One of AIP's more decent sci-fi paste jobs, plundering a big-budget Commie space opera (Mechte
Navstrechu, I think) and remixing it up with sub-Star Trek mockups and Roger Corman stablemates (John Saxon,
Dennis Hopper, Basil Rathbone) decked out in bubble-boy gravity suits. Russian interplanetary epics were
fertile toiling ground for scrambling 1960s upstarts (Francis Ford Coppola reshuffled Battle Beyond the Sun, while
Peter Bogdanovich inserted Mamie Van Doren footage into Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women), and in
this one Curtis Harrington serves the plot (a 1990-set collision between human astronauts and the eponymous alien
monarch) with a deadpan style that is close to droll. Indeed, in its sangfroid appreciation of the ridiculous (actors
gazing out of painted-on hatches, a cafeteria tray stacked with pulsating alien eggs), the film is closer to the spirit
of Harrington maître Josef Von Sternberg than Games, the director's overt homage. Appropriately, Harrington finds
his own Dietrich in Florence Marley's blood-sipping space vamp, whose sharp, green-tinted face and gray beehive
bouffant promise kinkier frissons than the movie can deliver. With Judi Meredith, Robert Boon, and Forrest J.
Ackerman.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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