Androids with four arms! Curvaceous, lifelike inflatable women! Bald interplanetary kidnappers dressed in dark raincoats and shades! Human mutants and laboratory rejects! A bizarre space-age cabaret where all of the performers are dressed as giant butterflies! These are just a few of the sights you'll see on The Wild, Wild Planet (1965), a groovy Italian science-fiction adventure directed by Antonio Margheriti. The outrageous premise has Dr. Nurmi (Massimo Serato) attempting to create a race of super beings on Delphos, a planet owned by "The Corporation." To achieve this goal, Nurmi has instructed his minions to kidnap top scientists and athletes from Earth for experiments. The abductions, which are accomplished by shrinking the victims and placing them in specially created suitcases, are soon traced to Delphos. When Gamma I Commander Mike Halstead (Tony Russel) eventually leads an expedition there, he not only learns of Nurmi's master plan but also discovers that his girlfriend, Connie Gomez (Lisa Gastoni), is going to be fused together with Nurmi in a procedure that will produce one all-perfect being.

The Wild, Wild Planet, which was released in Italy as I Criminali Della Galassia, was the first in a quartet of sci-fi tales produced and directed by Antonio Margheriti (identified in the credits as Anthony Dawson). The other sequels were, in chronological order, War of the Planets, Planet on the Prowl and Snow Devils (all 1965), but it's hard to top the excessive nature and camp delights of The Wild, Wild Planet. First of all, consider the dialogue. In one scene, Connie catches Dr. Nurmi ogling her to which he replies, "I was admiring your physique. The human body is my specialty, my area of exploration. I would be enchanted to explore - your mind. Can we have dinner together?" Nurmi delivers plenty of other howlers but he's bested by Mike who makes big statements like "I'm a person, not a collection of hunks of meat" and is fond of using "helium head" as his insult of choice. When he's really mad, he might say something like, "Why, you helium-headed IDIOT, you!" Then, there's his frantic command to his men while they are battling karate trained alien women - "Watch out for those gadgets on their chests!" Actually, those gadgets are deflators so you can imagine the outcome of this scene.

Equally nutty is the post-Jetsons set design and the special effects, or should we say the lack of them? The sequence where Nurmi shows Mike his private chamber of mutants is like a mass audition by bad makeup artists - there's a guy with a pig nose, a woman with a serious case of silly putty and so on. A more effective scene is when one of the kidnappings goes awry and the victim is only partially shrunk, rendering him a midget. Other high points include a trip to the body part factory - see the lovely display of red lungs, breathing independently - and the climactic destruction of Nurmi's lair, which is submerged in a raging flood of red liquid.

Yes, The Wild, Wild Planet is definitely a stop you should schedule on your next trip into deep space. But if you're still not sure, consider this rave review from Tim Lucas, editor of Video Watchdog and an expert on Italian fantasy-horror films: "The Wild, Wild Planet is perhaps Margheriti's most famous film in America, thanks to a popular nationwide Summer of Love release through MGM, when its psychedelic imagery seemed much more at home than it would have in 1964....Much closer in milieu to the Nova Criminal narcoverse of William Burroughs' early fiction than anything in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991), The Wild, Wild Planet is a truly hallucinatory movie. The cast is delightfully campy, Piero Poletto's set designs are a consistent marvel of imagination over budgeting, and the glimmering A.F. Lavagnino score (conducted by Carlo Savina) sounds at once kitschy and genuinely futuristic."

Producer: Anthony M. Dawson, Joseph Fryd
Director: Antonio Margheriti (as Anthony M. Dawson)
Screenplay: Renato Moretti, Ivan Reiner
Art Director: Piero Poletto
Cinematography: Riccardo Pallottini
Editing: Otello Colangeli
Music: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino
Cast: Tony Russel (Cmdr. Mike Halstead), Lisa Gastoni (Connie Gomez), Massimo Serato (Nels Nurmi), Franco Nero (Jake).
C-95m. Letterboxed.

By Jeff Stafford