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 Richmond Talbot is a "reluctant volunteer" who is next to orbit the moon after
the successful mission of Charlie the chimp. Problems ensue when Talbot is
accosted by the "beautiful, mysterious Lyrae". She has some information that
could save the space mission, but everyone thinks she is a spy. The back of
the box includes a glowing quote from The New York Times. The boxcopy also
refers to Richmond Talbot as "Richard" for some reason. How many times do I
have to tell these people to actually watch the movie before trying to write it
up? 1962, 98 minutes, VHS
Did you know that the United States manned space program began at a diner party
when a chimpanzee stabbed an Air Force captain in the ass with a fork? I
always had my suspicions, but the important thing to remember about this
bizarre event is that it is the last interesting thing that happens in Moon Pilot and it comes about fifteen minutes into its mission-to-Mars-length 98 minutes.
This is a relatively early live action non-effort from the Walt Disney Company
and it's notable for how little drama - real, imagined, or even forced, it
contains.
I'm still not sure how they managed to accomplish this since the movie involved
a chimp, a reluctant astronaut (not Don Knotts thank God, but Tom Tryon), a
sexy alien chick, and a gruff and apparently not yet suicidal Brian Keith.
Everything about this movie seems to be intent on proving Einstein's theory of
relativity in that as you sit on your ratty couch watching this thing, time
seems to stretch until when it finally ends, you'll feel as if five hours had
passed instead of about an hour and half. I know that any number of movies
have proven this to us in the past (remember Django Strikes Again?), but whereas those movies had to be respected for being so aggressively long
and boring that you become an active participant in watching it, just to spite
everyone involved so that you can then stand on the top of the car you have on
blocks in your front yard and browbeat the neighbors about how atrocious such
and such flick was, Moon Pilot, was so inoffensive in execution that it best serves as a movie to put on for
your bratty stepkids when they're home for Thanksgiving or something. It will
either lull them to sleep or force them outside to play, while not registering
except as dull background noise to the half-wasted adults in the room.  Much like the similarly boring (and longer!) First Men In The Moon, this movie seemingly starts out with a bang as we are in the midst of some
space mission, where a capsule is orbiting the moon and everyone (the three or
four guys in front of about two banks of blinking lights) at mission control is
really nervous and tense about the mission, since we were in a space race with
the Commies back then (this was back before we moved into that space apartment
with them and those rich guys that pay twenty million bucks in rent) and they
had
pretty much conquered America with the launching of Sputnik a few years before.
On the ground you've got General Vanneman (Keith) who we know is gruff because
he is constantly barking out his lines and chomping a cigar. Also present is
Senator McGuire who is played by the same guy that played circus con-man Harry
Tupper in that Toby Tyler, Or Ten Weeks With A Circus movie. I guess that this senator is there to provide us with failed attempts
at comedy involving how clueless our elected officials are. Almost without
exception, these bits fall flat and you're just hoping that the
General will start growling and snorting again to fill the silence that follow
these bombs. One almost wonders if there was some half-assed effort with this
movie to poke fun at the space race and the obsession our government had with
it , but it's a one note joke
that they play so broadly and unimaginatively that it's an utter failure.
Where were the bumbling foreign spies with bad accents? Where was the crazy
invention they were trying to steal? Where were the kids no one would believe?
Besides, I thought we were trying to bury these Ivan Dragos anyway. What the
heck are they doing making fun of our boys during the Cuban missile crisis? Is
it too late have John Ashcroft bring these traitorous dogs up on charges? If I
wanted to watch a bad comedy with anti-American views, I'd watch CNN. And
didn't our silly obsession with the space race get us to the moon first?
Didn't it destroy the
Evil Empire? Didn't it get Push, Nevada cancelled early?  So this early space mission is all tense and stuff, but in the end it turns out
okay and we get the space capsule recovered. We meet Captain Talbot (Tryon
from I Married A Monster From Outer Space ) and he gets a little woozy when he's in the airplane trying to recover the
capsule, so we know that surely he is the best candidate to go to the moon,
because of the hi-jinks involving barf in a zero-g environment. You would have
thought that at some point in all his super-secret Air Force training it would
have come out that he was afraid of flying, but I guess that what makes it all
so goddamned funny. Another whacky moment comes when Talbot fishes the
astronaut out of the capsule and it turns out to be Charlie the chimp. I
wasn't able to confirm whether this chimp was actually Mr. Stubbs from the Toby Tyler flick, but I'm guessing that he probably left Moon Pilot off his resume so as not to tarnish an otherwise standout career. Hey, most
everyone in this movie is either dead or French, so Stubbs' refusal to
acknowledge this one isn't too far out of line. Later at a dinner party
celebrating the mission's success, the General tells all the pilots in the
program that they are going to move on to the next phase of the project -
sending a man up. They need to do it next week because the moon is going on
vacation or something after that and so let's see a show of hands of who wants
to volunteer. It turns out that no one wants to go. These guys aren't
obviously from the Right
Stuff school of kick ass test pilots, but are closer to college kids that sit
in the back of the lecture hall. This is where Charlie comes in. He's been
out of control the whole night, making farting noises, putting his bowl on his
head, and smoking cigars. Heck, he's been up there and back, so he's the Man!
He stabs his buddy Talbot in the butt with a fork and this is mistaken by the
General for a volunteer. Why the General thinks a guy jumping up, screaming,
and holding his ass is someone volunteering for anything is probably best left
to his therapist to figure out.  Before Talbot can take his Dramamine and get his rump fired off into space, he
demands a three day pass so that he go tell his mommy good-bye. The General
relents after much squawking, but tells Talbot to be on the look out for
strangers and spies and Commie stuff like that. As part of his moon training,
he is given a briefcase full of that space food that comes in toothpaste tubes.
This plays no part in the movie, but the briefcase is given to him by Nancy
Kulp, whom you will undoubtedly remember from all those Miss Hathaway fantasies
you had as a youth. Talbot flies out to see his mama and on the plane a sexy
chick named Lyrae (obviously an alien name and not a Commie one) starts talking
to him and Talbot thinks she is some type of spy. He ditches her once he gets
off the plane and gets a ride back to his mom's house with his kid brother,
Walter. In a completely pointless, gratuitous, and distracting cameo, Tommy
Kirk appears as Walter for about thirty seconds in a single scene. What does
it say about your movie when you can barely get Tommy Kirk to show up for a
scene? After all, he starred in that Mars Needs Women embarrassment, didn't he? Once home, Talbot discovers that this Lyrae woman is
still pursuing him and he does everything he can to avoid it. At some point,
she says that she only needs to tell him something important, but Talbot is
a spaz and has been conditioned to fear strangers by his superiors even if
they are hotties with French accents. For some reason, this Lyrae character is
described by Talbot to the General as a Beatnik or something. I was never too
sure why, because she just looked like some fashion model from the early
sixties, but this allowed them to parade a bunch of Beatnik chicks in a police
line-up later on in the movie when the Feds were trying to find this girl.
That was really funny. What happened to that chimp? So, is this chippie a spy intent on sabatoging our ace astronaut and causing the
collapse of the free world? Nope, just an alien babe looking for someone to
put the "man" back into "human". She is from an advanced race who already know
all about space travel and she's just trying to warn Talbot that he needs to
put some different shielding on his space ship so he doesn't go bananas like
Charlie did when he returned from his mission (you mean sticking that fork in
Talbot's butt wasn't part of his training?). Well, once Talbot finally gets
around to getting launched, no one ever bothers to tell us whether he has
gotten his rocket coated with the new and improved stuff, but I guess it
doesn't matter since Lyrae teleports onto his ship and they decide to go to her
planet or something to end the movie in a rather abrupt fashion. Without any
real conflict, this movie
feels like a dish where someone forgot to add an ingredient, resulting in a
tasteless stew that leaves you burping air. This was based on a novel and you
wonder how much of that was redacted for this Disney version, but even if that
book just focused on Lyrae and Talbot getting to know each other, that could be
enough to sustain things if those characters did more than run after and run
away from one another as they did in this movie. Edmond O'Brien shows up as an
FBI-type guy who is kind of protecting Talbot from Lyrae, but his role is
little more than crabbiness and befuddled incompetence. His presence is most
notable to see how far the star of D.O.A. had fallen looks-wise and roles-wise in the twelve years since that classic
film noir. The French chick that plays Lyrae doesn't bring much to the table
beyond the expected girlish surprise at how humans kiss each other. Is there a
reason all these aliens that hook up with earth guys never know how we give our
good lovin' but are immediately all about it, once they get a taste? A
plodding, earthbound sci-fi flick that made you wish you had left with Tommy
Kirk when he quickly exited things after doing nothing more than driving Talbot
home.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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