Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Instant Favorite.

A Brilliant Conflict

In the 1960s, the Italians were the best in comedies, dramas, western spaghetti. Trying sci-fi, they did not succeed at all. This movie is not the worst, on the contrary, it's a good try which has some merits. The best thing is the beautiful Leonora Ruffo. And then, the presence of the very sexy Leontine May, who was also in a few euro-spy films. The story is banal and with deja-vu taste. But the actors strive, their effort is visible. I'm sure the film's budget was limited, so it did not benefit from the effects type Star Wars or 2001 Space Odyssey. Even so, it's not bad, it's worth seeing.

Sometimes a movie is so silly and retarded and inept that you can't help liking it in spite of its many deficiencies. Watching "2 + 5", I can only imagine that the director saw a couple of American science fiction classics like "Forbidden Planet" and "The Thing", and was so thrilled that he immediately went off to make films just like them.The problem was, he had no idea of the time and talent and effort that went into those productions, and he just slapped a bunch of story ideas and stock footage together, expecting the magic of film to somehow inject quality into the end-product. Instead, the results resemble what you'd get if a bunch of precocious 3rd graders put on a musical pageant based on "Planet Of The Apes". One of the cheesiest (if enjoyable) aspects of the production is the young woman who plays the part of the ingénue; she wears an amazing variety of alarming and distracting outfits that seem calculated to completely destroy the composition of any shot she appears in. Seriously. The other actors and actresses will be emoting away, and she will walk in and totally disrupt any atmosphere or mood the scene or shot might have by gadding about in some runway outfit complete with violent decals, eye-searing stripes, go-go boots, fringes,spandex and feathers. Sometimes the camera even follows her while the other poor saps are still carrying on the actual plot-driving dialog. The running joke among the group of people I watched this with was, "For 10 points: guess which cast member slept with the producer or director (or both)?!"Also of note is a drunken walk of a plot, which starts out as an mystery, veers into an story of international intrigue and conflict (with the "2" part of the "2+5" cast,who are "Oriental, not Chinese!"), mutates into an alien abduction scenario a la "This Island Earth", and then decides it's a time travel paradox story resulting in an "Cosmic Adam And Eve" resolution that wasn't really justified by anything that came before it. And some really badly translated and dubbed dialog. Half the time I wondered if the voice actors doing the dubbing were actually reading the English phonetically, with no real idea of what they were saying. But as I said...there is just something so innocent about the whole mess that I can't help but like it. A little, anyway. This is a "movie" in the same way that your kid's refrigerator art is a "painting." Nothing here resembles a mature, competent product, but you end up being somewhat fond of it.

The plot itself involves the usual alien abduction, and is not very original. When compared to Francisci's other films, this one lags remarkably. However, it has a definite B-movie appeal, and is, when viewed as an interstellar espionage film, quite up to par with the later entries of Alfonso Brescia (although Brescia did more of a slap-dash space opera with little of the espionage element). Maybe, then, this film is a big brother of Primo Zeglio's "Mission Stardust." I'll tell you what it isn't, though. It certainly isn't up to par with Antonio Margheriti's sci-fi films, many of which were directed during the same period. Francisci never made such judicious use of miniature models as did Margheriti, and, on a special effects level, this one must be ranked along with Alfonso Brescia's flicks.One of the highlights of the film, is the return of actress Leonora Ruffo after a three year hiatus. Never a prolific actress, she was at her peak in films such as Francisci's "Queen of Sheba" and Sergio Grieco's "The Black Devil." Being a consummate movie buff, I also admired her performance in Francisci's 1951 film "Le Meravigliose Avventure di Guerrin Meschino," in which Gino Leurini fights stone giants, colossal dragons, and evil witches, in an attempt to free the then 16-year-old actress Ruffo. She looked so beautiful at that time, but in this film she appears... well... matronly. Nevertheless, Pietro Francisci dresses her up in a mini skirt, with a décolleté top-piece, and lets her play the commander of the alien spaceship.Gordon Mitchell shows up briefly as a dispatcher from the home planet, who gives his orders to Ruffo. As usual, his murderous glare and menacing attitude squeeze him into the plot as a superfluous bad guy, who has very little to do with the film. Some Asian criminals show up, speak bad English, and attempt to take over the ship, but are subdued by the professor and the others after a fist-fight inside the space-ship. Later, Ruffo falls for Nando Angelini's character, while Leontine May gets cozy with Kirk Morris. The film ends rather mysteriously, with some sort of weak message on the horrors of radioactive waste being dumped into the atmosphere, and the ensuing end of mankind.Now, the ultimate question. Was this just a paycheck for Pietro Francisci, or did he really have serious pretenses when making this film? After viewing "2+5 Mission Hydra", the answer is fairly obvious. Francisci had already made whatever artistic statements he once had in such earlier films as "Hercules," "The Siege of Syracuse," "Attila," "Queen of Sheba," and "Guerrin Meschino." This was a downslide for him, and he didn't shoot another movie until 1973, when he directed the low-budget and somewhat asinine "Sinbad and the Caliph of Bagdad." Francisci was mainly a director of epic films. And I kept that in mind while watching this one. On the whole, this is a film that one should watch if he or she enjoys cheap thrills, or is a die-hard completist. If you're looking for lots of big-budget effects, a well-written script, and superior acting, stick to Margheriti's sci-fi films.

This film reminded me a little of Mission Stardust in reverse...the aliens land on our planet instead of what happened in that movie. While fairly coherent, the movie doesn't really know where it's going, as a lot of Italian SF movies didn't in that era. I'm still trying to figure out what the heck the secret agents were doing in the movie (and please remember, they're "Oriental, not Chinese"). Once the spaceship gets off the ground, we're treated to a lot of stock footage from Toho's Gorath, as a number of space stations and satellites try to pretend they are the starforces of Hydra. Then there's the time travel thing, and the female characters' need to wear fishnet bodystockings with leather or feather bikinis (obviously either an aside to the popularity of the fashions of Barbarella or just standard wear in Italian space operas...lord knows I've seen at least four other movies where leather was the material of choice for spacesuits). And then there's the need for spacehelmets when venturing onto a new planet, but two people can cross the cold void of space between two ships in what amounted to a snorkel and leather.To me, 2:5: Mission Hydra reminded me a lot of They Came From Beyond Space or the Terrornauts or similar British features made in the mid-sixties...not bad, but not necessarily well thought out.