12 to the Moon

Borrrrring!!! Usually you can have some fun with 50s and early 60s black and white sci-fi films but not this one. It is so static that you feel yourself drifting off to sleep about 10 minutes into the "story". This has got to be the largest crew ever sent to the moon.....as the title says, there are 12 of them and about half don't have anything to do but stand around and, if they are lucky, they might get one line of dialogue. And they are obviously dispensable......when two of the crew wander off into a cave and are captured by the moon people (who we never see), nobody makes much effort to rescue them. In fact, they jump in the rocket and speed back to earth.....see ya' later or not.

The crew is a mixed bag of ethnicity,ages and sex but they are still all so boring and played over the top. Tom Conway is the most unlikeable of the group as Dr. Orloff, with the giant ego. How sad that Mr. Conway, brother of that elegant actor George Sanders, fell to this level of film. No wonder he was such a pain in the butt. The rest of the cast is pretty bland although Johh Wengraf, as the Nazi with the heart attack, has some interesting moments. And Captain Slab Largethighs played by Ken Clark, has the personality and commanding presence of Mr. Peepers. He show his bare chest a lot and walks around in a towel.

The plot line(?) regarding dropping an atom bomb into a volcano is so ludicrous that I laughed out loud. Wasn't it amazing that they could construct such a bomb in about 20 minutes with whatever materials they had on hand?......let's see, mix a little Drano with some Kool-Aid and a dead monkey and presto, an atom bomb.....clever!

So unless you catch this on MST3K, el paso! It's the pits!