FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS—-“This blasted radioactive forest won’t let radio waves through!”  It’s been a long, strange trip since the autumn of 1962, when enthusiastic kids of the JFK days beheld this American-scalped version of a East German/Polish production (translated as ‘Commie’) released in Europe two years earlier as The Silent Star. Your humble New Frontierer first caught it, age eight, in Bellevue, Washington’s spanking new  theater, the space-age’y John Danz (alas, gone with the solar winds) on a Saturday matinee, double-billed with Varan The Unbelievable. At the remove of sixty-four years (try it sometime, I dare ya) all I recall was that First‘s spaceship was way cool (we likely said ‘neato’) and Varan was big and obviously irritated. True, it may be that post-exposure playground discussions of the duo were superseded by chatter over The Longest Day, The 300 Spartans and In Search Of The Castaways. At any rate, those epics occupy places of honor on this Rifleman-raised kid’s shelf, but the talky trip to the second planet and Varan’s monster mashing play better in memory.

“Scientists, mathematicians and astrophysicists; seven men and…a WOMAN.”

1985—The Future. An alien artifact–a “magnetic spool“—found near the Siberian locale of the Tunguska Event (now that would have been a ka-boom to witness) is traced to our celestial cousin Venus. An international expedition zooms away to investigate, braving meteorite storms en route and the hostile Venusian surface when they eventually touch down. Not all of the crew will make it back.

Directed by Kurt Maetzig, who wrote the screenplay with J. Barkhauer, basing it off  “The Astronauts”, written in 1951 by Stanislaw Lem. The 304 page novel, his first, was a serious epic about a Utopian Communist future (set in in 2003); Lem withered the film as “a boring, bad picture that has nothing in common with the novel.” And that was the Iron Curtain version! The doofy American scramble, shortened from 95 minutes to 79 and poorly dubbed, squeaks by only on some of the imaginative set design.

Shuffling around in dorkish space-togs are Yoko Tani (best known from The Wind Cannot Read and The Savage Innocents), Oldrich Lukes, Ignacy Machowski, Julius Ongewe, Mikhail N. Postnikov, Kurt Rackelmann, GuntherSimon and Hua-Ta Tang.

This survivor of Rocketship X-M, Forbidden Planet and The Outer Limits carries a fond memory of experiencing First Spaceship On Venus (a title that roars “Exploration!”), but have to say that after enduring it anew, the retro-revisit will just have to last me for the rest of my Earth life. Chuck Yeager would slap me on the goggles, but I’m gonna hit the chicken switch and direct those who want to know more to the detailed (and much more appreciative) takes from the esteemed Glenn Erickson.

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