Menace from Outer Space

"Menace From Space" begins with strange missiles made of crystal being hurled at the Earth. The brainiac professor determines they are from one of Jupiter's moons, so Rocky Jones takes a small crew to this strange world to try to determine why this is occurring. Once there, an evil Earth scientist is already there and he's manipulating the locals to his own wicked and greedy ends. So, it's up to the Earth heroes to save the day.

I love 1950s sci-fi movies--even though the special effects are often pretty silly and the plots a bit campy. I particularly love the films taking humans on their first trips to the Moon or Mars. However, despite my strong predisposition to like such material, this movie made up of three episodes of TV's "Rocky Jones Space Ranger" is pretty bad. Of course, being made for television the special effects were worse than you'd find in a real movie--this I could accept. What I couldn't accept were the awful characters! Rocky is wooden, but he's not the problem. The biggest problems are Winky and the little brat they took along for no reason whatsoever. Winky is the second in command but you wonder why they'd put a complete moron in such an important role! He's clearly the 'comic relief', though since he isn't funny, he's more the 'annoying relief'! And the 'precocious kid'?! Well, apparently although they barely have enough fuel to make it to Fornax and back, they decide to bring this whiny kid along--even though he can't possibly contribute anything to the mission (unless, of course, they want to use him as a shield). The writing of this show and the ensuing movie is pretty poor and clearly is being marketed to kids, not anyone wanting sci-fi that is realistic or well-written. As a result, it's only good for a laugh and not much more.

The good news is the professor played by Maurice Cass and Vena played by Sally Mansfield still seem to "believe in the dream" of acting despite the script. I get that it's a serial TV show, but they upped the ham and turned down the interesting plot for this set. Spacey cliche' and catch-phrases abound trying to cover up that this is actually some kind of old cowboy drama. The "science" part is severely lacking in this science fiction. There was some ship battles, a fist fight, but also a dragging tale and nonsensical decisions. As much as I liked the start of this potentially rocketing series, best to send this mess to the dark side of the moon.

Not a film for those seeking gripping, Hollywood style entertainment, in fact, not a film at all. Menace from Outer Space is an agglomeration of the first three episodes of the Rocky Jones, Space Ranger series starring "B" movie veteran Richard Crane.

"Menace" appears to have been created for re-packaging and re-licensing of film length features and is quite similar to its companion feature, "Crash of Moons."

"Rocky Jones," and the feature length films assembled from the serial shows, is a wonderful example of early television coming to grips with its role as an entertainer of children. Unfortunately, many of these early efforts come across as childish, and "Menace" is no exception.

While it's fascinating to see movie serial themes and dramatic situations reformatted for the small screen, the dialogue and acting is excruciating. Perhaps most difficult to bear is the director's obvious fascination with posing all of the actors for good TV images. Rather than a film, this piece comes across as a series of poses, interspersed with contrived dialogue. True believers only!

I have a soft spot in my heart for this old science fiction show from my childhood in the Fifties so I'll never give it a bad review. However in watching Menace From Outer Space a little knowledge of the show which only lasted for 39 episodes in the 1954 season certainly helps.

A moon of Jupiter not thought to contain life starts blasting away at the earth with missiles and we've got nothing that reaches that far. That's of concern to the United Worlds which was later the United Federation of Planets when we got to Star Trek in the Sixties. The place is called Fornax and it's ruled by Walter Coy who has an adviser from earth, a renegade scientist played by Nestor Paiva.

Two characters from previous episodes are in this film, one is a man who disgraced the Space Rangers by turning spy, Griff played by Leonard Penn, the other is an agent for the evil Queen of the planet Ophecius Dargento who is played by Frank Pulaski. Patsy Parsons who was Queen Cleolanta of Ophecius was one evil woman who gave this seven year old nightmares. She was a running villain for several episodes on Rocky Jones.

The planet Fornax has a powerful kind of energy derived from crystals that everybody wants. Kind of like oil today. I think you know where this one is going.

This is high camp and quite a hoot today, but you really have to be a fan of the show to appreciate it fully.

I usually love not very good Sci-Fi films from the 1950s but this effort was an exception to that. I could only bear to watch about ten minutes at a time but I was determined to get to the end, which I did eventually.

Poor in every way which can sometimes be entertaining but not with this film. The baddie looked like a kindly grandpa and was not in the least threatening. Bad acting all round and even in 1956 this was probably not seen as being a good film, even if it was cobbled together from a TV series of the time.

It's worth watching to see how bad a 1950's Sci-Fi effort can be but it's a struggle to get to the end as it's so bad.