Sci-Fi/Fantasy – The Magnificent 60s

Sumuru, Queen of Femina / The Girl from Rio / Mothers of America (1969) ***

Cult fans assemble. Sci fi crime thriller with for the time a fair sprinkling of nudity, and channelling psychedelic turns like Barbarella (1968) and Danger: Diabolik (1968) and one step up from the ultra-confident gals of Deadlier than the Male (1967) and Some Girls Do (1969). It would have helped if there was a decent plot, and not just a barrage of double-crossing halfway in, but you can’t have everything and director Jess Franco seems to believe that the presence of a tribe of women decked out in red capes, white knee-length boots and not necessarily much in between, goes some way to compensate.

Crook Jeff Sutton (Richard Stapley) holes up in Rio with $10 million in stolen cash, unaware that his presence has already been noted by gang boss Masius (George Sanders) and local ultra-feminist Sununda (Shirley Eaton). After hooking up with manicurist Lesley (Maria Rohm), Sutton is set upon by Masius’ henchmen but escapes in a plane to Femina, “the capital city of the world of women,” a female fortress along the lines of the Bulldog Drummond pictures.

Turns out Sununda is partial to men with piles of cash, kidnapping and torturing them until they hand it over. So she can’t believe her luck when millionaire Jeff walks into her lair. Except Jeff is a bit of a fibber, having made up the story about the ten million, and instead landing at Femina in order to rescue Ulla (Marta Reves).

The plot only really kicks in when he escapes. Masius agrees to help Jeff in return for the pretend-thief helping him hijack Sununda’s vault of gold. In reality, Masius is using Jeff as bait, to tempt Sununda down from the clouds, and then turn him over in exchange for just half her gold. And so it’s back to Femina for all concerned.

There’s no real pretence at the kind of sci-fi that enthralled Barbarella audiences and none of the slick campness of Danger:Diabolik, and most of the ideas seem still-born and occasionally contradictory – in order to enslave men women must first be taught how to be irresistible to them – torture is accomplished either by whispering or kissing, and the ray-guns employed looked like cast-offs from the 1950s, but the regiment of women, with spies infiltrating everywhere, led by the ruthless Sununda, have the makings of a warrior nation.

The movie has far better luck with Masius, a splendidly-drawn character who doodles on restaurant tablecloths, enjoys reading Popeye comic books, and – a bit of drawback for a man in his profession – can’t stand the sight of blood. While his sidekicks are mostly incompetent, they do drive around in hearses that resemble pagodas or dress in unnecessary masks and while his girlfriends appear docile they are in fact spies. And there’s a spot of waterboarding in case you ever wondered where the American secret services got the idea.

The source material was from Sax Rohmer but Sununda lacks the inherent obvious evil of the author’s more successful Fu Manchu series, Shirley Eaton no match for Christopher Lee, the most recent Fu Manchu, nor Richard Shapley on a par with Fu Manchu nemesis Nayland Smith, regardless of whether played by Nigel Green (The Face of Fu Manchu, 1965), Douglas Wilmer (The Brides of Fu Manchu, 1966) or Richard Greene (The Blood of Fu Manchu, 1968, and The Castle of Fu Manchu, 1969).

And anyone attracted to the picture by director Jess (Jesus) Franco is going to be disappointed by the lack of sleaziness he exhibited in pictures like Succubus (1968), 99 Women (1969) and Marquis De Sade’s Justine (1969) and there’s not enough style, though abundant campness, to make up. It’s hard to say quite why it did not have a harder edge, perhaps producer Harry Alan Towers, responsible for 99 Women, felt it should err in the softer direction of Fu Manchu than the overt sex-and-violence of the nascent women-in-prison genre.

Franco and Towers (24 Hours to Kill, 1965, and Bang! Bang! You’re Dead!, 1966) had collaborated on The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu as well as Venus in Furs (1969) and Marquis De Sade’s Justine so presumably knew how far they could go and decided that here it was better to rein in Franco’s tendencies. Whether a tougher-edged approach would have made much of a difference given the indifferent playing – neither Shirley Eaton (The Scorpio Letters, 1967) nor Richard Stapley (Two Guns and a Coward, 1968) bring much to the leading roles and George Sanders (Warning Shot, 1967) is not in it enough to save it. Maria Rohm, Franco’s wife, appeared in many of his films.

Towers appeared on surer ground in the likes of 24 Hours to Kill (1965), Bang! Bang! You’re Dead! (1966) and Five Golden Dragons (1967) when he could draw on a more interesting cast, better stories and more colourful locations. This was a sequel to The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967) again with Shirley Eaton and plum role for Klaus kinski.

Despite the film’s potential, the director and George Sanders it does not fit into the so-bad-it’s-good category nor has enough going for it to be labelled a true cult film. But I could be wrong in both those assumptions.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) ***

You can usually rely upon Ray Harryhausen to rescue any picture. But he’s got his work cut out in this leaden enterprise weighed down by nepo kids. One nepo kid would be bad enough but some bright spark had the terrible idea of pairing the son (Patrick) of John Wayne with the daughter (Taryn) of Tyrone Power, only to discover that neither could act. That’s not usually necessarily a massive drawback in an adventure picture, but they have zilch to compensate in the way of screen personas.

To make up, rather than periodic interventions by Harryhausen, this time we’ve got two of his creations with us virtually every step of the way – a baboon and a minotaur. The baboon playing chess is the highlight in terms of technical advances of Dynamation. To keep us on our toes when the narrative gets lost in exposition, every now and then we cut to the minotaur single-handedly rowing a ship or taking time out from such routine activity to spear some unwelcome visitor.

Given Harryhausen’s output switches from the mythical (Jason and the Argonauts, 1963) to the prehistoric (One Million Years B.C., 1966), he’s decided to mix it up this time round, with examples from both sub-genres. There’s a battle between a troglodyte (cave-man with what looks like a rhinoceros horn sticking out of his head) and a Smilodon (a sabre-toothed tiger)- and the baboon is so large it counts as prehistoric. Fulfilling the mythical end of the bargain a trio of ghouls with bulbous insect-like eyes arise from a fire, reminiscent of the skeleton army of Jason and the Argonauts. Halfway in between there’s a giant seagull, giant wasp, a miniature human and a very nasty cat.

Sinbad (Patrick Wayne) travels to the Arctic with sorcerer Melanthius (Patrick Troughton) who knows how to break the spell cast by the evil Zenobia (Margaret Whiting) that turned Prince Kassim (Damien Thomas), heir to the throne, into a baboon. Accompanying are the necessary ingredients for a love triangle – Kassim’s sister Farah (Jane Seymour) and Melanthius’s daughter Dione (Taryn Power).

Reversing the spell involves a sojourn to the icebound waste land of Arismaspi where the doors of temples look as if they have been constructed out of leftovers from King Kong (1976). Luckily, Zenobia isn’t as powerful as she thinks and after her outing as a seagull the witch can’t shake off the magic and is left with a bird’s foot. Every now and then her eyes glow like a cat.

There must have been some optimism at Columbia that Patrick Wayne could step into the shoes of John Philip Law (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, 1973) and that Bond girl Jane Seymour (Live and Let Die, 1973) could be the equal of scream queen Caroline Munro. And while Wayne had some form in the fantasy line via Beyond Atlantis (1973) and been acting since 1950 with routine appearances in his father’s westerns, in terms of quality roles he would be hard put to come close to Law whose portfolio included Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown (1967), and cult items Death Rides a Horse (1967), Barbarella (1968) and Danger: Diabolik (1968) and top-billed in admittedly more trashy ventures like The Love Machine (1971).

As you know being a Bond girl can be a curse as much as a blessing – Seymour had been offered little since. And although she would later make her mark, all that was on show here was promise, and not much of that. Taryn Power hadn’t capitalized on her starring role in the Spanish-made romance Maria (1972).

Nobody would accuse Errol Flynn of being a great actor but he more than compensated for any deficiencies with his screen charisma. Since neither nepo had much to offer in that department it was left to older hands like Patrick Troughton (Dr Who, 1966-1985) and Margaret Whiting (The Password Is Courage, 1962) to provide the gravitas. Even so, there’s not they can bring as the movie lumbers – and sometimes slumbers – towards its endpoint.

It’s as much as director Sam Wanamaker (The File of the Golden Goose, 1969) can do to keep the ship above water. Screenplay by Beverley Cross (Jason and the Argonauts).

On the other hand this movie is very much like the westerns I watched as a kid where I couldn’t wait for the grown-ups to stop quarrelling with each other or kissing and cuddling so that we could get on with the meat of the movie which was a gunfight or a battle between the Cavalry and Native Americans. Here, everything in between the Harryhausen elements just gets in the way.

Harryhausen rules – just.

The Magic Faraway Tree (2026) *** – Seen at the Cinema

Watching just one movie on my weekly jaunt to the cinema seems such a dereliction of duty that occasionally I’ll throw in a picture which was not at all high – or completely absent – from my must-see list. The presence of either Andrew Garfield (After the Hunt, 2025) or Claire Foy (H is for Hawk, 2025) would not have been enough to draw me in otherwise, especially as this was being sold as a children’s story and I knew from a trailer I’d seen ages ago that they weren’t popping up in the guise of fairies and elves, the usual inhabitants I had imagined of any magical world dreamed up by the likes of Enid Blyton.

I have to confess I was astonished to see Blyton’s name attached to this as I thought she had been cancelled a long time ago for having the temerity to set her stories in middle-class households. Though I had read The Famous Five and The Secret Seven as a child, I hadn’t been aware she had written a series set in the titular tree. Though I imagine her adult characters would not be inventing intelligent fridges nor determining to make a living by selling home-made pasta sauce, nor would social media play any part in the lives of the children. So whenever the original stories were set, they’ve undergone radical surgery.

I’m not sure how the target audience would take to the moralizing aspect i.e. that social media is bad, but that’s only if you assume that the target audience is children rather than the adults paying for the tickets who would most likely chime with those views. That’s notwithstanding the fact that mother-of-three Polly (Claire Foy) has been dabbling with intrusive technology, though she’s principled enough to quit when she realizes just how invasive.

So minus a job and with stay-at-home husband Tim (Andrew Garfield) not contributing to the family coffers they embark on what seems at first a disastrous foray into “The Good Life”, living in a barn with no electricity or central heating and the children in open revolt at the lack of Wi-Fi. Eventually, the titular tree puts in an appearance and all the magic of childhood comes rolling back as the children, led by Fran (Billie Gadsen), discover its unusual properties and investigate a world that’s half-Lord of the Rings and half-Avatar peopled by fairies and odd creatures and villains living in the sky. There’s a nod to Toy Story, the idea that children too quickly abandon the joys of childhood.

It’s not all magic, or to put it another way, the magic sometimes backfires as when the children get to make a wish and discover they can’t undo the wish. But the invention is good fun – Moonface (Nonso Anozie), the Know-It-Alls and schoolteacher-from-Hell Dame Snap (Rebeca Ferguson) complete with ominous snaggle tooth. There’s the innocent-leaning-towards-the-vulnerable Silky (Nicola Coughlin), stroppy eldest child Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), an airplane that stops flying when it gets tired and up in the clouds the kind of performers you’d find on a talent show and the greatest array of candy/sweets you could ever create what with marshmallow trees and sherbet flying saucers that actually fly.

There’s not much to the story, except believing in magic, and the climax is too earthbound to interest kids. Occasionally, the contemporary intrudes – Beth attacking Silky for defining herself by her beauty. But it’s just as well Beth is the lippy one, as it’s her ability to challenge that gets them out of scrapes, although her snarkiness is responsible for the family’s biggest problem.

Given this is gentle stuff, there are surprisingly potent emotional moments, though most revolve around Beth. She discovers that electricity comes in the form of a bicycle ridden by her exhausted father, that her snippiness does wound and that she is capable of destroying dreams.

In fact Delilah Bennett-Cardy is the standout with her expressive face and sharp retorts. Rebecca Ferguson (Dune: Part Two, 2024) wins out among the adults. Andrew Garfield is a goofy dad in the vein of Lionel Jeffries, Claire Foy the practical one.

The roster of television refugees includes Nicola Coughlin from Bridgerton (2020-2026), Jennifer Saunders from Absolutely Fabulous (1992-2012), Mark Heap from Friday Night Dinner (2011-2020) and Jessica Gunning (Baby Reindeer, 2024).

Ben Gregor (Fatherhood, 2018) directs with Simon Farnaby taking the plaudits/brickbats for modernizing Enid Blyton much as he did for tweaking Roald Dahl for Wonka (2023).

Much more enjoyable than I expected. Opening in the U.S. in August, so worth looking out for as counter-programming to the chunk of animation sequels heading your way.

Matchless / Mission Top Secret / The Invisible Spy (1967) ***

Alberto Lattuada is the big attraction for me here, being the director of World War One spy drama Fraulein Doktor (1968) starring Suzy Kendall and which has become a standout, in terms of views, on the Blog. Conversely, you might be swayed by the undoubted physical attributes of Ira von Furstenberg (The Vatican Affair), a real-life princess to boot, or perhaps by the under-rated Patrick O’Neal (Stiletto, 1969) enjoying a rare foray as the top-billed star.

While the U.S. title is a tad opaque – our journalist hero Perry Liston (Patrick O’Neal) uses that by-line – the foreign title gives the game away. While imprisoned in China, Perry is handed a ring with magical powers by a Chinese prisoner in gratitude for helping him out. The ring permits a brief snatch of invisibility every ten hours, resulting in the screenwriters having to ration its appearance. As with any such charm, it provides opportunity for tension, humor and sexual frisson.

Another inmate Hank (Henry Silva) wants the ring for himself so spends a lot of the movie chasing, catching and losing Perry. The U.S. Government reckons a touch of invisibilkity will come in handy when dealing with arch-villain Georges Andreanu (Donald Pleasance) who has the usual arch-villain’s penchant for world domination. If it’s not enough that people are hunting him for the magic ring, Perry has others on his trail once he steals Andreanu’s secret serum. (Sensibly, the screenwriters shy away from what actually the serum does in the way of helping the arch-villain along in his quest for world domination – all that detail never did much to enhance the Bond/Flint/Helm stories.)

And like any decent spy of the era, Perry has women throwing themselves at him, some just for the hell of it but others who use sex to their advantage. O’Lan (Elisabeth Wu) falls into the first category, Tipsy (Nicolatta Machiavelli), a henchwoman of Andreanu, into the second, while artist Arabella (Ira von Furstenburg) has him guessing, Instead of a girl in every port, Perry has a girl in every country, China, Britain and Germany.

Perry isn’t a superhuman spy in the James Bond mold, and he’s not forced to keep it going with spoofery of the Derek Flint/Matt Helm variety, and he’s often at a disadvantage, caught naked, for example, when the invisibility spell wears off, and allowing Arabella to generally outwit him.

The central conceit works well in the context of the movie, helping and hindering Perry in equal measure. But there are also plenty other original touches: a car chase where the vehicles end up on top of a train, Hank watching a Man from Auntie series on television, tension racked up when villains come inadvertently close to the ring, hypnotism to fix boxing matches, torture by spinning, facial transformation, an amphibious car, a set-piece in a bank.

There’s more serious intent than you might expect, a satirical view of good guys and bad guys. Americans and Chinese apply the same kind of torture to Perry and employ the same plastic surgery method to send spies in undercover. While Perry is at his most powerful – i.e when invisible – he is also at his weakest by being naked.

Patrick O’Neal and Donald Pleasance (who appeared as Blofeld the same year in You Only Live Twice) have a ball though Ira von Furstenberg steals every scene she’s in. Henry Silva has the opportunity to try out his comedy acting chops.

Not in the same vein as Fraulein Doktor but generally consistently holding the interest.

The Power (1968) ***

Low budget sci-fi effort that had little chance in the box office stakes that year up against the big budget psychedelic 2001: A Space Odyssey and the visceral Planet of the Apes. Producer George Pal and director Byron Haskin, the key figures behind War of the Worlds (1953), would later become among the most exalted in the sci-fi genre, but the cult of the 1950s sci-fi movies did not exist yet. Yet if made today, we would be treating this as an origin story with a sequel already in the works and creation of its own universe on the cards.

As the budget can only accommodate a few explosions and a derisory number of tiny special effects, emphasis is placed on imagination as the source of tension. The uncanny remaining unexplained helps ensure mystery remains character-driven. Wisely, the film makers steer clear of providing any detail on the strange force.

It begins with the neat title “Tomorrow.” As part of a planned space program, a team of scientists experimenting on the limits of human endurance discover that one of them has unusual powers. As a group they are able to make revolve a piece of paper attached to a vertical pencil without establishing who is the driving force. When Professor Hallson (Arthur O’Connell) is found dead in a centrifuge, the only clue being a scrap of paper bearing the name Adam Hart, suspicion falls on the other members. Professor Tanner (George Hamilton) is dismissed when the investigation discovers his credentials are fraudulent.

Seeking to prove his innocence, Tanner goes on the run before establishing that the main suspects are the mysterious Adam Hart and three of the original team – military chief Nordlund (Michael Rennie), Professor Scott (Earl Holliman) and Tanner’s girlfriend Professor Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette). But he is mostly baffled by the goings-on which include being dumped in an air force target range. He could be the culprit but again so many odd occurrences take place when others are present that it would be hard to pin the blame on Tanner. As the corpses begin to pile up, the list of potential suspects naturally decreases.

A toy winks at Tanner, walls appear were there were none before, a man is convinced Tanner is someone else (not Hart), a high-flying professor’s wife lives in a trailer, characters collapse under psychic assault, a young woman trying to seduce an old man discovers she is kissing a corpse, the imagery appears inspired by Salvador Dali and Hieronymus Bosch, and you could easily argue that Tanner’s academic records have been deliberately erased. On the more prosaic side, the cops are next to useless, there’s a car chase and a sequence in a lift shaft, but the bulging eyeballs suggested in the posters are a marketeer’s invention. There’s even a clever joke, Tanner misreading a newspaper headline “Don’t Run” as being a message to him.

The oddities are sufficiently off-beam to appear as figments of the imagination and it certainly seems Tanner suffers from hallucinations. And there are some deliciously off-key characters, an old woman obsessed with fly-swatting, a sultry waitress. If Hart is the superhuman then experiments may have taken place long before now. In his hometown, people still act on instructions Hart handed out a decade before and accomplices are in place such as Professor Van Zandt (Richard Carlson).

Adding to the mood are philosophic discussions about the existence (as already a fait accompli) of a superhuman: some want to clone him, others would happily submit to him.

Byron Haskin (Conquest of Space, 1955) and George Pal ( The Time Machine, 1960) have marshalled their puny resources with exceptional skill, down to hiring as leading man George Hamilton (Your Cheatin’ Heart, 1964), so far from being a big star at the time that audiences would not automatically assume he had to be the good guy, and peopling the production with names from 1950s sci-fi like Michael Rennie (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951) and Richard Carlson (Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954).

George Hamilton, in the days before the perma-tan became his calling card, is surprisingly good and the supporting cast does what a good supporting cast should do. Suzanne Pleshette (Nevada Smith, 1966) convinces as the lover who could be the cool killer. Also look out for 1940s glamor puss Yvonne De Carlo and a staple of The Munsters television series (1964-1966), Aldo Ray (Johnny Nobody, 1960) and Miko Taka (Walk, Don’t Run, 1966).

Perhaps the biggest coup was the recruitment of triple Oscar-winner Miklos Rosza (Ben-Hur, 1959) who provided a memorable score.

In most sci-fi films, the danger is readily identified. Here, you might hazard a guess but whenever you come close some clever sleight-of-hand misdirects. For most of the time I was happily intrigued, enough coming out of left field to provide distraction. This is a masterclass in how extract the most from very little.

Stargate (1994) ****

Outside of James Bond, why is it that science fiction has generated the biggest franchises? Star Wars, of course, and all the cross-over cross-under twiddledeedee Marvel worlds, three iterations of Planet of the Apes, Alien, Avatar, Star Trek, Terminator and Predator immediately come to mind. I hadn’t thought of including Stargate until I realized that the initial movie has generated three DTV movies and five television series.

When it first appeared I was knocked out by the chutzpah of bumping up the basic idea behind Chariots of the Gods – that the pyramids were built by aliens – into a big-budget heady adventure. I’ve not seen this in over a quarter of a century so came at it with some misgivings especially as the latest efforts of director Roland Emmerich such as Moonfall (2022) died at the box office, ditto writer-turned-director Dean Devlin (Geostorm, 2017).

The rather basic premise of Universal Soldier (1992) didn’t lead anyone to believe that Emmerich had a much more creative bent and would soon reinvent the invading alien subgenre. But Emmerich takes the greatest imaginings of the popular Egyptologist and produces everything that audience could ever desire, including the curious dog-faced snouts found on statues and of course flying pyramids and ancient gods with a side hustle into a futuristic version of shapeshifting.

Theoretically, Kurt Russell (The Thing, 1982), all brush-cut and snappy diction, is the star as Col O’Neil, heading up some kind of intergalactic task force. But in fact it’s meek Egyptologist Dr Jackson (James Spader), who does the heavy lifting – he even gets the girl – and who if he’d had a bit more pizzazz about him would have been a latter-day Indiana Jones.

The plot is, of course, preposterous, but that’s the nature of the beast. In true Indiana Jones style Jackson discovers the missing piece of an archaeological jigsaw that points to some kind of wormhole, redefined here as a stargate, that can zip people light years away in the blink of an eye, and in a speeded-up version of the phantasmagorial elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). And just as in the director’s Independence Day (1996), the U.S. Government is up to some shady stuff, the kind usually designated to Area 51, and has been working on its own stargate.

Quite why Col O’Neil is taking along an atomic bomb for the ride is anyone’s guess. But once we race through the titular stargate we land on a desert planet inhabited by humans building pyramids and in thrall to Ra, who turns up every now and again to terrorize them into submission and/or steal the next body he requires to continue his journey into eternity. There’s plenty mumbo-jumbo and as many plot holes, but Emmerich has such a knack for narrative that it fair zips along. Col O’Neil has signed up for the mission because, frankly, he’s in a suicidal state of mind after his son died in a gun accident. Anyway, without the involvement of Jackson, who has no great scientific standing whatsoever, the US Government has worked out that whoever controls the other end of the stargate needs a good thumping.

Emmerich has the knack of posing verbal questions, leaving them dangling, and providing visual answers, which is all you need to propel a narrative. There’s plenty to play with here, the visuals are outstanding, especially for the time and the budget, and you are soon swept into the futuristic version of Egypt, and sinuous villain Ra (Jaye Davidson), and all the humorous misunderstandings that arise from language miscommunication. There is plenty action, either the kind of advanced aerial fighters emanating from the mothership (as occurred on a larger scale in Independence Day), or the gun-blasters, or the superhuman powers exhibited by Ra’s guards or indeed by Ra himself, not one to let mistakes go unpunished. There’s a clever twist on the regenerating device, and naturally someone has to lead a rebellion, though without spouting poetry.

Despite a few snatches at stardom, James Spader (Wolf, 1994) was still in marquee terms strictly second potato. This turns on its head his usual intense screen persona, and he’s quite a delightful little nerd, and just the guy if you need saved in the nick of time. Kurt Russell is mostly taciturn and, except for being engaged on a secret mission, has too little to do, but his presence still manages to anchor the picture.

All in all the concept works magnificently. I remember being impressed when I saw it on its release (but not so taken to subsequently trawl through the later small screen iterations) and was equally impressed now.

Go with the flow.

The Valley of Gwangi ****

The special effects are in the five-star range while the movie into which they fit is really worth no more than three stars so I’ve compromised, hence the four-star rating. Actually, the story and characters are interesting enough, and there are some stunning cowboy stunts, though where is a fur-lined bikini when you need one. Although we are treated to prehistoric monsters, humans fail to have managed the transition to the hidden valley where the creatures have kept out of sight for millions of years. Instead, we are in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mexico.

However, one specimen, a miniature horse, known as El Diablo, has been found and now resides in a rodeo, property of T. J. Breckenridge (Gila Golan) whose showstopping turn involves leaping on horseback from a high platform through a ring of fire into a pool of water. Ex-flame and sleek salesman Tuck (James Franciscus) and archaeologist Professor Bromley (Laurence Naismith) follow gypsies who aim to return the horse to the Forbidden Valley. T.J. and a band of cowboys are in pursuit.

Widening a tiny gap into the unknown world also of course means it’s not big enough for the monsters to escape. The valley is ruled by Gwangi, an Allosaurus, which to most of the audience looks remarkably like a T. Rex. Various battles ensure. A Pteranadon swoops down from the sky and captures one of the cowboys but is killed by Carlos (Gustavo Rojo). Gwangi fights an Ornithomimus and a Styracosaurus. Even if your knowledge of prehistoric monsters isn’t up to identifying each creature, no matter, the fights are very well done, and a step up in terms of special effects from similar tussles in Harryhausen’s previous venture in One Million Years B.C. (1966) especially as we are less distracted by females attired in fur bikinis.

Naturally, the intent is to capture Gwangi and put him on show a la King Kong (1933) and it’s equally obvious how this particular maneuver is going to work out. That the story follows this particular angle is down to the fact that this movie was the original idea of Willis O’Brien, the special effects genius to created King Kong. After considerable development, RKO shelved the project on the assumption the public was not interested in dinosaurs.

Meanwhile, back in the human tale, the previously principled T.J. lets greed get the better of her and begins resisting Tuck’s overtures. Even if you can guess the finale, it is pretty well done.

Ray Harryhausen only had a limited fanbase in the 1960s, otherwise this picture would not have done the rounds as the supporting feature to Robert Mitchum western The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969). You can tell it lacked the budget of One Million Years B.C. because the creatures fail to remain a consistent color. Even so, this ranks as one of the top special effects achievements and these days Harryhausen’s work is much more appreciated.

Unless you are Raquel Welch, it’s difficult for an actor to compete with prehistoric monsters. At least here, the stars had decent dialog and the tangled romance provides entertainment as do the host of stunning stunts in the rodeo and a bull running amok. Charlton Heston look-alike James Franciscus (Youngblood Hawke, 1964) is a plausible love interest who doesn’t let romance get in the way of a fast buck. The role of Gila Golan (Our Man Flint, 1966) extends to more than eye candy and there’s not a bikini in sight or disrobing of any sort. Richard Carlson (Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954) was a sci-fi veteran and Laurence Naismith had appeared in Jason and the Argonauts (1963). British actress Freda Jackson (The Third Secret, 1964) plays a witch.

Director Jim O’Connolly (Vendetta for the Saint, 1969) keeps the human elements rolling along and once monsters join in the fun there’s scarcely time to draw breath. William Bast (Hammerhead, 1968) pulled together the human and monster elements for the screenplay.

Harryhausen fans will have a ball.

Moon Zero Two (1969) **

Not much that’s redeemable from this British sci fi effort. Maybe the idea of the “dirty universe” clogged up by waste with salvage hunters retrieving bits of old satellites and space objects. Or maybe an early version of “unobtainium,” the rare mineral that’s going to make someone very rich, in this a solid block of sapphire and some mined nickel. Or maybe the colonizing of the Moon for gain rather than the advance of science.

But that’s about it. Takes about 30 minutes for a story to emerge, the rest of the time taken up with info dumps and character background, so we know that ace pilot Bill (James Olson) was the first man on Mars and wants to repeat the same feat for Mercury, Jupiter and other distant planets and would rather become a salvager than lower himself to become a passenger pilot. His girlfriend Liz (Adrienne Corri) is an officious official and threatens him with being grounded on safety grounds.

But that kind of bureaucracy is par for the course in British sci fi which liked to clutter up the narrative with accountants (The Terronauts, 1967, et al) and various levels of officialdom. And there’s another British trope. Take a well-known comedian and turn him into an unlikely tough guy of sorts – Eric Sykes as an assassin in The Liquidator (1965) would be in pole position but Carry On regular Bernard Bresslaw runs him close here as a gun-toting bodyguard.

Or maybe the Brits just like a hybrid. Stick some comedy into sci fi. Certainly the animated credits suggest this is going to major on comedy, which turns out not to be the case unless you were laughing at how inept the whole project is.

Especially when director Roy Ward Baker simply resorts to slo-mo to suggest loss of gravity in space. And when the space outfits look as if they were run up by someone’s ancient auntie. Just to show the bad guy is a bad guy, entrepreneur J.J. Hubbard (Warren Mitchell) wears a monocle. He hires Mike to go find the sapphire asteroid and bring it back to the Moon, where it can be dumped on the “far side”, well away from any nosey parkers, to make it look as if it had landed there on its own, thus bypassing Space Law.

But Mike’s already made the acquaintance of Clem Taplin (Catherine Schell) who’s hiked up from earth to search for missing geologist brother and once Mike’s located the sapphire he heads out into the far side of the Moon to find the brother. They find him all right but by this point he’s just a skeleton though he has uncovered nickel deposits. He’s been killed by Hubbard and the couple are ambushed and have to shoot their way out (the efficacy of bullets in space in never explained) in a manner that suggests, as the posters liked to proclaim, a “space western.”

Mike gets his revenge by stranding all the bad guys he hasn’t already killed on the sapphire in space.

It would have probably been okay if any of the actors had shown any screen spark. But they’re all lumpen, although perhaps you can blame the restraints of the space costumes, or maybe even just the script. Oddly enough James Olsen would make his mark in sci fi adventure The Andromeda Strain two years later, but that had both better direction (by Robert Wise) and a more intriguing script (from Michael Crichton).

You might as well have wrapped up Catherine Schell (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969) in cotton wool for all the impact she was able to make. Warren Mitchell (The Assassination Bureau, 1969) looks as if he’s desperately trying to stifle a grin.

Hammer boss Michael Carreras (The Lost Continent, 1968) wrote the screenplay, and produced, so he should at least share the blame with Roy Ward Baker (Quatermass and the Pit, 1967).

The Terrornauts (1967) ***

The easiest ways to acquire cult status are a) to be impossible to find and b) in a genre piece add in the unexpected. In this case, although originally devised as the support feature to They Came from Beyond Space (1967), in an Amicus sci fi double bill, this was denied initial release in Britain and other parts of the world and only seen fleetingly thereafter.

The genre upset is in two parts. First, we have the notion of aliens coming to the assistance of Earth. Secondly, for foreign audiences, it upends ideas of Englishness. Overseas moviegoers would have become used to the arrogant upper class characters, the bowler hats, tourist landmarks, Cockneys out for a “larf”, and probably never actually heard a genuine British accent in their lives because the diction was so incomprehensible it was usually dubbed.

Here we have two very recognizable, in British terms, types – the tea lady Mrs Jones (Patricia Hayes) always ready with down-to-earth wisdom, and bureaucracy in the shape of interfering bean-counter Joshua Yellowlees (Charles Hawtrey, taking a break from Carry On duties). They provide a supply of gentle comedy, unusual for the genre.

Along with Dr Joe Burke (Simon Oates), Ben Keller (Stanley Meadows) and Sandy Lund (Zena Marshall), working in radio telescope laboratory seeking signals from outer space, they are kidnapped by aliens. Apart from an odd-shaped robot, on the alien craft they encounter nobody but are still set intelligence tests and then step through a transporter which lands them on an alien planet but one which is strangely familiar to Burke from a childhood incident on an archaeological dig in France. These aliens of the little green men variety are not so accommodating and it would come as no surprise that they elect Sandy for sacrifice. When she’s rescued and they’re all safely back on the alien craft, a greater danger materializes. Earth is going to be obliterated by another set of aliens, deadly enemies of the ones who are so helpful, and the Earthlings have to master the alien weaponry to defeat them and save Earth.

*Saw “The Terrornauts” on original UK release when it was support to “Flight of the Doves.”*

There are two twists at the end, one ending in speculative fashion, the other on a comedic note. The transporter returns to Earth and the same spot as Burke had his odd encounter, though nobody commenta on this. But to undercut that climax, the space travelers are arrested for trespass by a French gendarme. There’s no great acting and, in truth, it’s the oddball supporting players who steal the show, and Patricia Hayes would later achieve considerable fame as Edna, The Inebriate Woman (1971). This was the swansong for Zena Marshall (The Switch, 1963) and the penultimate picture of veteran Montgomery Tully (Fog for a Killer, 1962). Written by sci fi author John Brunner from the novel The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster. Score by Elizabeth Lutyens (The Skull, 1965).

This is more thoughtful than the general run of sci fi B-movies, and the special effects, considering the tiny budget, are acceptable. Had it enjoyed more success Amicus might well have continued down this route rather than the horror portmanteau for which they were associated, for by the time this movie was made, their efforts were split evenly between horror and sci fi and their biggest hits had been the big screen Dr Who adaptations.

Though They Came from Beyond Space was seen more widely in Britain as the support to Rank release The High Commissioner/ Nobody Runs Forever, The Terrornauts sat on the shelf. It was given a very limited release as one of three potential supports to Flight of the Doves (1971) which is how I saw it at the Gaumont first run cinema in Glasgow. And that was because Simon Oates had starred in hit BBC ecological thriller Doomwatch (1970-1972). In the United States, it had a sporadic cinema release, very little evidence of first run, but very quickly became a late-night television favorite.

If you accept the comedy and aren’t fussed to not be battling monsters, this is a very interesting diversion from the sci fi norm and well done with the budget.

Vinegar Syndrome has just brought this out on DVD.

The Terrornauts

They Came from Beyond Space (1967) ***

If you’re familiar with the Amicus output from its portmanteau horror movies this excursion into sci fi might come as a surprise. On the other hand, should you be a fan of Dr Who you might well be acquainted with Amicus’s two excursions into this genre – Dr Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2015 A.D. (1966). In fact, the outfit’s production at this point was evenly split between sci fi and horror and had They Came from Beyond Space and stablemate The Terrornauts (1967) done better the company might have persevered with the genre.

That these two were originally intended to go out as a double bill – they did in the U.S. but not in Britain – is somewhat surprising given they have similar themes of some kind of dying alien species using Earth for survival. And with a bigger budget, They Came from Beyond Space might have made a bigger dent into the box office, instead of heading beyond the realms of cult into oblivion.

There are some neat touches. Meteorites fall on Earth. Nothing odd in that, certainly not in the world of cinematic sci fi. What’s strange is how they land – in a perfect V-formation. What’s more their source is the Moon. You won’t be at all surprised to learn, however, that the aliens bear no resemblance to the amazonian-type women promoted in the poster.

Also peculiar, for the time, is that the scientists sent to investigate are led by a woman, Lee (Jennifer Jayne), her boss and lover Dr Temple (Robert Hutton) left behind because he has a silver plate in his head as the result of an automobile accident. The meteorites exert a strange power and soon Lee and her confederates are organizing some massive scientific project to send a mission to the Moon, funding procured from a million-pound loan from a hypnotized bank manager and the local community falling victim to a strange plague which renders them obedient.

Eventually, alarm raised by Lee commandeering so much expensive equipment, Dr Temple does go to investigate and is baffled by the construction of a military compound complete with armed guards and electrified fence housing a vast underground laboratory and a rocket ready for launch.

He manages to kidnap Lee, possessed by an alien force, and with buddy Farge (Zia Mohyeddin) comes up with a variation on the kind of common-cold weapon employed to defeat aliens – in this case the use of silver to block the alien rays, you always knew that silver plate in his head would have narrative purpose. Realizing her situation, Lee now pretends to be an alien and the trio sneak aboard a rocket and after a fantastically speedy journey land on the Moon where they are confronted by the Master of the Moon (Michael Gough).

Quite why female sacrifice was a common theme between this and The Terrornauts is anyone’s guess but soon enough the aliens have Lee staked out. And that silver plate has to be surgically removed from Dr Temple’s head so the aliens can get a good look at his brain.

Like The Terrornauts, there are no physical aliens, just some kind of energy source. And like E.T. some decades later they just want to go home. Farge leads the enslaved in revolt and normally that would trigger some violent finale but here, instead, there’s a curious – and welcoming – climax.

A kind of “why didn’t you say so, old chap” ending where the Earthlings agree to help the aliens return to their planet, no collateral damage necessary. This is probably the most unexpected thinking person’s twist that you could ever conceive – a variation on the idea of foes finding common cause. It certainly didn’t fit into the genre and my guess is most audiences were baffled at the outbreak of peace. It just didn’t go with the territory.

None of the acting is anything to write home about, but the picture is generally well done, the special effects more than passable given the budget, and enough in the narrative tank to keep you going.

Robert Hutton (The Vulture, 1966) was coming to the end of a B-picture career. Jennifer Jayne’s (The Liquidator, 1965) hardly really took off. Zia Mohyeddin (Deadlier Than the Male, 1967) had a decent run in supporting roles. Everyone is no more than adequate in roles that demand no depth.

Freddie Francis (The Skull, 1965) does his best with a script by producer Milton Subotsky (The Skull) adapting the novel by Joseph Millard.

Undemanding but holds the interest.