One of the best films i have seen

Instant Favorite.

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This movie has been misunderstood and slammed by some of the reviewers. At the time of the production in 1959, we still didn't even know exactly what the Earth looked like from space! All we had were a pitiful few almost useless "trophy" satellites careening around the Earth... Martians and intelligent life on Venus were still open topics for scientific discussion! It was a great time for speculation and open-minded thought. And on the other hand, the Cold War era movies always had to have a political morality issue thrown in... they actually still tried to put values into their work. Todays audiences should be proud to stand on the shoulders of the people who built the world they have the luxury of spitting on. It's actually pretty cool to watch the maker's conception of future space exploration. It's a shame we are too prejudiced to share their dream for an hour or so. The rocket may resemble a butane lighter and the meteors may not be real, but hey... it's an old movie!!! Get a grip on yourself and a bowl of popcorn and enjoy this piece of pre-spaceflight speculation for what it is.

12 to the Moon (1960)* 1/2 (out of 4)The title pretty much gives the plot details but to expand on it you'd have to say ten men, two women, two cats, two monkeys and a dog enter a spaceship and head off to the moon. After finally getting there they are confronted by a faceless alien and on their way back to Earth they learn the U.S. has been frozen by the alien so they must thaw it out before they can land. This Columbia sci-fi film has pretty much been forgotten, which is somewhat of a shame but the bigger shame is that such an ambitious film is wasted in the hands of screenwriters who obviously don't care too much for the genre. Just about every possible cliché is thrown into this film and it even comes up with a few new clichés. The movie is certainly bad due to the special effects, acting and directing but at the same time I have a lot of respect for the movie trying to be something special. Every five minutes a new plot device jumps up to make things difficult and had the film enjoyed a bigger budget some of these ideas probably would have worked a lot better. There's a sequence on the moon where the astronaut's enter a cave where a couple are sucked down into some quicksand like material. The lingering shots of the arm sticking out are quite effective but a great item like this is followed by a silly scene on the spaceship, which looks incredibly fake and takes away the atmosphere. All of the special effects are beyond bad and I'd probably rank them down there with PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE in terms of awfulness. Just take a look at the scenes with the rocket flying through space. For starters, they keep showing the same scene over and over but to make matters worse is that you can see through the spaceship!! Other really bad looking scenes include the stuff on board when we see meteors coming towards the ship. Once again, incredibly fake looking to the point of being laughable. The performances really aren't anything good either and that includes Ken Clark and Tom Conway. The one interesting thing is that a multi-raced cast was used, which certainly wasn't the norm for this period in Hollywood's history. It was quite refreshing seeing a movie with so many different characters but this too leads to some rather dumb stuff including obvious references to the Holocaust. In the end, this is a pretty bad movie but there's so many interesting things that one can't help but wish a better budget and real writers were used to make it work.

I have given this movie a rating of 1 because I don't know how to describe the feelings of anger and confusion that washed over me as I watched it. Twelve scientists go to the moon -- taking a cocker spaniel on a leash with them, wouldn't want it to run away -- and the story, though well-intentioned, was tripe, the acting was horrible, the dialogue was stupid and even the science was idiotic gobbledygook -- in 1960 the screenwriters felt no need for anyone to express surprise when there was plenty of breathable air on the moon. Yes, it clearly had a budget, something in advance of the usual Roger Corman shot-in-three-days-with-what-we-found-in-the-payphone-slot amount of money. But I was getting angry because I couldn't stop watching, even as I wanted to turn the sound off, or at least jab an icepick into my ears. What was going on here...... and then it hit me: they had John Alton as the Director of Photography!Who, you ask, is John Alton? Well, I would suggest you go over to his IMDb page and see for yourself, but let's put it this way: when you're shooting pictures, the DP is important. A great one can make a mediocre movie great. A bad one can ruin the world's greatest script, director and cast. And in the subjective and opinionated world of commercial art that is film making, if I told you that X was the greatest cinematographer ever, you'd look at me like I was crazy. But if I went before a meeting of the American Society of Cinematographers and announced "John Alton was the greatest cinematographer ever!" The reaction would probably be "Well, I think so-and-so had a little more on the ball, but not a bad choice." Well, you say to yourself, everyone has his ups and downs, some great careers end badly, sometimes there are no comebacks. But that's not what happened here. Alton was assigned this movie, shot it in his usual impeccable fashion, then went on to his next assignment, Richard Brooks' ELMER GANTRY, then quit. Just went away and didn't keep in touch, and when he called up a third of a century later to ask for tickets to an exhibit for his work that he had heard about -- it's my stuff, at least you can comp me in -- they were surprised he wasn't dead. He explained that it just wasn't worth it. He had enough money, so he left and he lived happily for the next 35 years. And this is the movie -- or one of the movies -- that made him decide to leave. And not shoot, what, twenty, thirty, forty a hundred other movies that could have been great or greater because of his sure touch? Because while it must have been nice to work on great pictures like AN American IN Paris and ELMER GANTRY, he must have felt like a schmuck coming in to work on stuff like this. because the front office told him to. So he looked at his bank book and quit.Thanks, guys. Damn you all to Hell.

I have a real fondness for the B&W day of sci-fi, littered with rocket-ships, aliens and mans indomitable spirit and will to keep communism at bay. Here we have a prototype for Star Trek, a multi-cultural effort to get mankind on the moon with a dozen various countries sending their best people to man the ship. It doesn't quite work out that way though, since they're all numb nuts and the script is poor at best, highly inaccurate at worst. There are subplots concerning an aging Nazi, Commie sympathisers and a 2 minute long tacked-on love story, but that doesn't matter because you'll laugh your ass off at how ludicrously badly made the whole thing is.Top of the list has to be the fact that when our heroes land on the moon, it's obviously a set. I don't mean that the surface looks a little poorly made, I mean we can see the scaffolding, we see scene shifters standing around in the background, lighting rigs above the actors, etc. We can see the torches used by the astronauts trailing long power cables, which might make exploring a costly exercise in extension leads from the ship. Funniest of all has to be the space helmets they use, real aircraft helmets with no visors attached. To get around this they have a character explain how their faces will be protected by an invisible ray shield, which even he obviously doesn't believe in. Ha!This is fun even without the MST3K guys ripping it to bits, it's cheesily written and acted, and any small blind mammal can see the glaring flaws in the effects and script. The MST3K version is one of the best they ever made, but this movie stands out as a laughable piece of nonsense on it's own.