Movie review – “Moon Zero Two” (1969) **

This could have been a really good movie. The special effects are impressive for the time, James Olson is a believable astronaut (though not really leading man material), Catherine Schell is stunning, Warren Mitchell a believable millionaire, the basic story isn’t bad… But the filmmakers keep dropping the ball. There are two main stories – Olsen is paid by Mitchell to do an illegal mining operation, to make an asteroid crash on the dark side of the moon so he can mine it - that’s a good idea. Throw in Schell looking for her missing brother and a believable depiction of moon society (run by red tape with miners out constantly to make a buck) and you have the basis for something good, especially with Hammer’s success with horror and suspense tales. Sure the interior decoration has a mod sixties feel (eg groovy mini skirts and helmets for girls) but that has charm of it's own too.

But Michael Carreras, never the best writer, penned an awkward script (it essentially goes: part one, asteroid, then part two, Schell, then unconvincingly ties them together). There’s too much talk and not enough suspense or horror. Every once in a while there’s a good bit, like Olsen trying to capture the asteroid or driving across the moon and running out of oxygen and you go “they needed more of this”. Then they ruin it with the awful jazz music score, or we cut to the bar and a bunch of miners come in like a western, or there are these dancers doing a big number, or the space patrol wear a silly wig. The film even gets off to an awful start with this ridiculous comic animated credit sequence which gives the completely wrong impression of the sort of film this is. It was advertised as a “space western” which it kind of is – but why didn’t they make a solid sci fi instead? Or a sci-fi horror? That’s what launched Hammer, with Quartermass. The studio had little experience with Westerns - they made war films, swashbucklers, Ancient World adventure tales...but never a Western. So they gambled a large budget on that and this film helped killed Hammer.