First Men in the Moon (Nathan Juran 1964)
Posted on October 04 at 16.20, 2007 by Eric Mahleb
Take a bland and decent looking actor, place a silly and useless woman at his side whose sole role it is to shriek every five minutes, pair him with a crazy and hyper, but brilliant inventor, use lots of ridiculous costumes and utterly preposterous plastic and latex things like flowers, rocks, bubbly tanks and Martians, place it all in a Victorian context, and you get an unfortunately overly used recipe for making terrible Sci-Fi B movies.
I have never read this novel by HG Wells, but I sincerely hope that this film, about that crazy threesome mentioned earlier getting to the moon long before the first astronauts, has taken plenty of freedom with the original story, as i would hate to think that Wells was capable of such silliness…
This silliness is even more so highlighted when one considers that Planet of the Apes (68) and Kubrick’s 2001 (68) both came out only four years after First Men in the Moon.
The only people who are going to enjoy this film are the ones who watched it when they were children and still remember fondly the absurd Martian latex costumes. For the rest of us, well, let us just keep an open mind.
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One Response to “First Men in the Moon”
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Journey to the Center of the Earth - Quiet Please - Cinema Futures by Eric Mahleb Says:
October 26, 2008 at 18.40[...] Journey to the Centre of the Earth is loosely based on Jules Verne’s novel of the same name, and feels more like a bad version of The Goonies (1985) than a serious attempt at honouring the memory of the father of Science Fiction. As I winced during several of the poorly written scenes, I could not help but to be reminded of the cheapness of At the Earth’s Core (1976) and of First Men in the Moon (1964), which is a real shame since Verne’s story, in the right hands, could be turned into a fascinating and highly entertaining film. [...]