ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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The Good, the Bad, and the . . . not so Bad.

The “Good” is an enjoyable TV spy spoof with Ted Danson as a computer whiz who gets drawn into a plot by an evil genius!

The “not so bad” is a 1970 TV movie with a plot that borrows from It Came From Outer Space.

And “Yhe Bad” is obviously The Navy vs the Night Monster — which has magnificent poster art!



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The Navy vs the Night Monster (1966)




Lordy me, what a poster! It's got everything — gorgeous gals, half-eaten bodies, attacking jets, an A-bomb mushroom cloud, and the most beautifully rendered monster in any poster, ever, bar none.

And there's an army of monsters lined up to attack in the background! What a poster!

What a movie! It doesn't have any of that great stuff, and the film makers ought to be taken out and shot by a military firing squad, just to keep things legal.

And yet it's hard not to like a movie with such an outlandish plot and such an infamous cast.

Mamie Van Doren is scrumptious as the Navy nurse heroine. Anthony Eisely ("Journey to the Center of Time") is the hero. Popular song-and-dance man Bobby Van ("Kiss Me Kate") is comic relief. Billy Gray ("Father Knows Best", "The Day the Earth Stood Still") is one of the brave young sailors who battle the Night Monsters (invading plant-creatures from space, ala "The Thing").

The monsters resemble huge mobile weeds (ala "The Day of the Triffids") which have acid for blood (ala "Alien"). The setting is Antarctica (ala "The Thing" . . . sort of), but the climate is a warm and well-lit (ala a studio set).

If all this sounds silly enough to be fun, take heart, it is (but beware of several gory scenes). The film was released by a company called Realart (this is "real art"?). Directed by Michael Hoey. ____________________________________________________________________

Night Slaves (1970 TV movie)



The residents of a small town are being hypnotized and recruited to help repair the disabled spacecraft of an alien crew (an idea perhaps borrowed from "It Came from Outer Space").

James Fanciscus ("Beneath the Planet of the Apes") retains his free will because he's got a metal plate in his head (an idea perhaps borrowed from "They Came from Beyond Space").

Franciscus falls in love with lady alien Tisha Sterling. Despite the borrowed nature of the plot, director Ted Post makes it worth watching, and the cast adds interest, too. Co-starring Leslie Nielson ("Forbidden Planet"), Lee Grant, Andrew Prine, and Scott Marlowe. ____________________________________________________________________

Once Upon a Spy (1980 TV movie)

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"Cheers" fans will get a kick out of watching Ted Danson play a likeable computer expert who is reluctantly drawn into a James Bond adventure by gorgeous American agent Mary Louise Weller after Danson's supercomputer is stolen by evil genius Christopher Lee.

Lee's base of operations is a mountaintop observatory. He has a shrinking ray which he can bounce off communications satellites and shrink anything on Earth. He demonstrates his power to the U.S. government by shrinking a Naval vessel down to the size of toy boat. Danzen's stolen supercomputer is necessary for Lee's satellite tracking system.

Danson is determined to get his computer back, but he has a hard time adjusting to the hair-raising experiences that result from his uneasy alliance with cool super-agent, Miss Weller.

After an assassination attempt on Danson and a high speed car chase that ends with the bad guys' car being carried off by a helicopter (an idea lifted from You Only Live Twice), Danson is so bewildered he just stands in the road next to Weller and repeats "Those guys shot at me!" several times with great indignation while the picture fades to black for a commercial.

Trust me, it's a funny scene.

Nice sets and special effects decorate the climax in which Weller and Danson blow up Lee's stronghold and ride off into the sunset. (Come on, admit it. You knew this was how it ended.)


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The whole thing is done up wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, with no apologies for the stolen ideas and the proudly cliche-ridden plot. Hey, that's the whole point!

Even the title work revels in the fact that it's a straight copy from all those fondly remembered Bond films. Directed by Ivan Nagy from a script by the prolific Jimmy Sangster.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)