So last week in a fit of impulse buying – thanks Amazon one click – I purchased a 2 DVD set of six ‘vintage’ SF films for $7.

Friends and acquaintances are perpetually perplexed my by hobby of enduring bad cinema, but the truth of the matter is really quite simple. Beside the ‘so bad it’s fun’ category such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, bad movies can be very instructive. From them you can learn all about bad exposition and info dump, poor dialogue, poorly plotted stories and hosts of other failures. Learning why they are bad, the mechanics of the mess can lead to improvement in your own craft. In many ways it is easier to learn from someone else’s failure than from a work of genius.

The first movie in set I had seen before but I still watched The 27^th Day Again.

Kodos the Destroyer hands out free weapons to random humans.

Calling this film ‘bad’ is perhaps too strong. It is weak with a foundation of science that had been laid out on beach sand. (Particularly when The Alien announces he is from another Universe and all he means is planetary system.) However, the plot is actually rather intriguing.

The Aliens face the destruction of their world, their high ethical standards prevent them from invading and just taking the Earth, so they give five people capsules that are fantastic weapons. IF the humans manage to NOT kill themselves off with the weapons then the Alien will lose and humanity will survive. The movie can be looked at as a poor man’s The Day The Earth Stood Still, but played out – despite budget restrictions – on a global scale.

The ending, though adapted from the novel by the original writer, is very weak and it is a shame that the production did not stick closer to the novel’s more ‘uplifting’ ending.

The second movie up, The Night The World Exploded was not as good. There aren’t very many movies that present minerals as the principal threat. The only other one that springs to mind is The Monolith Monsters– a film worth watching.

Seismologists demonstrating proper earthquake protocols.

The Night the World Exploded starts with one advance in science – earthquake prediction – and quickly moves to a world threatening danger as a new elements building to a detonation that will destroy the planet.

With even worse science and a lower budget this movie is not enjoyable to watch, but there is at least the core plot of a story and even characters in transformation, something that is often lacking in SF films of the 50s. Still it has a lot of stilted dialogue, sexist tropes, and for a global disaster movie a disappointingly lack of spectacle.

Two down – four to go.