You don’t have to suspend your disbelief, you have to fire your disbelief, then kill it and put the body in a bag and bury it in a shallow grave by the railroad tracks.
whock The asteroid is targer than any other in our solar system (true). whock Earth will be hit by an asteroid in 18 days and it takes months to prepare a shuttle mission! whock The refuelling station explodes! whock One of the shuttles crashes! whock We landed in the wrong spot! whock This is the worst possible spot to dig! whock We lost a vital part after 10 feet! whock We have 8 hours to dig 800 feet and it took us 2 hours to do 57 feet!!!
And more and more and more VERY BAD THINGS keep happening, and the audience is supposed to believe that they can succeed? What’s worst, they DO succeed. Pretty horrid movie.
John Carradine was in a film called The Wizard of Mars, a weird sort of sf-Wizard of Oz blend that has no giany amoeba in it. It was releasecx on video as “Horrors of the Red PLanet” to lure in the unsuspecting. There were no Russian scenes.
The sf movie that used scenes from a bad Russian movie (“Planet of Storms”) was Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, which had Mamie Van Doren as the US star. Peter Bogdanovich, of all people, helped cobble this Corman effort together. But it has no scenes with John Carradine.
And just because it has John Carradine doesn’t mean it’s bad. He was in Grapes of Wrath, you know. There are a few of his other triumphs listed at the IMDB, but you’ve got to wade through a lot of stuff like “Invasion of the Astro-Zombies” to get to them.
“Conquest of Space,” from the Fities, is no Robot Monster, but it is forgotten and generally scorned. But behind the melodramatic Oedipus-style plot it does have some nice model work with Fifties Werner Von Braun Mars expedition spacecraft, including assembled-in-orbit booster, winged Mars landing vehicle, and return-to-earth rocket. Plus a wheel-type Space Station, a nice Space Taxi and some good weightless shots.
