Starring Donna Martell, Hayden Rorke, Ross Ford, Larry Johns, Herb Jacobs
Directed by Richard Talmadge
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)
A space flight from an American space station on a mission to orbit the moon goes awry when an enemy agent on board is discovered.
Despite the fact that there's some gender role reversal in this film, I've always been a little unsure as to whether it's a progressive picture or not. Martell gets to play the hot shot pilot, but is not positioned in the script as the character to root for, and comes off as overconfident and arrogant. That is not to say that a woman can't play that role, as plenty of men have. However, the film makes a point of casting her bravado as hollow, and making her character defer to her male co-pilot for most of the command decisions, which doesn't seem progressive to me. Despite the fact that the film was co-written by famed science fiction author Robert Heinlein, this is a low-budget production, which was per Wikipedia shot in 10 days, pooling sets and costumes with Cat-Women Of The Moon. All of this doesn't mean it's not a fun picture, with elementary but clever special effects, well-photographed by William C. Thompson, and possessing Herschel Burke Gilbert's score, highlighted by eerie themes for the moon sequences.
No comments:
Post a Comment