In a future where all decisions are made by a giant supercomputer called "The WIZ" (I kid you not) and military men wear weird little miniskirts, renegade space captain Mike Leighton is sent on a routine mission. His ship is attacked by two alien ships. On orders from Earth he lands on the alien's planet which seems at first to be deserted - don't they always? - one by one his crew men are attacked and killed by a mysterious force (actually it's only one crew man - this film is THAT cheap).
The captain and his party are lured into a mysterious cave where they meet the "degenerate" remnants of the former inhabitants. The leader of the natives informs them that that once his people once ruled the planet till the machines they built took over. Leighton agrees to help destroy the machine brain that rules the planet (I'm making this all sound a lot more coherent and structured than it actually is). They return to the ship and consult their on-board computer who tells them the Bad computer will have a destruct button, "probably red" (I wish I was making this up). The captain and another crew member confront the Deep Thought like supercomputer and are instructed by it to replace one of its circuit boards, the only thing stopping it from dominating the galaxy. They do so and spot a red button. They press the red button. The computer explodes. The planet starts to explode (as they do) with the usual stock footage of volcanoes tinted nice reddish colours. The crew make their escape taking with them 2 crew members we know have been attacked and left for dead by the evil supercomputers robot henchthing. Big Mistake! Big mistake! Within minutes one of them is wandering around frothing at the mouth killing people as his face falls off - our hero soon puts a stop to that by jettisoning him into outer space but there is one final twist to come!... and you'll just have to watch the movie to find that out.
I was amazed to discover this film was made as late as 1977. It looks like a 1960 film. It is truly awful. The music is dreadful - almost random. At one point, when we first see the Bad computer, they actually use Bach's Toccatta and fugue in D minor!. The dubbing is hilarious and I guess the dubbed script must have been written by the Italians because the English is so tortured and twisted to make it fit the lip sync that it, at times, makes no sense at all. Even more amazingly when there is no need to lip sync, like when the natives talk to the Captain telepathically or the computers talk, the English is just as bad.
Surrealy Awful
