So we come to end if the collection and boy was the very ending rough. Six films and of those 5 were actually watchable, but the last one, well we’ll get to that.
A very optimistic view of where the space program might be six years after the films release.
The next movie was 1959’s Battle In Outer Space. now given the type of film being made, particularly SF films from Japan, this one wasn’t too bad. Earth has a thriving space exploration program complete with a nifty ring space station. (While the model maker put the windows on the rim of the ring, the set people curved the floor showing that they, at least, understood how a spinning station works.) Aliens come along and blow it up. Guess we got straight to the title. Anyway, there’s lengthy exposition – something about these 50’s and early 60’s SF movies felt that they had to explain everything and in doing so get so much wrong. Bringing atoms to absolute zero doesn’t negate gravity. nope. After the exposition, two rockets are sent to the moon to do battle with the aliens in their base. There are setbacks – after all the aliens can mind control people — the base is destroyed and the earth prepares for the final showdown. More aliens arrive there’s a big battle and eventually the day is saved. Not great cinema but watchable.
Iguana-don is not frightened by your puny matches.
The final film on the set they saved for the worst, Valley of the Dragons. In theory, this is adapted from a poor Jules Verne story, but the movies is a dull plodding affair with too much stock footage and too little story. Like 12 to the Moon, this is a sequence of events that really don’t add up to a complete story. An Englishman (Michael) and a Frenchman (Hector) are about to have a duel while a passing comet strikes the earth and the two men awake to find themselves marooned on a planetoid hurtling away into space. I wish I could say quickly but nothing in the film feels fast, they work out that the planetoid is really a fragment of the Earth knocked loose into space earlier in history and is populated by dinosaurs, cavemen, and neanderthals. They work together to survived, become fast friends, find sexy young women to fall in love with, and if all that wasn’t enough, stop warring tribes of cavemen, bring peace to the humans trapped on the fragment. This sounds like a lot fo action stuff, but it’s turgid and slow and boring. At an hour and twenty-two minutes this thing felt longer than a Peter Jackson uncut expanded Blu-ray.
