Director: Pietro Francisci
Writers: Pietro Francisci, English version by Ian Danby, from a story by Fernando Paolo Girolami
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 2 remain!)
A scientist and his team discover an alien ship beneath a strange piece of ground. The team is shanghaied by the aliens and set off on an intergalactic adventure.
Oh, Italy. This is going to be delicious hot garbage. And only 80 minutes long! For further background on what to expect from this movie, Wikipedia says, “In the fall of 1977, to quickly capitalize on the public's fervor for sci-fi movies following the unexpected success of Star Wars, the film was dubbed in English and released in the United States under a new title.” So it’s going to be cheesy and deceptive!
The scientist is asked to examine a curious geologic event—an area of ground that shows the same effects land over radioactive deposits shows, but the effect is growing. He gathers his team and his moviestar daughter and heads to the site. However, they’re followed by spies. The daughter notices this, but is mocked and ignored. Get used to that trope of her being right and being ignored.
They examine the ground, dig a tunnel, and discover the spaceship. Even though it’s obviously a spaceship and the daughter says it’s obviously a spaceship, they don’t realize it’s a spaceship until they’re taken back down to it by not-quite Chinese spies who insist the doctor is working on a new super weapon and, while down there, encounter the aliens.
No, look, if I stop to explain all the bits that don’t make sense we’ll be here all day. It’s going to take me long enough just to describe this everything-in-a-blender sci-fi smoothie as it is.
The aliens need their help to repair the ship, kidnap everyone once the ship is repaired because they need the help to take off, and start heading for home—the star system Hydra. Are they taking the humans to be guinea pigs as one of the spies overheard or will they be returned safely once the aliens are back home? That’s one of the arguments on the ship as they’re being pursued by the spaceforce (aka stock footage from Toho and The Doomsday Machine) that the world, somehow, suddenly has. One spy pulls a gun, shoots two of the aliens, and part of the ship is damaged.
There’s no going anywhere unless they all work together so they table the discussion of where they’re going and focus on healing the wounded aliens and fixing the ship. They land on a planet where the movie switches over into being about intergalactic romance. Only the flirting is interrupted by an attack of ape men who run off with the two spies as the ship takes off, leaving them to their fate.
They find an abandoned Russian craft with two corpses in it. After reviewing recordings on the craft, they realize that, due to the theory of relativity, an incalculable amount of time has passed on Earth and it’s been destroyed in a nuclear war. The ship’s captain doses everyone with knockout gas, heads home to Hydra, but finds the planet abandoned and in ruins. They find a monolith that reveals the fate of their star system: increased radiation from other sources (Earth and its nuclear weapons which is what led the ship to investigate the planet in the first place) has driven all the inhabitants away to colonize other planets THE END. “THE END” literally comes up while the explanation is still being offered, like even the movie couldn’t wait to get the hell away from itself.
So, yeah. That’s a whole lot of movie without a lick of sense. As I referenced above, it’s just a bunch of plots all tossed together without anything that actually links them. You have The Day The Earth Stood Still with aliens visiting to judge our militarism and the effects that might have on them, Star Trek language with warp drives and whatnot, a vaguely Flash Gordon look to a lot of the costumes, and on and on.
That said, all that chaos just ups the goofy factor and makes the movie kind of fun. It’s not good. In fact it’s a little draggy since nothing’s ever moving forward or resolved. All of that just adds to how very, very silly it all is. This is a highly riffable movie and I’d recommend it on that level. It’s just so silly in all the right ways.
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