It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

I've only two films by Paulo Heusch, and both of them are very early, but gosh darnit if they don't display some of the aspects that make Italian trash cinema so entertaining then I'm a something's something! Bad dubbing, crazy logic, loads of stolen footage, insane plot, terrible acting and all that jazz (although there's no boobs or gore...that happened later), I would say this film has it all if it weren't for the fact that Paulo loves to concentrate on folks talking to each other on microphones rather than give us any action. I seriously had my attention wandering throughout this film, although it did give a few laughs.The plot involves sending a pilot into orbit and then on to the moon in a process that takes up the first twenty minutes of the film, but eventually our ethnically diverse mix of scientists gets our guy up in space, but then things go wrong and he's force to detach his cockpit for Earth while sending his fuel filled rocket into an asteroid belt, which causes a load of asteroids to head for Earth, Armageddon style! Let's whittle it down a bit. You've got scientists all over Earth reporting what not to each other (including Glasgow!) while the Earth gets hotter and hotter, the animals go nuts, and society collapses. This is all demonstrated by stock footage, most of which has a single loop of dialogue where you can hear a woman scream "My Baby" over and over and over again, so look out for that.You've also got a few side plots, one of which involves the astronaut and his family and the other involving a scientist trying to get into the pants of a frigid female scientist type person. Cue loads of crappy old school sexism.I also loved that my copy was full of missing frames and got a laugh out of the bit where the frigid scientist bursts into a room with something important to say, only to have the film jump, the scientist disappear from the shot, and leave two male actors staring at each other for some reason.No where near as funny as his later Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory, this is still a nice early example of what makes these film so much fun.

A multi-national space mission including astronauts from the UK, the USA and the Soviet Union venture into space but they experience technical problems resulting in the mission being aborted, but unfortunately this is just the first in a chain reaction of events which results in catastrophic disasters back on Earth, including scores of asteroids, earthquakes and extreme weather.The Day the Sky Exploded is fairly notable for being the first Italian sci-fi movie. Having said that, this is a fairly limited claim to fame given science fiction wouldn't exactly go on to become one of the movie sub-genres that the pasta masters are most well remembered for. This one is fairly ahead of its time in some respects though and quite ambitious for its time. It also is unusual in that it showed Americans and Russians working happily together at the height of the Cold War. So, it has some interesting things about it for sure but on the whole it was pretty forgettable stuff unfortunately. Interestingly, it was also photographed by the great future directing legend Mario Bava; to be honest, the version I saw this was a public domain pan-and-scan copy in which it was difficult to really tell if it had great cinematography or not sadly.

A joint effort by the United States and the Soviet Union to send a nuclear powered manned flight into space results in a disaster which manages to ionize a cluster of meteors and send them on a trajectory toward earth. This causes a crises of the first magnitude as tidal waves are predicted to destroy cities near coasts all over the world. And that's just the beginning of the problem. Now, while this scenario had been done about seven years earlier in "When Worlds Collide", this film offers a different approach and succeeds (more or less) in spite of the limited budget which was spent to produce it. And although the acting certainly wasn't anything to get excited about, the special effects were pretty good considering the era this movie was made. All in all then, it's worth watching as long as people aren't expecting too much. All things considered then I rate it as about average. No more and no less.

The actor voicing McLaren in the American version is Shane Rimmer, who also provided the voice of Thunderbird 1 pilot Scott Tracy. I win the contest!To me, the oddest thing about this movie is McLaren's demeanor during the space flight. He looks like death warmed over, like he really really wants to go home right NOW, like he might vomit at any moment, and like he can barely bring himself to speak. Or admit that he feels like hell.This movie is not bad enough to be a source of amusement for that reason alone. It makes a serious attempt to tell a story, and is more coherent and intelligent than some recent similar films which commanded budgets hundreds of times larger.