Gamma One series

  • The Green Slime (1968)

    The Green Slime (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) And now for something both terrible and entertaining: The Green Slime, an MGM production that went to Japan for the direction and production of an English-language film with non-Japanese actors. The surprisingly colourful cinematography takes us aboard a space station, where an expedition to divert an Earth-smashing asteroid instead brings aboard amoeba-like alien creatures intent on killing everyone. More “Trouble with Tribbles” than Alien, the rest of the story deals with the characters fighting the rapidly-multiplying creatures and escaping the station in order to blow it up. The links with the Italian “Gamma One” film series are not accidental — going beyond the idea of American studios financing colourful low-budget space SF in other countries, the films share the same screenwriter (Ivan Reiner) and was originally slated to be a fifth entry in the Gamma One series — there’s clearly some visual kinship in what made it to the screen. In purely science fiction or even dramatic terms, The Green Slime is unmitigated garbage… but the numerous special effects and visions of a space-based future are rather fun in their earnestness, though. As a result, the film is more entertaining than expected — it’s clearly lower-tier moviemaking, but it has a naïve quality to it that becomes almost endearing. I found it even more worthwhile as a coda to the Gamma One quartet, itself a bit of a footnote to 1960s filmed Science Fiction.

  • I criminali della galassia [The Wild Wild Planet] (1966)

    I criminali della galassia [The Wild Wild Planet] (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.