Space Probe Taurus |
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USA • 1965 • 81m •
   • Directed by: Leonard Katzman. • Starring: Francine York, James Brown, Baynes Barron, Russ Bender, John Willis, Bob Legionaire, James Macklin, Phyllis Selznick, John Lomma, Jimmy Bracon. • Music by: Marlin Skiles.    In the year 2000 the spaceship Hope One sets off to find new galaxies for colonization. However, an encounter with an alien being and a swarm of meteorites sends the ship streaking off course into a sea of monsters on an uncharted world.
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Review:
The story begins with an astronaut staggering back to his ship and contacting Mission Control on Earth to inform them that the rest of the crew is dead and he has been fatally irradiated. After much pleading from the astronaut, Mission Control reluctantly remote-destructs the spacecraft to save the man from an agonizing death.
None of this has any connection to the rest of the movie. We don't even get an explanation for what happened, which was probably more interesting than the story we got instead.
The rest of the movie revolves around the crew of the space ship Hope, Earth's second manned expedition to space. The four-person crew consists of stock space-movie characters: Commander Stevens, the square-jawed commander who acts like he's never had a moment of fun in his life, Dr. Martin, the philosophizing older scientist, Dr. Wayne, the ship's female doctor, whose presence on the ship is resented by the commander who believes "space is no place for a woman", and Dr. Andros, the guy who challenges the commander's authority when he's not daydreaming about warm beaches and bikini-clad women.
The plot is episodic, with three distinct acts: the prologue and launch of the ship, an encounter with a free-floating alien ship somewhere near earth orbit and the stranding of the Hope on an alien world. The primary impression these incident leave in the viewer is that at least two, and maybe three of the ship's crew are temperamentally for long, dangerous space missions.
While exploring a derelict alien ship, Commander Stevens and Dr. Andros have mankind's first encounter with an intelligent alien life form....whom Stevens promptly shoots dead. He then blows up the alien ship to...um...hide the evidence? It's not really made clear. Let's just hope there weren't any other survivors on the ship. It's also not made clear why Stevens has to plant the bomb INSIDE the ship, risking fatal radiation exposure from the ship's overloading reactor which will probably blow it up anyway.
Later, the ship malfunctions after a near-collision with a meteor cluster, causing the crew to land on a free-floating moon in the Triangulum galaxy that has a breathable atmosphere and temperate environment despite no sun to warm it. The ship sinks to the bottom of an ocean - in an upright position - and is surrounded by giant crabs. Andros scuba-dives to the nearest land mass for no other reason than to assess its suitability for colonization while the rest of the crew repairs the ship. This is where the film's low budget really starts to show, as Andros encounters a sea monster via stock footage from another movie.
The movie has some degree of tension and drama, despite a crew that seems on verge of falling to pieces, showing signs of melancholia and depression at the first setbacks to their mission. I would score this movie higher had it been made 10 years earlier, but by 1965, the Space Race was well underway, America and Russia had already sent multiple men into space and the rigors of space travel were well-known. The pulp-era space travel cliches that drive the plot of this movie, and the bad science behind them, are on the verge of being unforgivable. The crew has radio communication with Earth, despite being in another galaxy (although they can't communicate with Earth while the ship is submerged). Sending Earth's second space mission to another galaxy makes no sense with a entire solar system left unexplored. Stevens carries a handgun to a place where there's no certainty of a breathable atmosphere (the gunpowder in bullets needs oxygen to ignite). Dr. Wayne determines that the alien moon has a breathable atmosphere by examining an air sample - through a microscope! Andros swims to shore underwater, a trip we are told takes "a couple of hours", and back again after only a few minutes on land. Glossing over the incredible physical challenge of that journey - probably well beyond human limitations - he does it with only three air tanks.
The crew completes their mission by finding a world where humans can live - not to mention the awesome potential of a Red Lobster franchise (imagine all-you-can-eat crab night when the crab legs are 20 feet long!) and the wanna-be Gill Man that attacks Andros will soon find his species going extinct. Happy endings all around. Space Probe Taurus is an artifact of a genre that had already limped into obsolescence before this movie was even made. By 1965, space travel sci-fi was already branching into two different directions: realistic films based on scientific fact, a la 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Trek-style far-future space operas (the Star Wars-type space fantasies were still yet to come). For that reason, there is little to recommend this movie - even the special effects seem outdated for its time with Derek Meddings producing better special effects for Gerry Anderson puppet shows during the same year. Curiosity seekers looking for little-know films may find some nostalgia value in this movie; everyone else can give it a pass.
Review by theshadow1963 from the Internet Movie Database.
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