There are some things no movie can survive...

I hold Hammer Films' sole sci-fi outing Moon Zero Two (1969) in the same esteem... actually maybe 'bracket' is a better word; in the same 'bracket', then, as Stanley Donen's 1980 SF flop Saturn 3. Both were attempting to ride the coat-tails of popular cinematic SF outings (2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, respectively) and both were full of interesting ideas and engaging production design under the top British talents of the day. And both are stinkers, really. In terms of 'guilty pleasure', each comes under the full penalty of the law, with Saturn 3 a hanging offence.

But in truth there's never been an SF movie quite like Moon Zero Two, and perhaps it would take a company (such as Hammer then was) that knows absolutely nothing about sci-fi to even think of coming up with a 'space western' six years before the cameras rolled on Star Wars.

Moon Zero Two admittedly takes the concept too literally, with saloon bar-brawls in moon colonies, and the frequent use of projectile weapons in pressurised environments - saving the production a lot of money on unusual armory and laser effects, but costing a lot of the credibility that the film manages to build up in other areas.

In terms of plot, MZT takes a strong core idea (about a lunar tycoon looking to illegally crash a sapphire-ridden asteroid on the moon's surface in order to exploit its mineral rights) and lets it wander all over the place in a series of VFX-laden set-pieces.

In every way possible, from acting quality to set design, dialogue, cinematography and special visual effects, the film is about as consistent as a squirrel on crystal meth. One minute we're looking at one of the best and most elaborate full-sized and functional movie SF vehicles of the 1960s or 70s...

...next, we seem to be watching the awful Top Of The Pops dance troupe 'Pan's People' doing a spectacularly absurd cabaret whilst the space-cowboys slug it out in a ridiculous low-gravity bar-fight:

One minute we're watching visual effects legends Les Bowie, Brian Johnson and Nick Allder - all seasoned movie-magic veterans destined for projects such as Star Wars and Alien - conjure up some great 'lunar joy-ride' VFX...

...the next, we're watching a 'surface explosion' effect even worse than the one in Saturn 3:

...even though this ghastly bit of animation is actually, for some insane reason, hiding a pretty acceptable on-set explosion:

One minute the space-helmets are first class, and the next they're goldfish bowls that might have got the thumbs-down even from Ed Wood...

But there are many viewers who won't even have got far enough into the movie to pick up on some of the excellent work by MZT's production team.

There's a very specific reason, in my opinion, why Moon Zero Two was being shown as an afternoon schedule-filler on British TV only six years after its disastrous box-office release in 1969: it has the worst opening credits of any science-fiction movie in the long and ill-esteemed history of bad credits in science-fiction movies.

Don Ellis, who would shortly afterward provide such effective scores for the French Connection movies, provides singer Julie Driscoll with a sub-007 dirge that completely defeats the entire tone of the production. Anyone expecting a real sci-fi movie will be heading for the remote control by the middle-eight, and anyone who sticks around to see The Pink Panther On The Moon - which is what the ghastly and even misspelt animated title sequence promises - is in for an equally big disappointment...

It's a bloody shame, really, since many believe that some of the ideas in Moon Zero Two had a strong influence on Dan O'Bannon's and Ronald Shusett's script for Total Recall, and Gerry Anderson certainly seems to have had the movie in mind when outfitting his moon-maidens on UFO (1970)...

Perhaps visual effects supervisor Brian Johnson (Alien, The Empire Strikes Back) sums up popular feeling about Hammer's SF bomb best: "Moon Zero Two, in my estimation, was the biggest pile of crap ever"*. Maybe, maybe. But with such a firewall of a title sequence, very few people will ever get to make their own mind up on the matter.

*Hammer Films: The Elstree Studio Years, ISBN-978-0-953 1926-2-5

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