BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN (1959)
Tagline: Billions of light-years away ... out in space beyond the sizzling sun ... in terrifying unknown worlds!
(Sci-Fi, Adventure, Mars) [PG]
Note – This movie did not originally have an MPAA rating, but I am pretty sure it would have been a PG. There is once scene with a pretty gnarly alien fight involving alien blood.
This one is about two races that basically rule the world in the future trying to get to Mars first. One of them has been secretly developing a plan to get there, but doesn’t tell the other. In a twist of fate, the nation that was the least prepared to make the journey has a rocket that is now being sucked into the sun due to arrogance and is in desperate need of help to survive.
First off, let me get to a bit of the history on this one. This was originally filmed in 1959 as NEBO ZOVYOT, a Soviet science fiction film directed by Mikhail Karyukov and Aleksandr Kozyr. Roger Corman bought the rights and crafted it into an English-dubbed and re-edited U.S. version called BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN. The English version involves this alien fight and the overall direction of the film was given to Thomas Colchart. Thomas Colchart is just a pseudonym for Francis Ford Copolla. The film was distributed by American-International Pictures and ended up being 13 minutes shorter than the Soviet version.
When I was watching this thing I kept thinking to myself that the acting just flat out sucks, but I could also tell everything we being dubbed, so I am not going to really get into the acting here. Whenever you have dubbing it’s very difficult to tell what would have happened if the actors doing the dubbing would have done a better job if they had just completely replaced the original cast.
Roger Corman went through the effort of completely getting rid of a United States vs. Soviet Union storyline and all the references the Soviet Union that he could. This resulted in a freakishly choppy movie with about the worst editing I have ever seen in my life. I say about the worst, because I have definitely seen worse.
What was good about this movie was the effects overall. It felt very “TOHO” and some of the shots particularly when Mars is in view are pretty rad looking. I do think the aliens were a bit over the top and the fact that they were supposed to represent male and female aliens made the scene that much more wonky. Having said that, without it, this movie would have been largely just a typical space rescue movie and at the very least the aliens were pretty memorable.
I have to give this one a 2 out of 7. Parts were well done, but too much of it was just weird spliced-up cut-up filmmaking not worth a second viewing.
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