ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

Former U.N.C.L.E. agent Robert Vaughn plays a UFO expert kidnapped by baldheaded aliens who want to help him save Earth from a group of evil aliens lead by Christopher Lee (in a non-speaking role!).

Lee's costume (black tights, a Ming-the-Merciless-style headpiece, a red dragon emblem on his shirt front) is a throwback to the Republic serials. So are his villainous activities; he baths Earth in a suicide ray, and people start killing themselves.

The special effects during the space battle are actually a notch down from the serials.

However, as the lobby card below indicates, some of other the costumes in the film bear no resemblance to the old serials whatsoever . . .



Written, directed, and co-produced by Ed Hunt. If you'd like to see more of this rare classic, Youtube is happy to obliged.

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

On another board this was discussed a couple of years ago. Someone pointed out that all of the designs in the movie, the costumes, props, robots, spaceships came from descriptions people gave that were printed in books on UFOs.

David.

[Bogmeister]

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_________________Starship Invasions Trailer


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I don't remember this one from my childhood, but I may have seen parts of it a long time ago on TV, like 30 years ago. I ended up buying a DVD-R from Sci-Fi Station out of curiosity. Ah, yes . . . this is Canadian sci-fi at its height.

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This is another of those cheap sci-fi pics that went through a few different titles before it became known as STARSHIP INVASIONS. The other title, Alien Encounter, sounded too similar to Close Encounters. Before this one, producers Earl & Norman Glick bought the Hal Roach Studios to produce the semi-sci-fi pic The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972).

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Also, though I call this cheap, it was — believe it or not — the biggest-budgeted film from Canada at that point, at $1.8 million cost.

Much of this money may have gone towards one shot of a flying saucer striking a large building at the 53-minute mark. The building is a model, but a pretty good one by the standards of seventies low-budget cinema. The full-sized saucer was a big inflatable. Other shots, such as when it hits the ocean, are frizbee-sized miniatures or smaller. There were 60 saucers made for this! But many of these were 3 inches in diameter.

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This begins in as hokey a manner as can be, but fans of UFO stories may like this. The aliens abduct an old farmer and then let him have sex with a female alien (nothing is really shown, in case one wonders). This is the only way for them to obtain a male sperm sample.

Uh-huh

I was astonished that some parts of this were better than I expected — not the FX, which are bad, but some ideas. The alien villain, Rameses (Lee), states/thinks at one point that his people are actually descendants of "transplanted earthlings". Hence, he plans to exterminate his own parent race — sort of an alien oedipal thing taken to a grand extreme.

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Also, Earth is considered off limits to such alien predation due to a galactic treaty, so Rameses is like an alien outlaw/anarchist.

The good aliens, who monitor Earth events, are located in an underwater pyramid in the Bermuda Triangle.

I wonder what motivated Lee to take this role — he must've known he wouldn't be speaking throughout the film, just supplying his voice like a narrator (all the aliens use telepathy, not vocal speech). If I were cynical, I'd venture to say that Lee got a good paycheck out of this.

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The film deteriorates quite bit as the 2nd half begins. For some reason, the director really liked to shoot scenes of Allan Duncan (Vaughn) walking with some other character in the Canadian rural areas.

The whole suicide ray plot is not very consistent. At one point, a citizen shoots a couple of others before killing himself, so which is it? Homicide or suicide ray? A military guy states that the suicide rate had increased some in a certain area, implying that the suicide rate was already high before the aliens' ray.

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BoG's Score: 3 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus

[Bud Brewster]

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I shared this movie in a synchro-cinema with my late friend Tim Edwards (Bulldogtrekker), but neither of us were impressed, and I don't remember much about it. Maybe we gave up on it and didn't give it a fair chance.

Perhaps we had a download that didn't look as good as the one on YouTube. I just downloaded their version after sampling scenes from the movie and discovering that it looked better than I remembered. Several of the FX with the saucer looked pretty cool.
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________________ Starship Invasions (1977)


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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One of the many things which doom this movie is the horrible editing!

The scenes change every few seconds, and sometimes the viewer can't even figure what the hell is happening!

As for Miss Victoria Johnson, the stunning young lady in the lobby card below, i scanned through the YouTube video just to find the scene and ogle the the shapely gal. But I never found the scene, and I don't think there's a single shot in which she even wears that sexy outfit!

What a jip!



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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)