by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Thanksgiving night,
after George White’s 1935 Scandals, Charles and I watched the 1964 film Mutiny in Outer Space, a considerably less prestigious movie
produced under the dubious auspices of the Woolner Brothers (when we caught one
of their productions on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 I joked, “At the top of the food chain of studios
founded by brothers is Warner Brothers, and at the bottom is Woolner Brothers”)
and Hugo Grimaldi Film Productions. The Woolner brothers (Bernard, David and
Lawrence, in case you were interested) and Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce (when
I went to one of the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings in Golden Hill I saw his name on
a writing credit and joked: “Ah! Screenplay by Arthur C. … uh, Pierce”) are the five co-credited producers, with Grimaldi
directing from a script by himself and Pierce. (Imdb.com claims Pierce also
co-directed but is “uncredited” in that capacity, though Pierce and Grimaldi
have a joint credit for “Original Story for Screen.”) I was interested in Mutiny
in Outer Space because the proprietor of
the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings (http://sdvsf.org/)
had scheduled this for his late September screening, along with Missile to
the Moon (the 1958 remake of the
dreadful Cat Women on the Moon that was actually superior to the original from 1953, mainly due to the
interestingly quirky direction of Richard Cunha and at least a slightly more literate script), but due to health issues
was incapacitated for several months. While we had Missile to the Moon on a DVD boxed set with three other sci-fi
cheapies, I’d never seen this and I went looking on archive.org for a download.
Mutiny in Outer Space turned
out essentially to be The Caine Mutiny meets Alien:
virtually all the action takes place on Space Station X-7, where an exciting
new shipment from the moon containing ice has just arrived and the commanders
of Earth’s space program are really excited because if there’s ice on the moon,
it can be melted down into water and also broken up into its elemental
components of hydrogen and oxygen, which will give people something they can
breathe. Then the world can colonize the moon and produce both food and
industrial products there — which makes this movie sound like a prequel to
Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, in which the moon gets turned into a penal colony á
la 19th century
Australia until the colonists, with the aid of a sentient computer, rebel and
declare their independence. Alas, there’s one itty-bitty problem with that ice
from the moon: once it melts, it releases a fungus that’s invariably lethal to
humans and grows into snake-like tendrils that basically devour everything in
their path.
The first crew member of Space Station X-7 to catch the fungus is
Captain Dan Webber (Carl Crow), who’s essentially this film’s antecedent of the
Star Trek “red shirts” whose only
plot function was to get killed early on so we’d know what danger the rest of
the crew — including the name stars — were in. He gets a huge red sore (at
least we presume that it’s red, since this film is in black-and-white — you
think a Woolner Brothers production budget in 1964 could afford color?) that
opens a hole in his leg, but fortunately Grimaldi cuts away from his leg just
when it’s starting to look really yucky and we’re only told that Webber has expired. Also, the commanding
officer of Space Station X-7, Col. Frank Cromwell (Richard Garland) has caught
a bad case of “space rapture” (analogous to the “rapture of the deep” suffered
by terrestrial divers who get so carried away by the splendors of the
underwater realm that they do dumb things like stay down too long for their
oxygen supply or ascend too fast and get “the bends”) and it’s made him surly,
quick to anger, paranoid and willing to give stupid and counterproductive
orders, like allowing spaceships to continue to dock on Space Station X-7 even
despite the risk that they will carry the fungus back to Earth and it will
decimate billions. The other protagonists are the station’s other top officers,
including second-in-command Major Gordon Towers (William Leslie, top-billed);
ship’s botanist Faith Montaine (Dolores Faith), who first notices the effects
of the fungus when the three months’ food supply she’s synthesized on board
gets reduced mysteriously to just a few days’ worth; Lt. Connie Engstrom
(Pamela Curran); and Sgt. Andrews (Harold Lloyd, Jr., son of the legendary
comedian and, according to his biography on imdb.com, “a submissive homosexual
who would come home battered after a rough date”; his career abruptly ended
when he suffered a stroke at age 34 from which he never fully recovered, and he
died at age 40 in 1971 just a few months after the passing of his famous dad).
along with the station’s resident medic, Dr. Hoffman (James Dobson), who first
diagnoses the fungus, realizes how dangerous it is and orders the room in which
Webber died from it sealed off so it doesn’t spread. (Incidentally one Josef
von Stroheim is credited with “sound effects,” so Harold Lloyd, Jr. wasn’t the only person associated with this movie who had a far
more famous dad.) Mutiny in Outer Space is that frustrating sort of bad movie with a good movie trapped inside
it struggling to get out; the idea of an outer-space Captain Queeg isn’t
inherently uninteresting, and though Richard Garland is hardly in Humphrey
Bogart’s class as an actor he’s still the most authoritative player in this film.
The problems with this
movie include an incredibly cheap-looking production — the model showing the
space station’s exterior is reasonably convincing but the interiors looked like
they were furnished from a thrift store and the little animated cut-out rocket
that lands on the station (or tries to) is so inept it’s risible. Yes, the
Woolner Brothers only had $90,000 to work with, but it’s still embarrassing
that a movie with so cheap and unconvincing a depiction of a spacecraft came
out just two years after the original Star Trek TV series, with its far better thought-out and
depicted ships, stations and planets, came out (and Star Trek was in color, which in the 1960’s made the special
effects considerably more difficult!). It also doesn’t help that the costumes
are so obviously designed to appeal to horny straight teenage boys, which
Hollywood considered then (and still considers now) the core audience for
science fiction; the male officers and crew are dressed in nondescript grey
tunics that look like something a mortuary staff would wear, but the women are
dressed in skin-tight jump suits with push-up bras and plenty of emphasis on
their curves. (Dolores Faith is also afflicted with the least believable
plucked eyebrows and drawn-in replacements I’ve ever seen in a film.) There are
also the usual scientific inconsistencies, including one howler Charles spotted
before I did: we’re told that the fungus grows in warm environments and
exposure to cold will either kill it or render it harmless (which is why no one
noticed it encased in lunar ice until the ice melted), but in the film’s most
obvious attempt at a shock scene the fungus’s tendrils have somehow managed to
exit the space station and surround it without getting killed by the cold of
outside space. All in all, Mutiny in
Outer Space is the best film I’ve seen
from its rather dubious sources — the Woolner Brothers, Hugo Grimaldi (and
Gino, whom I presume is his brother, who’s credited as “assistant to producers”) and Arthur C. …
uh, Pierce — which isn’t saying much
for it, but one wishes this basic story premise could have attracted a better
director and writer as well as a more authoritative cast and a decent budget
for sets and effects.
