The Doomsday Machine (1972)

[Scott]

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE (1972) - This is Z-Grade end of the world moviemaking at its best. Terrible acting and sets, but an interesting story. It seems that China has developed a doomsday device and agents have infultrated China's lab by throwing a cat over the wall to distract the guard dog. The world governments find out about the device which is about to go off, so the U.S. scraps a planned space flight and replace 3 of the 7 crew members with women. It seems to be that the goverment wants these people to continue the human race in case something happens with the Doomsday Machine. The women consist of a doctor, female Russian Cosmonaut, and a clueless meteorologist. It also seems that Russia has allowed one of their visting space people to join the flight. They get into space and watch the world literally explode. With no more earth to return to they head for Venus and are intercepted by an alien kraft who sends two of the earthlings out of the solar system since they don't want anything to do with mankind.

  (5 out of 10 Stars) So bad its good. There is so much here that you will appreciate from decent story to really bad acting and sets. This film has a lot to offer the bad movie fan. Picked it up on my Strange Tales 20 Movie Pack from Mills Creek Entertainment.

[Jack]

About the only thing I liked was the little bit of nudity we got.  I bought the Elvia Movie Macabre version of this, and I never made it past the halfway point.  There's so so much inane technobabble, it consumes the entire script.  When they finally get into space it gets a little less awful, as in, very little less awful.  I just didn't have the endurance it would take to make it through to the end.  I never even got to the part with the aliens.  Maybe some night I'll try again, but I really don't think I could make it any farther than I did the first time.

[Scott]

Giving Jack Karma just for the attempt. 

The beginning looks terrible and the dialogue is so badly acted that your sure your in for a boring film, but if you give it time and allow the story to unfold a bit then you will get more out of it. Believe it or not the acting actually gets better towards the end, but not enough to call it acting.

To wrap it up: The goverment sends these astronauts up into space with three women before the doomday machine goes off. While up in space the whole planet has a nuclear reaction and explodes. There is some scabbling over the women and a grusome scene of one male and felmale getting stuck in the vacum chamber and sucked into space leaving only the more rational members of the crew. They calculate that they can only carry 3 people to make it to Venus, so two of them do the right thing when they need to seperate part of the ship in order to use the rocket. They sacrifice themselves willingly to so the others can continue. There is a surprise at the end with the alien "collective voice" spacecraft.

This was made in 1969 and never finished, but someone (I read at imdb.com) found the film and added some scenes in 1972 to finish the picture. The film was made around the time of 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY and MAROONED and the film contains some of the elements of these two films, only the story is a little bit different especially with the earth exploding and the women on board.

There really isn't any nudity in this film. The image in the post is the closest thing to it.

[The Burgomaster]

I have this in one of Mill Creek's 50 MOVIE PACKS . . . not sure which one . . . either NIGHTMARE WORLDS or SCI-FI classics.  The part I liked the most is the beginning where the "top secret" doomsday machine is stored in a building that is barely guarded and the room holding the machine gets infiltrated in about 3 minutes.

[Scott]

Yea, and they do it in under three minutes by throwing a cat over the fence to distract the guard dog. 

Within hours the doomsday device goes off and all are gone including that fearless cat.

[Evan]

I have the Elvira version and enjoyed it to some extent. Of course, I noticed how some of the footage was also used in my favorite movie "Horror of the Blood Monsters". I think it was a sad career choice for Grant Williams who was in "The Incredible Shrinking Man" and "Brain of Blood".

[Archivist]

I just discovered this one on the increasingly large repository of full length movies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Machine_%281972_film%29

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SMT7dTrDuc" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SMT7dTrDuc</a>

Um, wow.  Just, wow. 

[akiratubo]

This movie is a f@#$ing disaster.  I can't believe someone didn't say, "Ok, guys, this is awful.  Let's just stop."  If you're looking for a "bad" movie, this is one of the worst.