Battle Beyond the Sun/Star Pilot

Rating:
Summary: 1960 you bastards
Review: Incase you were wondering, again. That's when this movie was made. AMAZON DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW THE YEAR OF PRODUCTION ANYMORE -OR THEY ARE TOO friggin LAZY.

I guess our money's just not goodnuff.

Rating:
Summary: "Nebo Zoyvot/The Heavens Call" Cormanized
Review: Mikhail Karzhukov's 1960 "Nebo Zoyvot" or "The Heavens Call" was Cormanized in 1962. The original is an artifact of the "Cold War" and needs to be restored to its original format to be fully appreciated. The original story line -- Russians helping Americans in space -- was later used to good effect in "2010". I give the original film five stars.

Corman bought the film cheap while in Europe. Coppolla reworked the Russian script into something supposedly pallatable to the American audience, added some garish monster so they could put it on the poster, reused footage to give it more length and recieved his first screen credit. Heaven forbid someone should do that to his film! But this sort of hacking was not unusual at the time as Corman (and Mystery Science Theater) fans know. Still, this DVD does have a decent transfer of the Corman version.

The second half of this double feature is an Italian sci-fi gone wrong. A generous star or so for that one.

Again, where's the original Russian film?