The Three Stooges in Orbit

This is one of the weaker things the later Stooges did, and you can mark that down as coming from a lifetime fan of all their two-reel shorts (be they with Curly, Shemp or Joe) as well as their feature films with Curly Joe DeRita. This movie just flat out ain't very funny. Having Moe, Larry and Curly Joe tangle with old professor Emil Sitka and cool-looking Frankensteinian martians (well, they look cool to those of us who grew up loving cheesy monster movies) should have helped make for a sure fire bullseye. Instead, this nonsense is all over the place, hopping from one unfunny bit of business to the next, trying to fill in the running time with all sorts of unrelated junk (including a meaningless relationship for the professor's daughter). This makes their Joe Besser shorts like OUTER SPACE JITTERS and SPACE SHIP SAPPY look positively first-rate. ** out of ****

Our three heroes who are in the process of being kicked out by landlady Maudie Prickett answer an advertisement by nutty professor Emil Sitka who is conducting some way out experiments. But he's on the money because Martians have actually infiltrated the professor's household to spy and report on his progress.

This was one zany film and it had a lot of good laughs. The heavily made up Martians who talk in subtitled gibberish and gesture a lot remind me of Khrushchev and his UN temper tantrums.

As for Sitka who gets his share of laughs as well as the Three Stooges he's invented an all purpose land, air and sea vehicle that he gets the Stooges to test drive. Only Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe could pick up an atomic bomb from a desert test site and use it as a carburetor for the vehicle. It does come in handy for the final battle with the Martians.

This one I have to say approaches the short subject type zaniness that the 3 Stooges had in their prime.

I enjoyed watching this movie and is more entertaining than Have a Rocket We Travel. The story itself has too many going on like the Stooges helping the scientist build his machine, while he have a way to help their business, and there also aliens who does generic stuff in the movie. I found each of the plot to be connect with each others, but the one with the Stooges show is the reason why they decide to help the scientist. The comedy is a hit or miss with a couple of funny moments from the Stooges and the gags that you see throughout the movie. I found Professor Danforth to be a interesting character with his weird machine and how he helps them with their business. He also has a daughter who has nothing to do with the plot and I forgot that she exist. As for the alien plotline, it your standard stuff with them decide on what they going to them and the motive is generic. Also, don't expect good makeup effects in this movie because the aliens looks pretty bad and their design is weird. I found the movie entertaining with them driving that submarine and going on a rampage, and the climax itself is pretty entertaining.

The Three Stooges in Orbit is a fun movie that I enjoyed watching despite it flaws.

Rather than retread my own version of the old "Joe Derita as a stooge debate," I'll just say that when you accept the older 60s stooges for what they are, some of these films do get a bit better, after awhile. A point I already knew years ago seeing these for the first time, but sometimes, it's not bad to take a break from the short subjects and pop in a feature.

"Daze," and "Hercules," still make for slighty better fun, but orbit is still a good one. The plot is cornball as hell (obviously) and the martian makeup won't knock your socks off, but maybe Joe himself has his best perfromance as "Curly-Joe."

I have seen live clips of Derita with Moe & Larry where he seems to flex more persona, so maybe this speaks to the format of the actual Columbia films as to whether or not he was restrained or not overly overt as a comedic dynamo like the obvious Curly, or even Shemp.

Not to mention, a few of his Columbia solo efforts were pretty good...

It's pointless to review the Stooges movies by comparing them to the shorts. These are two very different artforms. The Stooges shorts are easy to like, the movies need a bit of willing suspension of adulthood.

I first saw Three Stooges in Orbit as a kid, and that's the way I'd suggest seeing it now. There are so many reasons I really love this film, but most of them won't make sense to a dried up adult.

Even in this computer-graphic age, there's so much here that a kid just has to enjoy. The flying submarine, for starters. What a concept - it both hearkens back to Jules Verne, and anticipates Terry Gilliam by several decades. The goofy aliens. As a kid I was scared of them, amused by them, and just transfixed by the alien-ness of them. The wacky rotoscope animation process the Stooges are working on. Could that really have worked?

The Stooges movies are very different from the shorts, in that they're actually about storytelling. But there's plenty of Stooge-mania along the way. The whole thing with the A-bomb in a dust storm is side-splitting. ("Visibility, zero!") The antics with a hole in the cellar wall, a pipe and a raygun. And others. But they're in support of a story.

I was always aware that these movie-length Stooges were very different from the ones I saw in the shorts. For one thing, Curly was gone. For another, they were a lot older. But they were still geniuses at what they did: creating a magical world of laughter and imagination.

To me, these creaky old low-budget films are cinema at its finest. They created a magical world for me when I was a kid. Decades later, they still play in my head.