect human, as well as making himself literately and biologically bi-sexual, is about to come to a sorry end pulls the lever and blows up the dikes holding back the lake that borders on his secret hideout. In what looks like a river of orange punch fruit drinks all that the mad Prof. Nurmi worked for in secret in perfecting humanity went, together with him, under the waves.

Commander Mike now a hero, he was put under house arrest on orders by Nurmi earlier in the movie, gets a long long vacation and spends it doing what he likes, besides Connie Gomez, best of all; Standing on the corner, or lying by the swimming pool, watching all the girls go by.

" . . . Chests," is my favorite line of dialog from THE WILD, WILD PLANET (about 48:43). It reminded me of an event that happened to one of my roommates in Halverson Hall years ago. Cricket seemed snake-bit when it came to opening her designated dresser drawer. It had some sort of round, wooden pull thingies on either side, just like the other gals in our suite. Only the screws holding in Cricket's drawer openers were stripped, meaning that they were impossible to tighten even when she borrowed a Phillips screwdriver from the front desk D. I. Y. Maintenance box. Finally, feeling totally frustrated, Cricket placed a work order for the dorm's repair dude. At this time, it was customary for this guy to call us with a 10-minute warning when he was coming up. However, something slipped through the cracks, and that call was not made. When his knock sounded on our door, Cricket--who was half-dressed after taking a shower--assumed one of us had forgotten her room key, and flung open the door--totally bare above her belt! She said later the handyman simply blushed, stating "I'm here to fix the knobs on your chest."