Wild Wild Planet (1965)
Criminali della galassia, I

best line: “Watch out for those gadgets on their chests!” – Commander Halstead while wrestling with an alien woman

It’s go go action, when aliens disguised as fashion models start kidnapping people for a mad mad scientist, so he can conduct inhumane experiments and merge himself with the perfect woman! Augh! Yes, it’s so bad it’s great. Spacemen fight with karate-chopping vixens, rockets spew fireworks, and aircars dangle on strings. The budget is so low the miniature buildings are re-used in the next scene as furniture and mod set decor.

The plot? Italians don’t need a stinkin’ plot — just a couple of futuristic cars and a lot of hair pieces! The “perfect” woman gets drunk and spews anti-feminist venom. Then after being spurned by every officer in the room, she runs headlong into a trap. Between the sexist banter men are manly: fighting and rescuing, meanwhile beautiful women pick clothes off the floor and stuff them into designer handbags.

While wrestling with an alien woman Commander Halstead shouts out, “Watch out for those gadgets on their chests!” I’m sure it’s all a metaphore for something.
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Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Plot Summery: Kirk in mid-life crisis returns to Enterprise selfishly determined to reclaim his former glory. He bumps our young hero from the captain’s chair: the capable Decker who is further complicated when long lost love returns in the form of Lt Ilia, the irresistible Deltan who has been forced to take an oath of celibacy so as not to take advantage of a sexually inferior species.

Meanwhile, Spock has just failed Kolinahr, a grueling ritual to wash away his emotions, and is barely able to communicate with the human crew. Only Bones has enjoyed retirement having grown a long beard and lounging about in disco leisure suits with big gold necklaces. After a bit of grumbling, he sets himself to unraveling the Gordian knot of emotional baggage.

Don’t blame Robert Wise for all the problems of this film. Wise was stuck with the production Gene Roddenberry had proposed for for Star Trek: Phase 2, an aborted TV series that was planned to launch Paramount’s television network. Plenty of money had already been spent, actors cast and signed to contracts, but when StarWars launched Hollywood’s sci-fi sweepstakes at the end of the ’70s, the studio couldn’t wait. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was put on the fast track. Paramount simply added that tab and many of the contracts to this film’s whopping $40,000,000 budget.

It was Douglas Trumbull who was responsible for the much criticized V’ger sequence and also for the Enterprise drydock masterbation scene. He is credited as “Second Unit Director”, but had free reign over the fx — which is most of the film. They were late to be finished, and because of their great expense they were spliced into the film “as is” literally at the eleventh hour, too late to hold screenings or for Wise to trim. In the Director’s Edition commentary, Wise says the studio wanted a specific running time to make good on guarantees to theaters. Paramount execs had set a firm Christmas release date for ST:TMP and prevented Wise from trimming down the over-long fx sequences.
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The Black Hole (1979)

George Lucas once said that movies are binary, ones or zeros, they either work or they don’t… Obviously this quote was early in his career before his own films became a displaycase for a line of toys and merchandising tie-ins, but he makes a good point: you walk away from a film either liking it or hating it.

However, there are things in this world that defy simple explanation, that hover in a twilight between heaven and hell, Möbius loops and unresolvable equations that warp the very fabric of spacetime itself…. There is Disney Studios’ The Black Hole!
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2001: a Space Odyssey (1968)

I’m stunned that people debate the meaning of 2001 ad nauseum without ever mentioning the incredible design of the interiors: the orange chairs in the lobby of the space hotel, the banana leather padding and turban-headed flight attendants of the Pan Am transport, the minimalist meeting room with glowing white walls at Clavius, and of course Discovery’s dizzying interior with the rotating gravity ring. HAL’s unblinking red lens is as iconic as the monolith: a black post-modern slab that keeps turning up in the oddest places. Finally, the Louis XIV furniture in the futuristic zoo cage is such a perfect visual analogy to the time displacements and overlaps Bowman experiences in the alien’s time-space. For the design alone, 2001 is a masterpiece that would be difficult to top in any era.
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This Island Earth (1955)

Two attractive scientists are kidnapped and taken on a joyride to another planet by their alien employer. His home world is so desperately out of resources they need the inferior humans to help them improve their power supply. But time is running out and it may be too late!

This first encounter with an alien species is an acid trip in vivid 3-strip Technicolor, but dry and unemotional like an Arthur C Clark epic. The actors stand around explaining things to each other while molecule sculptures blink and rotate like a moderne chandelier run amok. A large psychedelic console unit, the Interocitor, is a videophone, autopilot, and death ray all-in-one. At one point the spaceship is attacked by triangles that hurl sparkling balls at them, but they escape. Then they are attacked by a deranged slave bug, but they escape. Etc, etc. Occasionally the aliens strike a pose like the Abraham Lincoln statue, making them seem aloof and too preoccupied to get emotionally involved.

There aren’t any surprises here and that’s the surprise. It’s oddly refreshing to watch a sci-fi drama without the cliches, no sassy mouthed princess…, no wild west gunslinger or WW1 pilot…, no druids…. What you get is pure ’50s science fiction adventure that slowly unfolds from the mundane, to the mysterious, to the monumental as our stunned Earthling tourists witness the death of an alien civilization!