Retro-Futurism was Sure to Go: 10 Cool International 60s Sci-fi Trips Streaming via Spaceships Prime and Criterion

 Lately I've been unable to escape a yen for all things sci-fi mid-60s --the stretch between Sputnik and the moon landing, when an ex-Nazi rocketeer named Werner released through Disney a series of fascinating speculative documentaries about NASA's plans for the moon landing, for orbiting satellites, space stations, and explorations of Mars and Venus and movies presumed we'd have all that shit up in the air by the 1980s or 90s --2001 at the latest. Boy were they all wrong. We've got the movies, though, and they look better than ever.

Von Braun points out the new space station designs in a 1955 Disney film.  This round revolving shape would henceforth be the go-to space station design in all science fiction for the next decade.

It was the Silver Age: the genre grew up out of the comic book lunacy and atomic caution of the golden 50s and into a colorful forward-launching space opera cocktail elegance. It was a good time especially for strong female characters, as they no longer had to fight sexist blowhards to be respected as officers in space command, heads of communications and operations, doctors in astro-biology and chemistry, etc. They could be pretty without having male crew members making comments behind their backs, or to their faces. I've deliberately eschewed any movie with even a hint of that dated sexism, even in critique form. I've also avoided any streaming titles of less than watchable quality, though your mileage may vary. So.... What are we waiting for!? The future's not going to get much older! Blast-off!


I'm beginning to see what the fuss was about vis-a-vis Andy Warhol's favorite movie. It was everything I love in a film: lots of deep reds and grays, tubes, silver eyeballs, theatricality and a total absence of daytime outdoor shots. Ed Wood fans need only know that Dudley Manlove is one of the robots and the link between them and homosexuals would be clear even without that. (We never see any female 'robuts' as Dudley pronounces them (the big headed inventor who helps them bring over 'the soul' via a special glandular resonator from a recently deceased human form into a new robotic model, refers to them as "Clickers," a term they robuts find disparaging. But it all works out as the robuts have an ingenious habit of absorbing their own opposition. Taking place all in one long eternal night, on a couple of crazy cosmic sets, it's never boring as it's never just 'filler' - this is clearly some writer's real labor of love and we imagine it got workshopped at some off-off-Broadway East Village coffeehouse, an early forerunner of the gay kid watching horror movie reruns at home and identifying with Frankenstein and the Wolfman and eventually writing Rocky Horror Picture Show. This hasn't got quite the same flair but we can imagine Frank N. Furter watching it with Andy on his private copy back home at the factory after all the other little monsters are off in dreamland.



When I can't sleep in a foreign land I'll listen to this in my headphones and watch my Kindle download, with the soothing drone of the voices in this odd, odd film, a mix of some Peter Bogdanovich fantasia (a dozen bottle blondes swimming in the spashing surf with shiny green scale-covered hiphuggers bellbottoms (one of the most sublime high fashion choices in genre cinema, when they sleep with their legs together they look just like mermaids) and communicating via telepathy.  I doubt it was pleasant but the sight of these ladies bobbing in what is clearly freezing Pacific surf, chomping on raw fish under the benevolent protection of their pterodactyl god is a goofy highlight of 60s science fiction. Most genre fans know the colorful story behind this film - a Russian sci-fi film about two astronauts and their robot marooned in a strange, prehistoric world -- that Corman bought (cheap) and brought to a young Peter Bogdanovich to restructure, dub into English, and shoot surrounding footage in English, starring Mamie Van Doren. He added his own hipster voiceover and a constant audio whoosh of sci-fi noises and the 'song' of the sirens, that's heard by one of the astronaust. Though he's probably just standing there gazing at the planet's wonders and pontificating about the glories of Russia's space program, now he's falling in love with the song of the far-off mermaids. But when the astronauts kill their pterodactyl god in self defense, the sirens sing into existence a flood and a volcano eruption.

 Ingeniously, Peter had the props boys build a rubber corpse for the girls to pray over, and also an aproximaiton of the now dried magma-encrusted robot. Is it intentional that the sacred crown Mamie leads their telekinetic prayers with is a chef cap?  With that laconic hipster narration, and the ceaseless pounding of the rhythmic surf, the beeps and burbles of the robot, the odd signing of the sirens and their occasional ESP communications, and the assured quality of Russian footage, it's a never gets-old go-to for a weary Erich. The Prime copy is bad, but there is no existing good quality DVD. I have the double disk set that includes the Russian original and the other film (much more dull, with too many cutaways to Basil Rathbone and a bee-hive hairdoed Faith Domergue) and--sadly--the image for the Prehistoric Woman one skips! The projector being used to make the image skips in the frame! What a drag! That makes this one, the Prime one, the pick.


Fourth on the bill, Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires is actually the best of the three as far as gorgeous cinematography and clever, if not always successful effects. The storyline fuses elements of Last Man on Earth with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and looks forward to Night of the Living Dead, and most notably Alien, which clearly borrowed more than a few things from here. Wise choice, as it's a gorgeous and fascinating film that would be worth seeing even if it was in Italian without subtitles. The plot concerns a rescue mission to a strange foggy planet where the dead rise from their plastic coverings (taken over by fourth dimensional aliens) and the co-ed crew wear sexy high-collared black leather uniforms with deep yellow trim (the sexiest, coolest and most high fashion space crew uniforms ever). and their ship is a huge minimalist black affair. The outside miniatures make the ship look a bit like a floating bar of soap, but are still cool - and the planet is a bizarre world of fog, petrified tentacle tree rocks, and mist, fog and weird noises. The shots of the outside guard looking deep into fog for signs of life are some of the most eerily beautiful in all of science fiction. The dubbing is good (lead Barry Sullivan does his own) and the music is super eerie. It just gets better with every viewing, especially when the print is this HD color-restored super-marvel.


Thanks to an amazing Prime HD image (sourced no doubt from a terrific Blu-ray print), this is a fun, terrible Japanese fusion of James Bond style sci-fi underwater lair building and Jules Verne-style fishmen building ala AIP's War Gods of the Deep, Japan's Atragon, and Italy's Island of the Fishmen (AKA Screamers - also on Prime). A young and impossibly gorgeous Sonny Chiba and a young, impossibly gorgeous blond gaijin Peggy Neal (The X from Outer Space - which is streaming on Criterion and I would love to include in this list, what with its cocktails and dancing on the moon, and moons and space stations as jump offs to outer galaxy exploration) star. A native of Biloxi, Mississippi who came to Japan as a student and stayed for three films, Neal is utterly charming and naturalistic - with stunning features and blazing blonde hair, making her the perfect counterpoint to the Japanese around her (other gaijin actors appear as the US Navy). The inevitable fish people are a bit of a disappointment - all cross-eyed and hammy, enslaved to the evil ruler who controls them via a radio signal (when it jams up, they run amok shooting and killing everyone). But can Neal and Chiba free themselves and escape the lair before they too become fishmen? Meanwhile their American Naval officer friend (Franz Gruber!) labors to convince the top brass to send a search sub after the pair go missing. He won't take no for an answer!

But in the last big climax the film gets really wonky with its editing. Was the editor compelled to leave, replaced by Ed Wood's protege? We get all sorts of odd gaps, like asides and pauses that make no sense in the usually frenzied editing scheme of an underwater lair about to implode kind of climax. I mean the pauses between reactions that actors and directors presume the editor will snip off in order to create continuity (i.e. you cut to what their looking at in the space they leave between their reactions). When the gang are trying to escape and battling the bad guy's minions for space on the emergency elevator, this sluggish pace as each new emotion is formed on the actor's faces, is as annoying as it is delightful' once you've seen it enough times that the weird pacing doesn't bother you, I imagine it will scale bad movie heights. The way Chiba has to fight with the monsters carefully, as to not rip the obviously very thin plastic bag-style material used to make the monster skin (it looks like the silver/grey plastic wrap new appliances are sometimes wrapped in when you first open the box); and the way the fights drag on while the professor and Neal just stand there, looking aghast, rather than doing anything to help.


Man, whatever, papa's got a brand new bag, as the quality of the image is divine. Everyone in the underwater lair wears white tunics, and Neal's hangs on her just perfectly. With her short bob of a blonde hair do and ready-for-whatever innocence she's irresistible and Chiba has these deep dark eyes that suck you through an interdimensional portal; as a result, watching them be covered with oatmeal that's supposed to be scales is a tad upsetting. Yet nowhere near as bad as Neal's tantrum wanting to die rather than be a scaly freak, warrants. Just one of the myriad great and terrible moments when Peggy Neal, Sonny Chiba, and their professor benefactor (lower right) experience TERROR BENEATH THE SEA!

There is a stand-alone version of this on Prime (the "Comic Book Edition") but it's been so yellowed by someone's idea of color grading (for the old yellowed newsprint effect of old comics?) it's distracting. I prefer the "Double Doses of Sci-fi: Hostile Planets and Doomsday" version (it's the first film, starting on the 0:17 mark - ending 1:22). Followed by the forgettable Doomsday Machine, both are just an analog, color-graded rip of the PD title, but--as with the above Prehistoric Women--there is no good HD upgrade available.

Sort of the grandpa of Margheriti's "Gamma One" Tetralogy, it's not to be confused with War Between the Planets (above) or War of the Planets (both 1966), as those are all separate films, part of the same (unofficial) series. All told, they can be read a sextet of interlocking films worth exploring and uncovering, all connected by the "Gamma One" idea of a unified government of capable women and men working together, sans sexism, and capable commanders tackling existential planetary threats. (Don't worry, I'm working on an in-depth analysis)

Here instead of a rugged, quick-thinking, well-dubbed commander there's an aged, vaguely portly Claude Rains, hamming it up to beat the band, but never less that magnetic (this seems like one of those 'last role' kind of things, but he still had a bunch of TV and small roles in things like Lawrence of Arabia ahead of him. G'head Claude!). His voice is all there and he's not phoning it in, even wearing a space helmet and racing like a kid in a candy store through all the alien tubing, he's giving it 100%, even more so as he recognizes he's in a kind of well-written but nonetheless schlocky picture, and rather than just dial it back and coast, the way, say, Karloff might, he goes all in, like Lugosi might, realizing it's a chance to fly downhill with the brakes off as a tyrannical but lovable intellectual curmudgeon who tends his garden in the house next to one of the 'best' observatories in the world. A mix of Mycroft Holmes and Peter O'Toole doing Henry II, Rains' mathematician physicist is so brilliant he can just write an equation on the floor for the world's leaders to see via camera phones, and the world is saved. It's pretty far out how firmly he's in control, able to save or destroy the world via, as he loudly proclaims, it's all done "with calculus!" Like Dr. Who without any of the joie de vivre or love of humanity, but still deep down a good fella. Once again an errant planet is on the way to Earth, this time it's got UFO defenses!  Mario Migliardi did the score, very forward-looking to giallos and the kind of hip music he'd deliver in films like Matalo! in a few years.

In case you can't tell, this list also goes beneath the sea, because if you watch any ocean show and they'll remind you we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about our own oceans. Dark and deep and full of high pressure secrets. As with the other feature on our list, above and below, we're still exploring the uninhabitable vastness of the world beyond our daily access, only it's below rather than above. It's still a trip, man, and we get NASA rockets too. Here we have one of the countless spy movies that proliferated in the mid-60s (spanning both Goldfinger and Thunderball before the craze cooled). A lot of them aren't very good but a few of them are, in that ingenious termite way Italian directors had with cranking out high energy creative budget-defying blasts of spontaneous energetic trash, one after the other. Here, as with so many, death-defying stunts abound - as in the high up fight in the image above as our laid-back super agent fights with the beer baron bad guy whose been toppling rockets while planning to launch his own and plant a laser on the moon. We get some exciting footage of real-life Nasa rocket failures seamlessly interwoven with Eisley's frenzied driving past NASA gates. The rest of the time he's being shot at by a lovely blonde in what's supposed to Florida, chased around the brewery loading dock, trying to escape a hops silo filling with water, and/or being menaced deep in the villain's very cool expressionist undersea lair all while trying to locate a doctor in the midst of perfecting a laser beam device (in the above Sea it was the formula for turning men into sea monsters). Funny, exciting, and always mixing the unexpected with the spy movie familiar - without becoming campy or winky, thank god. It's one of the better Bond imitations and the Prime print image is sublime.


Peggy Neal is back! I know this is cheating since this one is only available on Criterion channel, worth getting for this film and Destroy All Monsters alone. Different from an ordinary kaiju movie in that it's set in that once-seemingly inevitable future of permanent bases on the moon, operated by a United world order where young people of both genders were given high ranks and dangerous jobs on orbiting space stations and manned Mars explorers. So here we have a young team of go-getters, including cute blonde gaijin astrobiologist Peggy Neal (in her other big film aside from Terror Beneath the Sea - above) and three Japanese men blasting off to Mars, stopping off on the moon to party with cute Michiko (Itoko Harada), whose got a crush on the commander, who crushes on Lisa (Neal) who crushes back but knows Michiko crushes so hard she can't get in the way, and also none of it gets in the way of their sororal professionalism. As with The Green Slime (part of the above mentioned "Gamma 1" series), the danger comes from when a tiny alien spore sample taken from free floating space (it gets gummed up in their exhaust) is brough down to earth, escapes its jar (ala Alien) and soon grows to kaiju size and starts running amok, devouring energy. The monster--dubbed Guilala--is hilarious, with a weird paper airplane-shaped head, the edges of which curl up when blasting down any model plane or tank that takes a shot at it. Luckily a trip back to the moon helps Neal synthesize the solution. But is there a solution to the human heart?


The Criterion image is soft but hey - if not for them it wouldn't be out on anything but a $60 import. And it's a must. In my mind it's the seventh film in the Gamma One series, which I often visit in a kind of chronic obsessiveness, after The Green Slime. If there's cocktails being served at little soirees on space stations or orbiting planets or the moon in a 60s science fiction film--and there's no cranky old American B-actors dragging the moood down with their patriarchal foot downing, you can bet I'll be there.