MOON ZERO TWO (1969)

Director: Roy Ward Baker

Writers: Michael Carreras, Martin Davison, Frank Hardman, Gavin Lyall

Producer: Michael Carreras

Cast: James Olson, Catherine Schell, Warren Mitchell, Adrienne Corri, Oli Levy, Bernard Bresslaw, Dudley Foster, Sam Kydd, Neil McCallum, Joby Blanshard, Michael Ripper, Robert Tayman, Amber Dean Smith, Simone Silvera, Keith Bonnard, Leo Britt, Carol Cleveland, Lew Luton, Roy Evans, Tom Kempinski, Claire Shenstone, Chrissie Shrimpton, The Gojos (Michelle Barry, Sue Baumann, Brenda Krippen, Sally Graham, Jane Cunningham and Irene Gorst as the bar dancing girls), (and uncredited cast) Athol Coats, Tim Condren, Bill Weston, Martin Grace, Robert Lee, Freddie Earlie

By the year 2021, the Moon has begun to be colonized. Space pilot Bill Kemp (James Olson) has been using his ten-year-old spacecraft, Moon 02, for salvaging defective space satellites. Kemp is approached by Clementine Taplin (Catherine Schell) to help find her brother who has been prospecting on a claim he has on the Moon. Wealthy J.J. Hubbard (Warren Mitchell) also wants to hire Kemp. He needs Kemp to secretly fly to a sapphire asteroid that is approaching the Moon. Hubbard’s illegal scheme is to alter the trajectory of the asteroid to crash it on the lunar surface and claim the 6,000 tons of sapphire as his own.

The Flashback Fanatic movie review

The British movie company Hammer Films will always be renowned for their gothic horror classics. However, Hammer had always dealt with other genres before and after their trend-setting takes on Frankenstein and Dracula that began in the late 1950s. One of their more unusual and interesting deviations from what was expected of them was Moon Zero Two.

Serious science fiction was still a pretty iffy proposition for films in the 1960s. The now-revered Star Trek television series (1966-69) had only made it through three seasons because letter-writing campaigns by fans convinced the NBC network to stick with it. Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was not universally praised; many found it too slow, pretentious, or confusing. Even though the United States was about to claim a space race victory with the first manned Moon landing, many still found sci-fi too far-out.

Yet it would seem that the time was ripe for Hammer’s Moon Zero Two, which was promoted as the first “space Western.” Hammer was no slouch when it came to thrilling science fiction. After all, they had made the trilogy of Quatermass films that adapted the popular British television serials. The challenge this time around was making a film of futuristic adventure rather than contemporary sci-fi horror.

Director Roy Ward Baker was frustrated with Moon Zero Two. Although the film seems to have had a bigger budget than most Hammer productions, it was still not enough to fulfill Baker’s ambitions. I can appreciate what was accomplished in creating a setting that is entirely lunar-based. This poses enormous special effects challenges to overcome for a film of any budget. Aside from some scenes on the open lunar surface with actors’ movements ignoring the low gravity conditions, I think Hammer’s go-to guy for special effects, Les Bowie, manages things nicely.

While the costume and set design in retrospect seems so very ’60s in its mod and pop art influenced vision of the future, it was also still far removed from the contemporary. Many later films took any edgy contemporary affectation of fashion and then based the aesthetic of their future upon it. You probably can’t find more than a few future-oriented sci-fi films of the 1980s that have not been influenced by what was being shown in MTV music videos. Was “badass” punk and new wave fashion supposed to be relevant decades or even centuries in the future? And don’t get me started on contemporary catchphrases used in future scenarios…

I enjoy the survival considerations that are raised throughout Moon Zero Two. There is a lot of effort put into making us understand this alien setting and its dangers. To man the Moon is a new and very hostile frontier. Man does not belong on the Moon. His technology and movements are always coping with an environment that he can’t survive without great preparation and caution. Those considerations settle us into the practical reality of this sci-fi setting.

What still makes Moon Zero Two relevant science fiction is that it demonstrates that human nature does not change. Even in the space age future, people will still have ambitions that can lead to avarice. That seems to be expressed by the funky animation during the opening credits. While I think that intro has a tone completely inappropriate for this film and was just a means of making sure that this flick seemed hip to a young audience, it actually spells out that, even on the Moon, corporate greed and development will flourish without regard to the concerns of any nation.

Two years before starring in one of the best science fiction films, The Andromeda Strain (1971), James Olson plays the space pilot hero Bill Kemp. He is the first man to land on Mars and wants to be the pioneer who travels to still more planets. However, the current commercial interests of “the corporation” are focused on the profits to be made by ferrying passengers back and forth between Earth and the Moon. Since the company will no longer employ Kemp as a space explorer and he refuses to be a passenger pilot, he uses an old space ship to privately perform space salvage operations with his partner, Korminsky (Oli Levy). Olson’s Kemp has a resigned attitude that can occasionally be stirred into irritation, but he always seems controlled. This is probably a good attitude for a space pilot to have. Kemp is also refreshingly free of the posturing that heroes of any genre must display in films these days. He has some humor and nerve, but no snark and bullyboy antics.

I suppose a frustrated space explorer biding his time until he gets another chance to make history can cope if he’s got someone that looks like Adrienne Corri to land on. As Elizabeth Murphy, she is the Moon’s Bureau of Investigation official that has been assisting Kemp’s liftoffs in more ways than one. Because of their relationship, Murphy has been overlooking the risks of Kemp’s aging Moon 02 spacecraft. I really like Corri in this role and wish she played a much larger part in the story, but her few scenes are memorable. This feisty actress had a long career on stage, television, and film. Corri appeared in a few other Hammer films and may be best known as the unfortunate Mrs. Alexander who is assaulted during a home invasion in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Catherine Schell appeared as a Bond girl the same year in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). In the 1970s she would have the recurring role of Maya in the second season of the British television series Space: 1999 (1975-77). In Moon Zero Two, Schell is the beauty that makes Bill Kemp’s moon buggy a lot cozier. As Clementine Taplin, she appeals to our hero to take her to find her out-of-touch brother on his claim of Moon land. Since tempers have flared between Bill Kemp and Elizabeth Murphy, we suspect that Clementine will provide the lunar Lothario an opportunity to carve a new notch on his fun gun.

As is the case with many Westerns, commercial opportunities in a new frontier motivate the principal players, cause conflicts, and reveal the villains. Warren Mitchell, as wealthy industrialist J.J. Hubbard, is the unscrupulous mastermind causing all the dust-ups on the Moon. While he always seems jovial, we realize that he is a smug and evil opportunist that manages to win people over with the prospect of profit. Even our hero Bill Kemp is willing to assist Hubbard in his sapphire-asteroid-salvaging scheme until murder tactics ensue.

Big Bernard Bresslaw is Hubbard’s ineffectual henchman Harry. Since Bresslaw had a long history as a comedic actor, it’s possible that he may have been originally intended to be played just for laughs. Wisely, that is not quite the case. While Kemp seems to always get the upper hand on Bresslaw’s Harry, the big thug still demonstrates his cold-blooded obedience to Hubbard on a couple occasions to remind us that anyone is dangerous when they’ve got the gun. 6’7” Bresslaw was a prime contender for the role of the monster that was ultimately played by Christopher Lee in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).

Moon Zero Two was not well received by critics or the box office. It’s extraterrestrial setting and legitimate attempts to portray the action and dangers in space and on the Moon may have been hard for an audience to relate to. Dealing with those aspects realistically may not always translate into mile-a-minute thrills, but I found this far more involving than many later sci-fi action-fantasies with no ideas claiming to have a vision.

Hammer Films’ Moon Zero Two was an interesting attempt to extrapolate a possible future from the space exploration developments of the day and draw the all-too plausible conclusion that man will still behave in the new frontier of the future like he did in the Old West. It also creates a lunar dystopia of fully clad showgirls and bad cocktails. Now, that’s a Hammer horror I just can’t handle.