MOON ZERO TWO (1969)

In the year 2021, the moon resembles the wild West of the 19th century, with small communities popping up and miners staking land claims. Just as his two-year claim was about to run out, Wally Taplin, one such miner, found a vein of nickel, but he has since vanished and his sister Clementine arrives at a moon base hoping to find an adventurer to track him down. A pilot named Bill Kemp comes well recommended: he was the first man on Mars; since the space agency shut down its exploration unit, Bill has felt a bit lost, taking on mostly jobs of space salvage (we first see him and his buddy Karminski bringing in a junk satellite). When he first meets Clementine, he is naked, fresh from a shower, and so at a bit of a disadvantage. While he considers her offer, he also takes on, reluctantly, a secret and illegal job for millionaire J.J. Hubbard, to fly up to capture an asteroid which Hubbard has discovered is made of sapphire—he wants Bill to bring it down to the moon's surface in secret where he will profitably mine it to use for rocket parts. On top of all this, Liz, a security cop, tells Bill that higher-ups want him to get rid of his ship, the Moon Zero Two, because it's a dangerous old eyesore. All three plotlines eventually meet up when Bill and Clem go the dark side of the moon to discover that Wally is dead (a creepy shot of a skeleton in an astronaut suit). Liz wants to arrest Bill for flying a decommissioned vehicle, and Hubbard one-ups them all to insist on Bill finishing the capture of the asteroid to be brought to Wally's former land for mining. There are bar fights and shootouts, as in classic western mode, and it's not really a spoiler to note that the good guys win.

This is not a well-regarded movie, perhaps because arriving when it did, audiences may have expected another 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It does crib some visuals and minor plot elements from the earlier film, but it can't hope to compete in terms of budget and style. For what it is, a B sci-fi-western (and to be fair, its posters called it "the first moon western"), it's OK. I have a thing for James Olson (Bill, pictured) so, as he is in almost every scene, I stuck with it. He usually plays fairly passive vanilla guys rather than heroic alpha males, but as a coming-of-age gay teenager in the early 70s, I imprinted on him in THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN where he has a brief nude scene—as he also does here. I also liked Adrienne Corri (the artist that Alex assaults in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE) as Liz; she's likable and her character seems to have some depth, though she's not on camera long enough for us to really get to know her. The rest of the actors, including Catherine Schell as Clem and Warren Mitchell as Hubbard, are fairly weak. Aside from Olson, that leaves the visuals as points of interest, and their effectiveness is scattershot. There is a moderately fun low-gravity barroom fight (which is in slow motion, I guess because other ways of conveying weightlessness were too expensive), and there are some very 60s style go-go dancers now and then. The score is a little weird, often sounding more like lounge music than futuristic sci-f music. Surprisingly, it's a Hammer film, one of their rare SF outings. With low expectations, this is definitely watchable. [TCM]