Missile to the Moon (1958)

1 Star (out of 4)

Lido Dreck

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

When people talk about cheesy old sci-fi movies, it conjures up images of cheap-looking monsters, cardboard robots and fake studio sets filled with craters. But the sad truth is that most bad sci-fi movies mainly feature people sitting around in rooms and talking; they're more boring than they are amusing. That's exactly what happens for roughly the first half of Richard E. Cunha's cheapie Missile to the Moon. When two escaped convicts Gary (Tommy Cook) and Lon (Gary Clarke) hide aboard a rocket ship, a scientist Dirk Green (Michael Whalen) forces them to be his crew on an impromptu trip to the moon. Dirk's partner Steve Dayton (Richard Travis) and his fiancée June (Cathy Downs) also wind up on board. On the moon (actually a canyon in California), our crew discovers a dying race of beautiful women, led by "The Lido" (K.T. Stevens), some clunky rock monsters, a giant pipe-cleaner spider, a cache of diamonds, and more talking. The acting is uniformly wooden, though it appears that Clarke was a "method" actor since he mumbles his way through his dialogue (though I'm not sure if this is better or worse). Most of this stuff was already used five years earlier in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), though at least that film was a comedy.