Friends, I am trying to track down an old sf movie with just a tiny memory. Back in the early 70’s local TV stations would have old movies on Saturday afternoons. I remember a film that had the following scenes. Two men and a woman working to solve a mystery of a small box with knobs and protrusions. I think it was an intelligence test of some kind. When solved it related to them knowledge about an alien attack they had to stop. Somehow the trio end up on a space station fighting off an alien attack. They wear strange helmets, there are missiles that have doors that open to fire red beams. I believe it was a foreign film and dubbed.
Sorry that is all I have, a vague memory from a nine year old. Any ideas? I know we have a lot of SF experts on the board.
It sounds like This Island Earth, although it has been many many years since I saw it. However, it’s not a foreign or dubbed film, and I don’t remember red beams. The main thing that rings a bell is the mystery box, which they called an Interociter.
I think Dropo got it right, I’ve seen both The Terrornauts and This Island Earth. Both involve tests, but the description you give more closely resembles The TerrorNauts.
It’s not a great film. They clearly had only a tiny budget. The green aliens that look so intimidating on the poster look pretty pathetic in the movie
Both movies are based on novels. This Island Earth is based on the novel of the same name (A “fix up”, as A.E. van Vogt termed it, meaning the novel was cobbled together from previously-published short stories) by Raymond Jones, while The Terrornauts is based on The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster. Not one of his best.
As I have frequently stated on this Board, the “intelligence” test given in the movie This Island Earth is pretty easy – the Metalunans send Cal Meacham not only the parts, but also the schematic to put it together. THis makes it the equivalent of an interstellat Heathkit. In the novel, he gets no schematic – only the catalog and the parts. Meacham has to dope out how to put his Interociter together from hints and clues hidden in the descriptions in the catalog. He even has to rebuild one of the parts himself when it breaks. That’s a far more challengng test. And relevant to the plot – the Metalunans basically want an army of really high-quality technicians to assembly more Interociters for them, not to research atomic energy. That wouldn’t make any sense – the Metalunans are clearly light-years ahead of Earth in science and technology.
The novel also describes some of the other “intelligence tests” the Metalunan sent to other people at Meacham’s facility. The others failed.
The book was out of print for decades, but ought to be easy to get hold of these days. It’s worth a read, although it peters out after a strong start.
The production values might be crap, but you’ve got to at least give them credit for a creative alien design. If they could have made it more realistic, that thing would be serious nightmare fuel.