209. Silver Needle in the Sky

209. Silver Needle in the Sky (1954)
Director: Hollingsworth Morse
Writer: Fritz Blocki
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

Rocky Jones, Space Ranger blah blah blah blah. His crew yadda yadda yadda until phhhbt phhhbt, phhhbt-phhhbt-phhhbt. Cleolanta dispatches argle bargle poot poot poot, but they don’t realize Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Zzzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZZZZZzzzzzzz and thus the day is saved.

I can’t pretend to care about Rocky Jones movies anymore, and I was barely pretending to care the last time I wrote about them. This is the sixth Rocky Jones movie I’ve watched, and the fifth in the series, not that watching them out of order makes any difference. The production order, by the way, is Beyond the Moon, Gypsy Moon, Menace From Outer Space, Manhunt in Space, Silver Needle in the Sky, and Crash of the Moons. I hope there aren’t any more in these sets because I honestly don’t know if I can take another one.

The plot is pretty meaningless: the United Worlds sets up a conference of scientists, Cleolanta’s planet isn’t invited and she takes it as an insult so she sends her loyal servant to kidnap the head scientist. He does and manages to capture Rocky Jones as well, but one of Cleolanta’s other flunkies screws things up by trying to double-cross Cleolanta’s second and make him look bad.

Rocky and the scientists are trapped in a conference room with a timed lock so they’ll escape in three hours. The flunky, though, turns off the air supply so they’ll all suffocate. “Fortunately,” Bobby, the junior adventurekateer who’s always traveling with Rocky, is able to fit through the air vent, knock the grate in the control room free with his head (yeah, a major plot point involves a child banging his own head against a wall), and save the day. Cleolanta locks both her servant and the flunky up together for a few months so they can fight it out. THE END.

The more I watch these movies, the less there is to see. This one dragged even though I was literally watching it on fast-forward. I set VLC to play it back at the fastest speed where I could still understand the dialogue, and, even then, scenes dragged with nothing going on. My criticisms, by the way, aren’t an issue of elements not aging well or the movie being made in a different culture, the producers themselves didn’t try.

The movie opens, not with the movie’s title card, but the serial’s title card including the “Chapter 1” subtitle. At the end, the announcer, who was presumably present in every TV broadcast but hasn’t been present in any of these movie edits, pops in to encourage kids to tune in again next week. They didn’t even bother to sort that out.

Obviously, this isn’t a recommend. I’m trying to figure out if it’s the worst Rocky Jones movie I’ve seen so far. It has its fair share of “the goddamn kid,” but I’m not sure it’s as annoying as The Gypsy Moon which is framed around Bobby not wanting to read and then seeing parallels to The Odyssey in everything. As slow as this movie is, that one grinds to a halt over and over again to let Bobby monologue about The Odyssey and how it compares to their own adventure. As with all the others, this is under copyright protecting us all from accidentally coming across it.