Groovy theme music and multi-coloured visuals greet viewers of Italian space movie Mission Stardust, a 1967 sci-fi flick based on the popular German Perry Rhodan series of novels by K.H. Scheer and Walter Ernsting. It's a movie that is very much of its era, with highly stylised alien spacecraft, unrealistic spacesuits, robots that fire energy beams from their eyes, a sexy extraterrestrial, and a loose comic-book plot that is almost as random as that of the following year's Barbarella.
The film's hero, astronaut Major Perry Rhodan (Lang Jeffries), leads a mission to the moon to find a valuable metal. After landing his rocket on the moon's surface, Rhodan and his crew discover an alien craft, and are invited on board by one of the ship's robots, where they meet the very human-like alien inhabitants - elderly male Crest (John Karlsen) and sexy blonde Thora (Essy Persson) - who explain that they are stranded on the moon, and that Crest is suffering from a serious illness. Rhodan's medical officer identifies the disease as leukaemia, and explains that there is a Dr. Frank Haggard in Mombassa who might be able to save Crest's life...
What follows is hardly 'The science fiction film that staggers the imagination!', as the tagline claims - much of the film feels like cheaply produced filler - but it is still a reasonably entertaining piece of '60s pulp sci-fi, largely thanks to its hilariously wobbly alien spaceship, the sexy ladies (in addition to Thora, we also get Haggard's tasty assistant Dr. Sheridan and hot Nurse Silva), and the silly sci-fi technology (including a hand-held device that can not only levitate objects and project a force field, but - wait for it - also acts as a televisual communication device. Far-fetched or what?!!?!).
5.5/10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.
The film's hero, astronaut Major Perry Rhodan (Lang Jeffries), leads a mission to the moon to find a valuable metal. After landing his rocket on the moon's surface, Rhodan and his crew discover an alien craft, and are invited on board by one of the ship's robots, where they meet the very human-like alien inhabitants - elderly male Crest (John Karlsen) and sexy blonde Thora (Essy Persson) - who explain that they are stranded on the moon, and that Crest is suffering from a serious illness. Rhodan's medical officer identifies the disease as leukaemia, and explains that there is a Dr. Frank Haggard in Mombassa who might be able to save Crest's life...
What follows is hardly 'The science fiction film that staggers the imagination!', as the tagline claims - much of the film feels like cheaply produced filler - but it is still a reasonably entertaining piece of '60s pulp sci-fi, largely thanks to its hilariously wobbly alien spaceship, the sexy ladies (in addition to Thora, we also get Haggard's tasty assistant Dr. Sheridan and hot Nurse Silva), and the silly sci-fi technology (including a hand-held device that can not only levitate objects and project a force field, but - wait for it - also acts as a televisual communication device. Far-fetched or what?!!?!).
5.5/10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.