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Poster tagline: FIFTY YEARS INTO THE FUTURE!!! THE MOST FANTASTIC EXPEDITION CONCEIVED BY MAN!! Filmmakers have been fascinated with space since the beginnings of cinema. The focus of interest was always the moon, but it started to change in the 1950s, and this one is the second film (after Rocketship X-M) that deals with a trip to Mars. Awareness of cosmic laws was not yet high, so the astronauts encounter a swarm of dangerously aggressive small stars (here named "shooting stars"), resembling meteoroids, and land on Mars in an avalanche of snow, so there’s no chance to wonder at the advanced Martian civilization. The fact that the film was shot in color (which was not yet standard at the time) is a testament to the austere production design depicting Martian architecture with slanted corridors, windows of all possible shapes, and two effects shots: a brief macro view of an underground city with flying objects and a hangar with a crashed rocket. While Earthlings walk around in the Martian air in flight suits with oxygen muzzles, Martians wear brightly coloured jumpsuits with helmets that resemble today's astronaut helmets in shape and size. The first dialogue when both civilisations meet is funny. The Martians speak English , they learnt it from radio broadcasts from Earth, and when asked why we never caught their radio broadcasts, they explain that they know how to receive them, but not how to transmit them. The script smacks a bit of chauvinism, with the roles of the women (all of them in miniskirts without exception, and some with dangerously deep cleavages) being reduced to rivals in love, or a traitorous element. The quick ending is a bummer, it looks as if they had run out of budget. All in all, though, a pretty entertaining sci-fi B-movie with quite nice visuals.

Poster tagline: YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT IT! YOU’VE READ ABOUT IT! YOU’VE TALKED ABOUT IT! THE SCREEN’S FIRST STORY OF MAN’S CONQUEST OF SPACE! I was very pleased with this smart sci-fi movie, it lived up to its praiseworthy reputation overseas. Of course, it must be seen in the context of a time when awareness of the technical aspects of space exploration was still in its infancy. So there is no need to be surprised that 1) astronauts walk on Mars in leather jackets, with a cap, with their face covered only with a muzzle from an oxygen bomb 2) the concept of weightlessness does not exist 3) to physically overcome the overload at space velocity, you just need to lie down in bed and fasten a belt around your waist, etc. Those who don't like conversations (in this case, intelligent conversations) won't enjoy the film much, because 80% takes place inside the ship, in an oval room about 5m in diameter. But thanks to the likeable cast, led by Jeff Bridges's then-young dad, Lloyd Bridges, the experience was enjoyable. The scenes from Mars have an interesting orange filter, and there is also an action scene in the form of a fight with a primitive Martian gang that look like prehistoric hunters (a leftover state after the atomic catastrophe that destroyed the advanced Martian civilisation). Intelligent dialogues, good performances and an unexpected tragic ending, which eventually leads to the scientists' determination to build a new ship, leaving a certain element of hope, all of this suited me perfectly and I have no problem giving it a strong 4*.

Poster tagline: TERRIFYING! FANTASTIC! STARTLING! SEE... A PREHISTORIC WORLD OF FANTASTIC ADVENTURE COME TO LIFE!!! There are few certainties in life, like the fact that one day you’ll die, that the smug douchebag Václav Klaus will continue to poison the local political climate, and that Bert I. Gordon does not change! His entire oeuvre, all his films, have a common symptom: overgrown, especially radioactively tuned-up fauna vs. man, hideous rear and front projections, sloppy effects; and this film is no exception. It’s an ultra low-budget piece shot in three days, and one of his worst, in fact. The story of four astronauts exploring the planet Nova (sic!!!), which suddenly appeared in our solar system, looks like this: during 45 minutes of the hour-long runtime, 4 actors sit in a spruce forest, with randomly cut shots of a fawn, a bear cub, an alligator (!), and a sloth (!), they are attacked by a hideous front projection of a giant ant, and one of the actors rolls in the ground fighting with a stuffed crocodile. The highlights are the violently cut shots of an iguana (that's supposed to be the dinosaur) breaking into some kind of opening that represents the cave where the main characters are hiding. All of this is achieved with hideous back projections. During the escape, the actors shoot a giant armadillo, there are brief shots of mammoths and prehistoric goats from the 1940 film One Million B.C., which do not match the visuals of the film at all, and everything ends with a shot of a massive atomic mushroom with one of the actors cheering. Forget the Ed Wood’s films, forget the legendary Robot Monster, this is an absolute cinematic low point that will have you laughing in disbelief.

Poster tagline: GREEN SLIME – INVADERS FROM BEYOND THE STARS – ARE HERE!!! Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima are history, now we are friends. This largely forgotten sci-fi classic is one of the first co-productions between Japan and the United States. It has a slight patina of Ishiro Honda's films – so the outdoor scenes, the barracks and the launching pad are made of papier-mâché, the interior design is very decent (everything was filmed in Japan), the effects are consistent with the time and typical of Toho studio; it all looks nice and the widescreen format suits it. The destruction of an asteroid threatening our planet using drills and an atomic bomb inspired Bay's Armageddon and Deep Impact, and the fight with aliens aboard a space orbital station has similarities with Scott's Alien. The monsters, elongated warty potatoes moving on two legs with one red eye and octopus-like tentacles, are cute today, they don't inspire much fear, but that didn’t affect my experience. Too bad the chase with the aliens around the orbital station stops after about half an hour and there are no twists to freshen things up. But I can't help but comment on the nonsense written by my colleagues and at the same time summarize my impressions. Folks, these films need to be seen through the eyes of the filmmaker and the viewer at the time and judged by the time they were made. There's nothing ridiculous about this solidly produced sci-fi flick, it's just that you're already a bit jaded by the Transformers and similar attractions :o)

There’s no more boring and hackneyed cliché in recent times than the constant emphasis on how much better Ben Affleck is as a director than as an actor.

Poster tagline: WATCH OUT!!! GAMMA RAY CREATURES OUT OF CONTROL!!! Weird film, weird (almost) sci-fi. The theme, a man (two in this case) in a mysterious unknown country with totalitarian elements, reminded me a little bit of Juráček's Case for a Rookie Hangman, only without the strong absurd elements. The plot, set in a small, remote country called Gudavia, clearly brushes against totalitarian systems (one of the main characters, a boy genius, wears a uniform like a small NSDAP member, complete with the requisite slick blonde Nazi patois), and the ruler uses gamma rays to turn people into either gifted geniuses or, conversely, brainwashed obedient puppets willing to follow any order (responding to the sound of a whistle) and terrorize the local population, while the small, gifted children create art not unlike socialist realism, etc. It's not brilliant, but it's not a stupid film either. There's nothing unintentionally ridiculous about it, and it meanders through quite unpredictable plot twists, which is nice. The British approach is also refreshing, the main character protecting the female protagonist is not a sexually attractive man, but a bland and slightly overweight middle-aged geezer (in Hollywood it would have to be an Adonis).

Poster tagline: WARNING! BEWARE THEIR STARE! THE MANAGEMENT WILL SUPPLY YOU FREE WITH SPACE SHIELD EYE PROTECTORS TO PREVENT YOUR ABDUCTION INTO OUTER SPACE!!! Granted, it would be good stuff to screen at a party, while taking some stimulants, but I don't believe that even then the audience will still be enjoying it after an hour. Even considering the year it was made, when the naivety of the 1950s was already leaving cinema screens for good, this is an extremely bad film. A spaceship carrying bald aliens with elfin pointy ears, led by a woman who looks like Nefertiti lands somewhere off the coast of Long Island to "harvest" Earth women because all the women on their planet have died off, and the aliens need to reproduce. Into this mix comes a downed human pilot who has a machine for a brain and about whom his creator, a professor, fears that a negative experience could turn him into a Frankenstein monster with a desire to kill. So for the whole film, "Frankenstein" staggers around for several kilometres, killing someone here and there, while the aliens abduct women, who are cast in the role of passive cowards, incapable of resisting. Since we are in the 1960s and the sexual revolution is in its embryonic stages, there must be a swimsuit promenade (for one of the captives), an occasional rock 'n' roll banger, and one scene that alternates between night and day, depending on where the camera is – the director doesn't care. Then there are the haphazard proportions of the inside of the rocket and the view from the outside, and I haven't even mentioned the "monster" (a guy with a skull on his head and a gorilla skin) locked in the rocket and used against rebellious captives. Because the director's inability to sustain the material for 80 minutes is considerable, a good third of the runtime is filled with uninteresting cut-up period footage depicting military equipment, and everything is presented so blandly and uninterestingly that the guilty pleasure potential is completely unfulfilled.

Poster tagline: CRAWLING, SLIMY THINGS TERROR-BENT ON DESTROYING THE WORLD!!! Everything is bad. The filmmakers took Heinlein's novel “The Puppet Master”, deboned it and screwed-up whatever was left. The director didn't even bother with anything that could have visually refreshed all that babble. The whole film revolves around the fact that remote-controlled alien humans attach these black, slimy worms to the necks of Earthlings to bring their victims under their mental control, but even when the actors are explicitly looking at them, with amazement in their eyes, the viewer doesn't see the attached creatures because there was no budget for that. Visually, the film is quite repulsive, the camera sometimes chooses impossible angles (someone must have been playing Orson Welles), the whole set consists of one rocket, surrounded by scaffolding and several half-empty rooms, and the cherry on top are the completely unknown and unlikeable actors, who overact with gusto. Inside the spaceship, with the floating vapour, the white-bearded Methuselah and the crawling lumps with antennae, only the toughest can survive. One star for the only memorable scene, when the camera follows the gaze of a worm crawling on its victim and the viewer seems to see the surroundings through its eyes.

Poster tagline: ONE DAY AFTER A MILLION YEARS IT COME OF OUT HIDING TO... KILL, KILL, KILL!!! I'm astonished. A catchy title, and enticing advertising campaign and posters, but the monster itself plays only second or third fiddle. I really don’t like it when filmmakers make fools out of viewers. That said, in terms of filmmaking, there is nothing much to complain about. Despite the genre classification, this is no cheap B-movie at first glance – expensive, lavish sets with stacked herds of buffalo, multiple extras and impressive Mexican realism, all shot in widescreen cinemascope, only the monster has wandered off somewhere. In the 80-minute runtime, it appears for the first time after a full hour, and until then it’s not even mentioned in the slightest. On the contrary, they deal over and over again with a love triangle, the main character's problems with finding a herd of cattle, all with rustling eavesdropped dialogues. Granted, the last twenty minutes, when the stop-motion animated dinosaur doesn't leave the screen, improves the impression with its appealing action concept, but overall it's not a hit. If you want to experience a really impressive unusual crossover of prehistoric fauna vs. dirty Mexicans, choose The Valley of Gwangi, still alive thanks to Harryhausen's effects, while this film by Rodríguez is deservedly gathering dust.

Poster tagline: THE FANTASTIC NIGHT OF TERROR THAT MENACED THE FATE OF THE WORLD! SIGHTS TOO WEIRD TO IMAGINE! DESTRUCTION TOO MONSTROUS TO ESCAPE!!! This film, more than any other, confirms the rule that the more enticing and exalted the posters, the dumber the film. The premise, a Martian woman and her deadly robot terrorize a small hotel somewhere in the Scottish Highlands in order to capture the male race that has become extinct on Mars, is straight out of Ed Wood's pen, but the potential for guilty pleasure entertainment is considerable, so I wouldn't be as harsh in my assessment as my colleagues here. There is, for example, the scene when they introduce the powers of the robot, which evaporates a tree, a tractor and a barn with laser beams, or the hypnosis scene, and, in fact, all the moments when the actress in the role of the martian with a serious face recites her threats. The way the film takes itself terribly seriously, the way the actors passionately deliver their lines, the deadly serious themes that are dealt with (the desire for family, the fear for one's fellow man, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the good of the whole), all against the backdrop of the "threat" of a woman in a leather coat and a robot, who moves slowly like a snail and looks like a refrigerator with a light bulb for a head; all this, and the idea that people really experienced it in the cinema 60 years ago, takes on a kind of Dadaist dimension. And that’s exactly what I enjoy in films like this. Moreover, visually it was quite cute, the model of the flying saucer was adorable, its landing was pretty good and the overall theatrical stylisation (one house, a couple of trees around and a glowing spaceship) didn't bother me, on the contrary, I quite enjoyed it. So I give it a merciful 3*, even though I may end up roasting in "critics hell" :o)