 |
 United Nations astronauts are surprised to find a guy that claims to have gone
to the moon with a couple of other people sixty-five years ago. He claims to
have been attacked by moon creatures called Selenites while on the moon. This
is described as a "fantastic account of life on the moon" and they praise Ray
Harryhausen's effects work. They also note that director Nathan Juran was also
the guy that made Attack Of The 50-Foot Woman. 1964, 103 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
This one trickified me right from the beginning. As soon as the picture began,
we were on our way to the moon with one of those multicultural Star Trek-style
crews (though in this case that merely means that some of the astronauts speak
American with some crappy accents) and I was rubbing my chin and musing that
here was one movie about a trip to the moon that wasn't farting around. I had
noticed from the back of the DVD box that that there was some blonde gal that
was making the trip and she was wearing some type of frilly shirt and long
skirt that NASA chicks usually forgo on these space journeys. This made me
think that what we had here was probably one of those deals where the
girlfriend of the hunky dope that decides to hitch a ride with the older,
doofus inventor that inevitably builds these nineteenth century backyard
spaceships (Now we have backyard wrestling - that's what I call progress!), had
gone and either stowed away or accidentally launched the dang thing when she
was checking her make up or something. I was of course pretty much right in my
initial assessment of the situation (and no, I hadn't read the book - why would
you even ask that?), but I was wondering just how this all fit in with the
United Nations space flight that was taking place at the beginning of the
movie. And speaking of those blue-helmeted busy bodies, I think we all know
that if the U.N. was really in charge of the first trip to the moon, that we
would all still be on the launch pad waiting for France to sign off on some
resolution allowing it to happen, while trying to make our great nation look
like some
sort of pushy space bully. What's wrong with those frogs? Don't they realize
that those moon men probably have weapons of mass destruction? Anyways, these
guys land on the moon and once they're out and about on the lunar surface, they
discover a torn up British flag and a note claiming the moon for Queen
Victoria. Guess you all need to get back to Geneva, huh? It was at this
moment I realized that this U.N. space mission would merely provide the framing
device for a movie-length flashback describing the real first trip to the moon
way back in 1899. Remember that? Well, the U.N. apparently covered it up
because it made the civilized world look good.  From the information on the piece of paper left on the moon, the people back on
Earth manage to track down the only survivor of that first trip at a nursing
home. Quicker than you can say, "I remember it like it was only yesterday..."
this guy, Arnold Bedford, begins rambling on and on (for about 100 minutes)
about his stupid trip to the moon with his hottie girlfriend Katherine
Callender and their crazy inventor buddy Joseph Cavor. You know how these
lonely old folks can embellish things, right? Once my grandfather told me that
he was in something called World War II and that he was fighting Japanese with
the help of the Chinese. Did this guy think I was born in 1970 or something?
So, we go way in back in time for what basically amounts to an extended episode
of a little television I program called Space: 1899 (please tell me I'm the first person to come up with that). Arnold is a
frustrated and broke playwright who is squiring the whiney blonde girl named
Katherine who wants to get all married and stuff and gets pissy when she sees
that Arnold hasn't gotten past the first page in his play (doesn't she know
that these things have to ferment, like the fine whine she enjoys so much?).
Arnold assures her that it's all under control, even as he is getting a note
from his landlord that he is overdue on the rent to Cherry Cottage. Somehow,
he manages to trick his girlfriend into believing that he is not only not
behind on the rent, but is actually the owner of the cottage (inherited from a
rich aunt - he probably got that car stereo from a dying cousin or something,
too) and eventually gets her name put on a bogus deed in order to sell the
house to their neighbor Cavor. Cavor wants to buy the place because he's
concerned that his experiments are going to damage the property or something,
but once he shows Arnold the project his working on, Arnold is ready to plow
the money back into the inventor's work. Arnold would no doubt call this
"investing in his future" while Cavor probably referred to this as "grifting".
So, just what is the big project? Anti-gravity paint! Wait! Where are you
all going? Like you didn't see all those movies with Flubber in it!  Arnold, showing that he's the perfect match for a blonde gal, immediately sees
the anti-gravity paint as something that he could use on the soles of all those
surplus army boots he invested in. I was never real sure why an aspiring
playwright was also getting in the clearance footwear business, but luckily
Arnold is soon convinced by Cavor that what they really should do is paint the
blinds on this big metal sphere in his greenhouse (guarded by geese for no real
good reason except that I suppose someone thought that farm animals always
equals yuks) and fly to the moon where there would be stuff like nuggets of gold
just laying around with Arnold's name on it. This is all well and good except
that Arnold's old lady gives him that speech all guys get at one time or
another. You know the one I'm talking about. It's the old "it's either your
trip to the moon in your homemade rocket or me" speech. Why do women always
have to be so doggone selfish? Arnold decides that gold nuggets hold more
allure than trying to explain to his old lady how he put her name on a bogus
deed and prepares to fly off with Cavor. In the meantime, the old lady gets a
summons served on her by the authorities for the scam she and Arnold were
pulling with the bogus deed. My reaction to all this was the same as Arnold's:
I didn't think they'd catch on that fast! She stomps down to the launch pad
to read Arnie the riot act and wouldn't you know it, but it's right at that
time that the ship starts to launch! They pull her on board, though no one
would
have blamed them if they had pretended not to hear her mewling outside as the
ship floated away and she slid off the outside of the ship to the ground.
Shoot, if she let go soon enough, she probably wouldn't even be that badly
hurt. It doesn't take long for Katherine to muck things up when she opens
up a window (remember the blinds are painted with the anti-gravity paint)
and throws them off course straight into the sun. To you, this may seem like
a pretty serious crisis, but to us astronauts, it's no big whup because in the
next scene they're flying back toward the moon and everyone seems to have
forgotten that they were ever headed into the sun in the first place. 
Once on the moon, the adventure begins! Arnold and Cavor go out on the surface
in their diving suits and make a big production about wearing their diving
helmets since there's no oxygen on the moon, but I could have sworn there were
scenes where the faceplates of the helmets were not in and even if they were,
the helmets had these side vents that were open, so what was the point of the
helmets at all? They end up underneath the surface of the moon where they
encounter a race of insect-like creatures that are about the size of child
actors dressed in cheesy costumes and wearing these bug-eyed masks that look
like like Greedo from Star Wars. Arnold immediately gets into a fight with these creatures and chucks several
of them off a bridge into a bottomless pit below. So much for making a good
impression. Cavor figures out that the prism set-up the moon men have is some
type of solar powered gizmo that provides oxygen underground so that these
creatures can survive their life on the moon. It seems a bit inconvenient that
creatures needing oxygen would develop on a heavenly body where there was not
any naturally occurring, but I guess that's why about fifty of them get beat up
by one skinny English guy. They go back up to the surface, but those little
buggers have gone and carjacked their sphere complete with Katherine inside of
it. Arnold and Cavor go back down to retrieve the ship and the babe and
somehow get separated. Cavor ends up hanging out with Katherine and he works on
trying to communicate with these things. Finally he gets a dialog going on
with these guys and the leader starts asking all sorts of questions like
doesn't the sun hurt our eyes when we live on the surface, why does man make
war and what's wrong with the Rams? There is a lot of blather about war and you
can tell that this is another one of those uppity alien races that looks down
their noses at us because we like to settle things man to man and don't mind
getting our hands dirty getting rid of despots that may have weapons of mass
destruction. Thankfully, before we get any more of this hippie-alien's treasonous babble,
Arnold shows up and shoots at him, gets the ship repaired, gets in Cavor's face
about being an alien sympathizer and takes off leaving Cavor behind on the
moon, where Cavor has decided to stay. A visually interesting film that
otherwise leaves the viewer alternately bored and exasperated, First Men In The Moon contains surprisingly little in the way of action when they're on the moon.
Basically they get their ship stolen by these things, then they get it back and
that's it. There isn't much exploring going on, nothing much of interest is
seen (there is a giant caterpillar-like thing that gets zapped with a laser,
but you don't even get to have Arnold fight it or anything) and you keep
waiting for something else to happen. Despite the movie supposedly being about
these guys on the moon, it takes about forty-five minutes to get there and
before we get there, we learn to despise all of our main characters, but
especially the goofy inventor. His constant babbling and being whacky grates
on your nerves even more than Arnold's selfish behavior and criminal fraud or
Katherine's prissy and smothering attitude. By the time they launched into
space, you were breathing a sigh of relief because finally they could avoid
anymore weak attempts at characterization and bust out all the stop motion
monsters and strangely shaped plants and crystals. Then once they get on the
moon, they just run around underground bothering these midget moon men and you
actually feel sorry for the poor little devils when Arnold is throwing them to
their death, when all they wanted to do was cross this narrow bridge he was
blocking. This is an overlong, uneventful film whose ideas are sketchily laid
out and never match the promise of the above average special effects. Another
dull entry along with the The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver in the Ray Harryhausen
Signature Collection, though this time Ray's work is about the only bright
spot.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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