toto-24

This truly is my favorite for sheer enjoyment. This was featured on a low-budget TV station (WOR) back in NYC in the early 1960's. It could be shown up to 20 times a week and we watched it EVERY time. It has everything: the 1958 view of life in 1984, space catastrophe, sex (well, sort of), Zsa Zsa, a man-hating queen with a shocking secret, babes in short togas, and the funniest plot ever. It's colorful, hysterical and they even throw in an animated monster for a mercifully short period of time.

Any line of Zsa Zsa's (the chief scientist of Venus) is quotable. The best moment in the show happens when she tries to impersonate the Wicked Queen and they briefly fall for it, accent and all!

Don't miss it!

For reasons I cannot fathom, this film sometimes ends up on lists of the worst movies of all time; this despite Oscar nominations for Eleanor Parker and Hope Emerson. It has some of the best acting performances around, runs the gamut on "stock" characters, but well done and great black & white filming and lighting. It's terrifically engaging and one quickly gets wrapped up with the characters, some of whom are morally ambiguous and some of whom are just evil, and how they choose to cope in unbearable circumstances. It's a great movie and deserving of a lot more credit than it's gotten in the past. 10/10.

The acting is mediocre or histrionic, the plot is a bore. The sets are big and the costumes are good. It had so much hype even back when they were casting for Scarlet O'Hara that no one ever maintained much objectivity about it. Typical of that era, the blacks are displayed without any dignity at all. I didn't care about even one character. It was an appropriate precedent to modern-day Hollywood in which enough hype and budget get all the attention regardless of quality.