Il pianeta errante

Remember that sci-fi skit you and your buddies made up and performed in front of your third grade class? Someone made it into a movie. Minus the good parts. This is one of those films you keep watching because you expect it to get better. It never does. If you go out for refreshment you may not want to come back.

Something in space is causing disaster on earth.

An unexpected thrill to find this is 2022. The last time I saw a 60s Italian science fiction film was back in the 70s on a box shaped TV screen. Now it was in widescreen with lots of red and orange (my favourite colours) all over the place - mainly in the climax.

I am fully aware this movie pinched things from other Italian films but because this screening came before the other movies - I had a ball with this flick!

The dialogue is far from perfect but because War Between The Planets is such a visual delight (the sets, props, hardware, the red) I can forgive the wooden conversations.

Well worth watching but only with a quality widescreen print.

1965's "War Between the Planets" (Missione Planeto Errante or The Errant Planet) was the third in director Antonio Margheriti's ambitious 'Gamma 1 Quadrilogy,' four features commissioned outside Italy and completed over a period of three months, his last return to epic science fiction since starting out with "Assignment: Outer Space" and "Battle of the Worlds" (among the authors involved were Bill Finger and Charles Sinclair, collaborators with Bob Kane on Batman). "The Wild Wild Planet" and "War of the Planets" came first, its theatrical title eventually changed to "Planet on the Prowl" to avoid being confused with its predecessor, a new cast aboard for this third entry (held over for the finale "Snow Devils"). Giacomo Rossi Stuart as Commander Ron Jackson is dispatched by orbiting space station Gamma 1 to investigate the possibility of gravitational forces responsible for a rash of tidal waves and earthquakes afflicting the earth. The script gets bogged down in personal relationships and wobbly scientific jargon, only taking flight during the final reels, when the asteroid is revealed as a gaseous planet with blowing wind, interior brain cells, and solid arteries that bleed crimson grue when cut. Costs were kept down by reusing costumes and sets, a completely antiseptic, dust free world of bright colors set around the year 2000, this plotline already worn out since George Pal's "When Worlds Collide" or even "Battle of the Worlds." Critics never had anything positive to say about these films, played dead serious by the entire cast, but the climax here does foreshadow the STAR TREK episode "The Immunity Syndrome," depicting an energy eating single celled organism that can only be destroyed by antimatter (James Doohan's Scotty beautifully exhales: "aye, it couldn't swallow that!"). Giacomo Rossi Stuart was quite a familiar face from eclectic titles like "The Day the Sky Exploded," "Caltiki the Immortal Monster," "The Last Man on Earth," "Kill Baby Kill," "The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave," and "Death Smiles on a Murderer."

The years 1965 and '66 were busy times for Italian director Antonio Margheriti, working, as he was, on no less than three shlock classics in the spaghetti sci-fi genre (amongst other projects!). Those three films were "The Wild, Wild Planet," "The War of the Planets" and "War Between the Planets," and for those who prefer their spaghetti covered with loads of grated cheese, these films will surely fit the bill. "War Between the Planets" (1966) is fairly representative of the lot. In this one, a 25-mile-wide rogue asteroid (hardly a planet at all) approaches Earth and causes widespread catastrophes due to its gravitational fluctuations, so a United Democracies space team, under the command of granite-jawed Rod Jackson, sets out from the Gamma 1 spacewheel to destroy the darn thing. Typical for these rigatoni space operas, the FX on display are cheaply realized and often laffable, but that is not the problem here; tacky FX can often be endearing. More problematic is the lackluster script and the often confusing, often boring "action" sequences. Half the dialogue of the film seems to be comprised of technobabble (such as "Checker feed is a constant 100 propulsion," "Recon Gamma, keep your flight course on 0800," "Come in on gyro," "Correct our position by 22 degrees on your quadrant 6"), and that sort of gobbledygook gets old pretty quickly. Even worse, many of the film's plot points (such as a love triangle of sorts that Jackson is involved in, and that switched-helmet confusion at the picture's end) fizzle out to nothingness, and the matter of the rogue asteroid being, apparently, a living thing, a la Solaris, with a breathing, jellylike surface and cablelike arteries that bleed when cut, is never even discussed! In the lead role, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart is thoroughly unlikable as the butt-clenched Jackson, a factor that might have torpedoed this film all on its ownsome; the actor would be much more sympathetic that same year in the Mario Bava masterpiece "Kill, Baby, Kill." So is there ANYTHING that I did enjoy about this deep-space pasta? Well, I suppose some of the background music was kinda freaky, and Ombretta Colli (as Gamma 1's resident redheaded space babe, Terry Sanchez) was sorta hot, and that antimatter explosion at the end, all two seconds of it, looked pretty cool. And that's really about it! Basically, "War Between the Planets" is as stultifying as sci-fi gets, and is best observed by those under the influence of some ergot-based concoction....

As you can see from the time when it's made you can't expect very good special effects but the movie himself isn't that bad. It's about natural disasters on earth which already destroyed many big cities. As the origin of this scientists figured out a moon or planet far away. Now the crew of a space shuttle should go there and solve the problem...