So we come to end if the collection and boy was the very ending rough. Six films and of those 5 were actually watchable, but the last one, well we’ll get to that.

A very optimistic view of where the space program might be six years after the films release.

The next movie was 1959’s Battle In Outer Space. now given the type of film being made, particularly SF films from Japan, this one wasn’t too bad. Earth has a thriving space exploration program complete with a nifty ring space station. (While the model maker put the windows on the rim of the ring, the set people curved the floor showing that they, at least, understood how a spinning station works.) Aliens come along and blow it up. Guess we got straight to the title. Anyway, there’s lengthy exposition – something about these 50’s and early 60’s SF movies felt that they had to explain everything and in doing so get so much wrong. Bringing atoms to absolute zero doesn’t negate gravity. nope. After the exposition, two rockets are sent to the moon to do battle with the aliens in their base. There are setbacks – after all the aliens can mind control people — the base is destroyed and the earth prepares for the final showdown. More aliens arrive there’s a big battle and eventually the day is saved. Not great cinema but watchable.

Iguana-don is not frightened by your puny matches.

The final film on the set they saved for the worst, Valley of the Dragons. In theory, this is adapted from a poor Jules Verne story, but the movies is a dull plodding affair with too much stock footage and too little story. Like 12 to the Moon, this is a sequence of events that really don’t add up to a complete story. An Englishman (Michael) and a Frenchman (Hector) are about to have a duel while a passing comet strikes the earth and the two men awake to find themselves marooned on a planetoid hurtling away into space. I wish I could say quickly but nothing in the film feels fast, they work out that the planetoid is really a fragment of the Earth knocked loose into space earlier in history and is populated by dinosaurs, cavemen, and neanderthals. They work together to survived, become fast friends, find sexy young women to fall in love with, and if all that wasn’t enough, stop warring tribes of cavemen, bring peace to the humans trapped on the fragment. This sounds like a lot fo action stuff, but it’s turgid and slow and boring. At an hour and twenty-two minutes this thing felt longer than a Peter Jackson uncut expanded Blu-ray.

So after waking up this morning with a splitting migraine and double dosing on my meds to kill the damned thing, I stayed home from work. Now that I feel a wee bit better I’ll give you the next installment in my bad movie watching.

I am watching the movies in disc order so next up was a little Japanese horror film I had never seen The H-Man. Given being on the receiving end of two atomic bombs and having fishermen caught in the fallout from US fusion testing the Japanese have always had a keen interest and utilization of radioactive horror in their post-war cinema. The H-Man is a lesser contender for the fare then the better known and better produced films such as Gojira, known to the rest of the world as Godzilla.

In a better movie that cop was a one-eyed scientist.

The H-Man is sort of like a mashing together of a mob/crime picture with The Blob. A crew of a fishing boat encounters a deserted ship and discovers a fluid monster. The monster eventually makes its way to Tokyo and begins massacring mobsters. There is never any reason given for the predilection for gangsters, but hey that’s what it is. The movie’s character are rather stock, the idealistic young scientist who figure it all out but has a hard time convincing the police. A mob gal/nightclub singer who’s really a good person and had no idea her boyfriend was selling drugs. The tough a nail cop but with a good heart and of course, the gangster who is deadly, violent, and develops a sudden third act need for the dame.

The monster is like the blob but man-sized, which makes the resolution of the story rather problematic. In order to get this thing that has killed four or five gangsters the police and authorities burn down an entire section of the city. In addition to the overkill ist is all anti-climatic as they get the monster on their first attempt. I haven’t been more underwhelmed by the end of a movie monster since The Blood Beast Terror when the giant killer moth threw itself into the bonfire.

Next up was 12 To the Moon from 1960. In addition, to the usual terrible exposition, silly science, and overly cardboard characters what aspiring writers and filmmakers can learn from this movie is simple: a series of events do not a story make.

A little know lunar danger – quicksand.

This is a movie about the first trip to the moon, but with a gigantic crew, 12 international top scientists. A cast this crowded in a large production with a big budget would have a difficult time fleshing out all the characters. (To wit; The Hobbit movies) With a limited budget and poor writing the trouble is only compounded. The dangers are mostly standard bad SF movies fare, frequent meteor swarms (I have to comment that perhaps my favorite science error is the constant shooting stars on the lunar landscape.) There is also a love story that come out of nowhere and is equally dispatched back to nowhere, and of course aliens.

While the characters faces constant challenges and the entire North American continent is threatened. (Apparently the aliens fell everything else is not so much a danger) the film has no narrative throughline and as such is simply a collection of and then this happens and then this happens until the story ends. The writers certainly took up sides for the cold war, but then as suddenly performed a reversal that in a better script would have been interesting. In this movie is was just another iteration of ‘and then this happened.’