Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Blucher One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Richard Chatten For every asset this film set in the year 2116 has there's an equal and opposite liability. The interiors of the rocket look great, but the model work is awful. The script attempts to be intelligent and unsensational but is wordy, dull, trite and leadenly humourless, with reporter Ray Peterson (Rick von Nutter) constantly narrating on the soundtrack things we should be shown, or - worse still - already are being shown. It opens promisingly enough with the crew being awoken from suspended animation as at the start of 'Alien'; the first crew member we see being Archie Savage as 'Al' - with his striking mane of white hair - who is tall, handsome, intelligent and noble and the fact that he's black is never mentioned. So far so good, but when Ray gets defrosted he gets the obligatory chilly welcome from the ship's commander and most of the rest of the crew - who call him a parasite to his face - and we're forced to fidget impatiently through half the film's duration before finally reaching the usual grudging respect bit we all knew was coming. Ray expresses the usual open-mouthed astonishment all newly arrived hunks do at finding that one of the crew members is "a girl!" (his word) and as usual they fall in love. Fortunately the radar operator at the interplanetary base on Venus is also a women (played by Anita Todesco) shown just doing her job without any of the men being obliged to fall head over heels in love with her too (onscreen, at least).The music's not bad (some of which I recognised from 'Destination Moon').

polsixe OK, bad FX but given it was 1960 don't be too harsh in that judgment. Not having seen all SF films from that era it's hard to say whether it was below standard or not. Star Trek didn't get so much better by 1967, substituting flashing lights for analog gauges and completely rewriting/ignoring physics. I liked some of the techno babble here - the multi-stage rocket, the sleep chamber, the arched trusses inside the space station, weightlessness, hydrazine, the paramilitary dialogue. Tossing objects out to detect the beams and stay in the middle seems reasonable and inventive for a mere reporter. "Pecking the lobe" is an electronic way to do the same thing against enemy radar in modern warfare. There was a story here but things got compromised, as usual in movies time and space (ie distances), are ignored in order to cut to the chase (see Armageddon, 1997). The guy waxing philosophical during his space walk has been done in almost every space movie since, and even Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, et al spoke that way once on earth. Anyhow, good for a laugh.

MartinHafer While this film may be slightly better than PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, at least technically speaking, overall it is much more dull and less fun to watch. In fact, during the first twenty or thirty minutes I kept finding my self falling asleep. I don't think this says a lot about my sleep habits but more about how tedious and uninteresting the film was--at least for the first half or so. About the only interesting things at all are that there is an important crew member ("Al") who is Black (a little unusual for 1960) and it's fun to watch the Captain and Al make fun of the reporter who they were forced to take along with them on the mission. In the second half, things pick up a bit (they couldn't have gotten any slower or duller--otherwise audience members would have begun committing suicide), as they are called away from their mission to rescue the Earth. It seems some space ship built by the Earth is screwed up and its engines will vaporize the Earth when it returns. So it's up to the useless reporter to spring to action and save them all--and teaching us an important lesson that when the safety of the planet is in question or you need someone who's an expert in astrophysics, get a reporter.By the way, the special effects were awful--even by 1950s or early 1960s sci-fi movie standards. As usual, the space rockets have flames that come out at an angle (due to gravity--which should NOT be a factor in the vacuum of space), they wear silly silver suits and there are a lot of useless dials and gizmos. The film was originally an Italian flick and with a bit of re-dubbing (with really awful voice work), it became this "masterpiece"---yech! Even for fans of bad films (and I am one), this one is pretty tough going!

gftbiloxi Now and then you encounter a film so tiresome that the thought reviewing it is every bit as tiresome as the film itself. Such is the case with ASSIGNMENT: OUTER SPACE, also known as SPACE MEN, a 1960 Italian flick.The story is unimpressive. A reporter (Rik Van Nutter) is assigned to cover the goings-on aboard a space station--and happens to arrive just in time for a nuclear space ship to go out of control and threaten the earth and everyone on it. So they all blast off for Mars, and then they blast off for Venus, and then they blast off for the runaway space ship. There is a romantic subplot and more uninspired cliffhangers than a Pearl White serial.The special effects aren't, the actors are stiff, and there are numerous insults to audience intelligence along the way. The absolute best thing I can say for this movie is that I've seen worse dubbing jobs--and now and then it does have an idea that seems interesting, although in truth nothing much comes of it. Unless you are a die-hard fan of lousy 1960s sci-fi, give this one a miss.GFT, Amazon Reviewer