Hindsight being what it is, I don’t imagine that I should have ever thought that a movie starring a guy named Rik Von Nutter and Gaby Farinon would be anything above “worst movie about a runaway space station ever” status. If Rik and Gaby never had the good sense to change their names to something that didn’t immediately make me think that this was some type of send up of movies about runaway space stations, then why would I think they had any ability to judge scripts?

Still, when I saw that the director was the American-sounding Anthony Dawson, I thought that maybe, just maybe this might be a hidden gem. Now, if the director with the American-sounding name really been American, I would have keep my five bucks in my pocket until I could hit the 7-11 and invest them in some scratch tickets, but I knew that that American-sounding name was really hiding the Italian-sounding name of Antonio Margheriti.

Like “open sesame” or “clearance videos”, “Antonio Margheriti” is a magical phrase that makes an otherwise rational man lose any semblance of common sense. If it’s one thing any connoisseur of film knows it’s that while Antonio may not do anything particularly well, he has no problem doing everything particularly half-assed. Over his forty-plus years career, he managed to make movies in every Italian film genre imaginable. Gothic horror, sword and sandal, giallo, war, cannibals, killer fish, spaghetti western, and space opera are all represented in his oeuvre. And he was a guy who only seemed to get better as he went along.

While 1964’s Castle of Blood was a stolid movie that could’ve have turned a hyperactive four-year-old pumped full of Twinkies and Jolt into Rip Van Winkle, Cannibal Apocalypse has to be acknowledged as the premiere crazed Vietnam vet-cannibal movie of its era. Even movies with questionable premises such as the Indiana Jones inspired Ark Of The Sun God which featured a Trans Am chase and really hideous model work more than justified its importation from Italy with all its laughable action.

All of this is a prelude to trying to explain just how horrible Assignment: Outer Space truly is. No, it isn’t so horrible that it’s hilarious. Yes, the special effects depicting all the action that’s taking place in the outer space of said assignment are so embarrassing you wonder how they could have ever had the courage to put them on screen, but how often can you look at unmoving astronauts “floating” against a backdrop of stars that for some reason are blinking like those little cheap white Christmas lights before moving from amused to bored?

I’ll admit that I laughed out loud when an astronaut jumped out of his spaceship that was going to crash and we got to watch him fall to the planet’s surface like he had jumped off a ten story building instead of falling thousands of miles at thousands of miles an hour. But by this time the laugh was more of a snort of disgust than anything else.

Abominable special effects don’t automatically raise my ire though. Antonio’s special effects several decades later in Ark Of The Sun God weren’t appreciably any better and I managed to laugh with them instead of turn my nose up at them. But that was because they served a story that wasn’t a mundane, confusing talkfest like what we endured with Assignment: Outer Space. If you’re going to have your generic characters sitting around the same cramped cockpit jabber jawing all day about a space station and the photonic field its emitting that is threatening to melt the Earth, put a little effort into making it look nice.

If you’ve ever had any doubt that Mario Bava is one of the great filmmakers of all time, just check out his Planet of the Vampires to see that low-budget Italian science fiction movies don’t have to be the cruddy humiliations that movies like this one, War Of The Planets and War Of The Robots were. It didn’t hurt that Mario actually was working with a story with some ambition behind it. Here, we spend the first forty percent of the movie yakking about everything except the main plot. And in a seventy-one minute movie no less!

Nothing was ever terribly clear as far as who was who or what was happening here other than then the fact that we were in the far-flung 22nd century where the astronauts wore suits that looked like silver Michelin Man costumes and had helmets that looked to be good-sized televisions turned on their side.

Ray is the reporter accompanying the crew of a space ship headed by an uptight captain (and I do mean uptight – you should see the prunefaced expression he busts out whenever there’s a crisis). Ray also narrates the action for us, but in what would have to be called an odd artistic decision, they get different guys to dub Ray’s speaking voice and his narration. Sometimes I forgot that the narrator was also Ray. But then again sometimes I forgot to stay awake, so maybe it was explained while I dozed, like Ray had a cold or something.

Lucy is the token female/love interest and I think that Captain George was sweet on her, but the dashing and multiple-voiced Ray captures her heart thus causing some tension between George and Ray that culminates in a zero gravity punch that looks like a slow motion sissy move more than anything else. Al is the stud pilot with bleached white hair, whose been around forever and done it all. Every so often he’d chip in some awful bit of philosophy that would’ve have easily been the worst dialogue of the film, but for Captain George’s soulful rumination about how outer space has been explored more thoroughly than human emotions.

That’s some pretty scary talk coming from the captain of your ship, especially since he’s resigned himself to the fact that there’s no way to stop the runaway space station. But guess who’s not going down without a fight? Guess who’s going to get the scoop of the 22nd century or die trying? Guess who just hopped in the space taxi and flew off to the space station to destroy it?

I’ll confess that this movie lost whatever chance it may have had with me as soon as I heard folks going on and on about a space taxi. Say what you want about the Star Trek franchise, but do you really think anyone would remember it today if the crew took space taxis down to a planet’s surface instead of shuttle craft? And the space taxi is just some open-air vehicle that drives around space like a little motor boat or something!

The climax of the movie shows Ray riding in this thing and chucking things out into space to try and determine the boundaries of the deadly photonic field the space station is emitting. I wasn’t sure which was more off-putting: Ray screaming at the top of his lungs that “I’m going to make it!” or George screaming at the top his lungs once Ray did in fact make it to “turn off the electric brain!”

Technically deficient on every level, devoid of talent at every turn, the most shocking aspect of Assignment: Outer Space is that as it was Antonio Margheriti’s second directorial effort, that he ever had a third one. Not good, not fun. You’d have to be a real Von Nutter to get anything beyond drowsy watching it.

© 2008 MonsterHunter