AKA ‘Star Pilot’ (1966)
IMDb metadata: 1 hour and 29 minutes of Dali time, rated a generous 4.3 by 284 relatives of the producer.
aka ‘Star Pilot.’
Verdict: One hour and twenty-nine minutes later and I still do not know what Mission Hydra was.
Rock rats in Sardinia find a hole in the ground. Wow! Then their fancy scientific instruments — watches, telephones, jeeps — misbehave. The solution is more funding! But the Ministry in Rome is not convinced. There follows more incoherent drivel from the Italian Sy Fy factory.
Much going to’ing and fro’ing and it seems the Roman coliseum is in Sardinia.
Using the script as a tool, the professor and the graduate students dig and find a buried spaceship. The aliens missed Arizona and hit Sardinia near the coliseum. Wow! Satnav gone mad!
First contact does not go well. Just as the professor was about to display his CV, thugs appear with gats and demand the secret weapon he has been working on. They declare, by the way, that ‘We are not Chinese [despite appearances]. We are Oriental.’ Salute that!
‘It’s no weapon, you fools,’ replies the professor. ‘It is an alien ship.’ The Orientals are not going to fall for that one, when….
Aliens in black latex appear and blast away. They seize the surviving thugs and the professor’s party, which includes his daughter (who thereafter tries to steal every scene by mugging, posing, waving, flouncing, peering, preening, gasping, gyrating — the whole repertoire of a director’s girlfriend’s efforts to act). It seems that the aliens took the wrong off ramp when they crashed and now need repairs. Blah, blah, blah. The prof, it turns out, can change a tyre on a spaceship, when not digging in the rock garden.
The aliens, commanded by a woman, take off with the prisoners to complete a mission and continue the repairs, with the promise of returning the prisoners to Earth when Missione Hydra is accomplished, whatever it is. No one cracks wise about how strange it is that a woman is captain alien.
Then there is a segment that seems from another movie, as Earth Command launches a fleet of spaceships in pursuit of the alien craft. We never hear or see this armanda again. Satnav again? Must have diverted into the another movie in a studio next door.
In a similar vein they land on a planet of the apes and some creatures appear to put on the lobby card. There is dialogue in this sequence that makes even less sense than that elsewhere.
On board the imprisoned Orientals make a break, and shoot ‘em follows. The black latex is not bullet proof. The situation gets worse. And worse. The screenplay is even worse. Later the dead rise in response to a late screenplay edit.
More than once members of the crew have to do an EVA without a spacesuit. Yep. They pop out onto the space trampoline in their black latex and wiggle the antenna, scrape the barnacles, paint the prow. Weightless, briefly. Cold, no. Dead, no. Slow motion, yes.
Meanwhile, thanks to Einstein’s theory of relativity, time passes, and the Earth is destroyed in a nuclear war, according to some old newspapers they find on a derelict Bulgarian Marie Celeste spaceship. Bulgarians in space! What next! An idiot in the White House! Again.
They have then no choice but to go on. And on. The fraternity brothers feared the worst. They were right.
It just goes on and on, boring the cast to distraction.
While made earlier, the English-Language dubbing was done after the success of ‘Star Wars’ and it was retitled ‘Star Pilot’ to travel in its wake to bait hapless audiences.
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