Antonio Margheriti

(On Cable TV, May 2021) If you’re interested in smart, solid Science Fiction cinema, there’s not a lot to recommend in The Wild Wild Planet — it’s a futuristic equivalent to the C-grade sword-and-sandal peplum tripe that the Italian film industry was churning out in the 1960s. If you’re willing to place it in the history of the SF film genre as a whole, though, it’s a fascinating footnote. What happened was that, over a two-year period in the mid-1960s, director Antonio Margheriti (“Anthony Dawson”) worked with American SF writer Ivan Reiner to develop the “Gamma One” series of four (some say six) related movies that would be shot more or less at the same time, reusing not only actors and sets, but sharing a coherent future background and characters. The Wild Wild Planet is the second of the four. Being from mid-1960s Italy, the result is far more colourful than expected, with shoddy special effects, ramshackle plots and rampant sexism actually helping the entertainment factor. There’s some effort made in terms of worldbuilding, audacious art direction, mildly intriguing premises (with the fourth film of the series, The Snow Devils, even poking at intentional climate change) stereotypically square-jawed heroes and lovely damsels in distress. The Wild Wild Planet is representative of the entire quartet — rough, offensive, ramshackle and yet bizarrely entertaining. I can’t quite recommend it without a long list of reservations, but if you’re looking for interesting Science Fiction films of the 1960s, the entire Gamma One series is a bit of a bright spot.