12 to the Moon

Let me just say first, that it was a very noble idea for the moon to be explored as a global effort. They had representatives of many nations and even a black man and two women! (Actually pretty bold ideas at the time.) And even in the midst of the Red scare, they had a Russian, who, despite being a jerk, stops another European from sabotaging a mission to save the U.S. Yes, the movie seems to have been made with noble intentions towards world peace. That said, this is one big turkey. First, no one involved with the movie had any idea about what the moon and space were really like. (They have steam coming out of craters, and several clusters of meteors just between earth and the moon.) Second, the SFX are pitiful. (The ship at times has visible strings, and at one point a stick. The moon also appears to have Stage lights at one point.) These ingredients makes it a fairly awful movie. My recommendation? Watch the MST3K version and applaud the good intent but laugh at how awful everything else is.

This film remains rather stilted and slow-moving and that's not a good thing in what is essentially a 1950s style Rocketship B-Movie...it has many of the trademarks common to those...hurtling meteor storm attacks!, silly and impossible solutions to every problem usually involving shooting a rocket at something else and an intergender crew(although this one also has the daring for its time interracial crew!)...the problem with this film isn't its story really which could have been fun but the fact we see so little of what we hear about after the fact..more on screen adventure would have been a tremendous help..the gay undertones present in this film are also disturbing and sometimes laughable(although how else could the subject have been brought up in the time?). Still deserves points for being so daring.

Those man's-first-flight-into-space movies from the 1950s often have a certain charm despite (or perhaps because of) their cheap sets, black-and-white photography, no-name casts, and scientific ignorance. This movie, however, has all the Grade-B tackiness without much of the compensating fun that marks, say, "Cat-Women of the Moon."

The plot has an international crew of ten men and two women rocketing to the moon and encountering the usual meteor showers along the way as they discuss how small and insignificant the Earth now looks. Upon reaching the moon, they discover gold, a glowing substance dubbed the "Medusa stone," traces of air, and evidence of a mysterious, never-seen civilization living below the surface in a "sealed city." This civilization wants them to leave before they inflict more damage.

The crew of the "Lunar Eagle 1" promptly heads for home but discovers that North America has been frozen by the civilization on the moon. To thaw it out, two members of the crew undertake a suicide mission to steer an atomic bomb into a Mexican volcano. (Don't ask.) The resulting explosion thaws out the continent and this act of self-sacrifice helps convince the moon-people that we Earthlings aren't so bad after all.

Mixed into this plot are a conflict between two crewmen, (a German and an Israeli), as well as a scene with a crewman who proves to be a saboteur with Communist tendencies.

Perhaps the movie's "high" point occurs when, mid-way to the moon, the rocket's American captain -- naked except for a small white towel modestly looped around his waist -- opens the shower-room door only to discover that it's currently occupied by the two female members of the crew. The human race has the expertise to build a rocket to the moon but they can't figure out how to put a lock on the shower-room door?

Incidentally, the captain is played by Ken Clark and his hairy chest is by far the best special-effect in the entire movie!

An international team of 12 scientists, along with a menagerie of animals, including a Cocker Spaniel dog, blast off for the unknown satellite. Luckily, the crew has their seatbelt-equipped, foldable, patio lounge chairs for added comfort. Plagued by meteors and nationalistic quibbling, they finally reach their destination.

Upon arrival, the explorers soon realize that the Moon is a cruel mistress indeed.

12 TO THE MOON is a silly, but enjoyable sci-fi yarn from a far more innocent time. Ken Clark is as stiff and stolid as ever in his Commander role. Tom Conway provides a dubious Russian accent. The Cocker Spaniel provides the cuteness. This is all topped off with an utterly absurd finale.

The rocket's interior and some of the equipment may be quite familiar to fans of movies like ANGRY RED PLANET or JOURNEY TO THE 7TH PLANET. This movie is recommended especially for lovers of such harmless, interplanetary fluff...

A slapdash screenplay filled with random emergencies, 15 second solutions, random melodrama and emotional outbursts, and worse than usual unscientific "science" cripple what is nonetheless an optimistic effort.

The ship boasts a pre-Star Trek multicultural crew, but even here the screenwriters can't resist making the African man the superstitious one, and the Japanese woman the one who is capable of on-the-spot translation of hieroglyphics which "resemble Chinese" characters.

Still, it is an interesting effort within the context of the international space race, and worth 75 minutes for fans of that era's matinee science fiction culture.