Space 1979 Prototype Trilogy 2: The one with a transgender mad scientist

 

Title: Wild, Wild Planet aka Criminals of the Galaxy

What Year?: 1965 (copyright)/1966 (Italian release)/ 1967 (US release)

Classification: Prototype/ Mashup

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (2/5)

 

With this review, I’m continuing a survey of some of the older movies to come to my attention. The next up is one I debated including because it is relatively well-known, and especially because it has ties to another movie I’ve covered, in fact the very first 1960s movie I reviewed. As usual, what I knew about it was enough to go in, and this time shell out a fair amount of money to buy it. What I found was something that still doesn’t “fit”, but is too weird to ignore. I present Wild, Wild Planet, the movie that led to The Green Slime.

Our story begins on a space station where pulsating organs lie in tanks and on operating tables, including what appear to be human brains and eyes. We learn that this is a sort of organ-replacement project by Dr. Nurmi, a scenery-chewing scientist who spars with the station commander, Mike Halstead. The doctor takes a further interest in Connie, a spunky woman involved with the commander, despite or possibly because of the fact that she enthusiastically beats up several beefy men in self-defense training. The commander becomes suspicious when he hears of a wave of disappearances on Earth, carried out by a group of mysterious women and their silent accomplices, tall men in silvery trench coats that turn out to hide an extra pair of arms. It turns out that these are creations of Dr. Nurmi, sent to gather subjects for his research and shrink them for easy handling and concealment in the process. And our best sense of what his research is emerges as we see his next plan, to fuse himself and Connie into a single perfect being. It’s up to Mike to save the day, except his superiors have already put him under house arrest!

Wild, Wild Planet was a film by Italian low budget/ exploitation director Antonio Margheriti. It was the first of an informal “Gamma One” series of four films, all made with overlapping costumes, sets and effects. Some accounts say that it was produced as a TV pilot, though this is difficult to harmonize with the quick production of the additional films. The film starred American Tony Russell as the commander and Italian Lisa Gastoni as Connie, with Massimo Serato as the mad doctor Nurmi. The movie was filmed in 1965, but was released in Italy along with at least one other “Gamma One” film the following year, under the title Criminals of the Galaxy. US release was delayed until 1967, when it was given its current title apparently based on the Western/ proto-steampunk show Wild, Wild West. Several of Margheriti’s coproducers went on to make The Green Slime without his participation, using a similar space station setting and models. The original film was neglected by comparison with The Green Slime, but has remained available. Amazon currently offers it either for streaming or on DVD-R.

For my personal experiences, I caught wind of this one when I was reviewing The Green Slime. That turned my interest to Japanese films, which if anything are comparatively familiar to western audiences. However, I definitely remained interested in this movie and others in the nominal series. The main question in my mind was whether to take a look at several entries, but availability was sketchy enough that I decided it was just as well to let one represent them all. I finally went in after looking at several other reviews, which were detailed enough to leave no real surprises. Still, there was really no way to prepare for just how weird and illogical this one really is, even by Italian movie standards.

The foremost thing to talk about here is the villain, a traditional mad scientist with an emphasis on the “mad”. I have mentioned (see Ewoks) that my benchmark for a literally psychotic villain is Megavolt from Darkwing Duck. By comparison, even the Joker’s plans will follow a logical path to a goal that makes some measure of sense from his viewpoint and philosophy. Megavolt’s schemes, on the other hand, are routinely incomprehensible in motive, means and objective whether or not he bothers to explain it. This movie’s villain is truly as close as you will get to Megavolt crazy in the live-action medium (though the alien outlaw from The Hidden definitely gets honorable mention). What becomes disconcerting is that what we can make of his worldview is sophisticated and even progressive. He accepts a woman as superior to male subjects and presumably broadly equal to himself. He is seemingly willing to take on female biological qualities, making him more or less “transgender”. The problem, of course, is how this is all going to work, something he has evidently thought through but certainly doesn’t explain for our benefit, and in the best Bond villain tradition (only 3 years after Dr. No!), he already explains far more than he needs to.

The real pros and cons lie in the simple fact that this is an Italian science fiction movie, made a decade before masters like Argento and Cozzi showed what could be done with actual budgets. The models and effects are cheerfully cheap, with an impressive further disregard for continuity and basic safety considerations. The goons are game, especially the weird, seemingly interchangeable trenchcoated mutants. The supporting cast is divided between monotone and histrionic. What quickly becomes irritating if not intolerable is the “hero”. He is dismissive of others, especially women, to the point of almost writing off several leads. When he does get involved, his non sequitirs and leaps of logic are as nonsensical as the doctor’s schemes, except he actually has formal power to abuse in a trail of harassment, threats and misogyny. Worst of all, there is never a point where he is forced to admit a mistake, but on the contrary is handed a continuous supply of contrived affirmation. Even when confronted for accusing the doctor with little if any evidence and invading the privacy of innocent civilians (warrants already seem to have gone out the window), he simply fumes about “rules” and goes right back on the trail.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I found it difficult even to decide if this one was handing me too much or too little to work with. I finally went with one I had already considered discussing at greater length above, the movie’s big action sequence where Mike and the crew break into Nurmi’s Earthside lab. It starts with a tense moment as they use their ray guns to burn through a sealed door, and what you are bound to notice is that their props shoot some kind of actual flame. They are spotted by a lab tech type, who runs away. For reasons that aren’t obvious, the commander tells his men to let him go. They have trouble enough as they burst in, and are met by more lab techs and several of the four-armed goons. The mutants are at their peak of menace as they charge, but alas, nobody gave them their own guns. Meanwhile, the guns continue to flame, as Mike declares, “Keep blasting!” At times, the flashes in the muzzle seem to correspond to the source of an otherwise unseen energy beam, which is about how an actual energy weapon would look. At several points, however, a target is literally set ablaze, always a tech with a thick vest. At least once, there is charring visible, consistent with some kind of protective clothing. It’s a reassuring moment of sanity, unless you remember this is from the studio system that filmed Zombie with a real shark and the real Brooklyn Bridge.

In closing, I must say that this is another movie that fell in a frustrating middle ground, a trend that I’m already sure will continue if I continue with this period. It’s too entertaining to receive the lowest rating, but nowhere near good enough to get a rating equal to what I gave Cyborg 2087. The one thing that keeps it on my good side is the preview of what the Italians would do in the coming decades. There can be no doubt that it laid the way for the likes of Zombie and Starcrash, but there can be equally little doubt that even lesser talents such as Fulci could do at least as well as this. Add in its considerable flaws, and what remains is a movie that’s not the worst, but certainly not great.