MISSION STARDUST (1967)

Astronaut Perry Rhodan is heading a four-man flight to the moon to investigate a new and possibly valuable metal near a crater. A villain named Arkin is interested in their findings and has planted a spy on the team to convey information and carry out his biddings, if any. Their landing is complicated when they are yanked off course and find their communications with Earth disrupted. The moon travel vehicle is disintegrated by an alien ray and they are confronted by a platinum blonde alien woman named Thora. She takes them aboard her ship (which resembles a diving sphere on legs) and explains her problem: on a mission to find a race to breed with because her race is so old, it's "genetically used up," the ship malfunctioned and she was forced to land on the moon. She is accompanied by Crest, an old sickly man, and when tests show that he has leukemia, Perry remembers a doctor on Earth (in Mombasa) who is working on a cure. They take a smaller alien craft to Earth, landing in a desert outside Mombasa where they attract the attention of the African Federation Army who arrive with jeeps and guns to attack the craft. Arkin, thanks to his spy, knows where they are and shows up with plans to steal the craft. He also kidnaps the doctor and replaces him with a fake (accompanied by two softcore porn-looking nurses). Things don't look great for our good guys, but maybe the small group of invulnerable killer robots that Thora brought with her will help.

Perry Rhodan is a sci-fi pulp hero who has appeared in over 3000 stories published in Germany since 1961 (over a hundred were published in English in the 1970s) and he's still going strong. But Perry Rhodan fans are outspoken in their dislike of this movie, as it's not very faithful to the original character. I suspect one problem for fans is that instead of space opera trappings, this movie becomes largely a spy adventure story set in an African desert, so any cosmic doings only take place in the first half-hour and at the finale. Because of this, the movie does drag mightily in the middle, but I like the character of Rhodan—as inhabited by Lang Jeffries (pictured), he comes off as the quiet confident studly type who, by the end, is ready to volunteer himself as a breeding guinea pig for Thora's use. Jeffries did play secret agents in a number of 60s Eurospy flicks, and this makes me want to search a few of those out. If you can adjust yourself to the adventures of an spy-type astronaut, you'll like this, or at least be able to tolerate it. As I noted, the middle stretch is a bit of a chore to get through, and if the handsome Jeffries isn't your type, Essy Persson (as Thora) might be. The stunning Swedish actress made an international splash a few years earlier in I, A Woman, one of the films that made softcore porn safe for mainstream theaters. Her main job here is to look coldly sexy and act superior to everyone else, and she succeeds admirably. When the astronauts ask her how she learned English so quickly, she snaps back, "It wasn't hard to learn the babble of savages." Luis Davila, as Mike Bull, is a handsome and competent sidekick. I liked Daniel Martin because his character's name is Captain Flipper and he's not a dolphin. Also because he gets to yell at Thora, "I'll kill you, you hellcat!" The bad guy, in a Goldfinger reference, carries a puppy around. The takeoff effects are awful, though some of the miniature sets are effective, and there are some nice ray gun battles and old-fashioned fisticuffs. The only print on YouTube is pan and scan and not in great shape, but I suspect this would look much better in widescreen. [YouTube]