Directly after the classic jungle adventure She Demons (1958), director Richard E. Cunha released a classic of the spaceship genre, Missile to the Moon (also 1958), thus cementing his reputation as a master of multiple genres.
Some of your universe's critics, as always, fail to see the genius of Missile to the Moon. For example, reviewer Hitchcoc focuses on the performances when they write, "The acting is ridiculous." Reviewer mark.waltz, also focusing on the performances, writes, "The acting is hideous, particularly by the space women and ranks up there with the worst performances of all time." And reviewer bkoganbing, incredibly also focusing on the performances, writes, "In fact all the players look like they're in terrible need of ExLax."
Read on for an accurate appreciation of Missile to the Moon...
In the high desert, a police car drives down an empty road. The officer radios dispatch, which is clearly coordinating a manhunt in the desert.
The film then cuts to an office, where Air Force officers and scientists are discussing how to use solar energy to power missiles. The colonel tells the lead scientist, Dirk Green, “Your use of solar energy as an inexhaustible power supply is an excellent theory. But it has to be proved. As do all your other innovations.”
Offended by such a suggestion, Dirk Green replies, “Everything I design and build works! Outside stands a missile capable of safely transporting a man into space. And I’ve proved it time and time again.” (He is referring to simulations that have been run with the missile.)
The colonel explains that “missile experimentation is government business. Strictly government!”
Steve Dayton, the other scientist, disagrees, but the colonel tells them they must turn everything over to a team of government experts. Then the door opens and the local sheriff explains that two prisoners escaped from the county farm (explaining the manhunt from the opening shot), so he needs to search their private missile base. While Dirk Green turns off the electric fence around the missile to the sheriff can investigate, Steve Dayton opens the curtains so he and the colonel can admire the missile outside.
“Now that he’s completed it,” the colonel asks, “what does he intend to do with it?”
“Fly it to the moon,” Steve Dayton replies matter-of-factly.
Steve Dayton’s fiancee, June Saxton, enters the room.
Outside, Dirk Green and the sheriff find that the electric fence has already been turned off, the lock to the control box having been opened. While they look around the small area under the missile, the film cuts to the two escaped prisoners, Gary and Lon, who have hidden inside the missile itself! As they hide, Lon explains he read in the paper that Dirk Green built the missile with private funds. “The paper?” Gary asks. “What do they know? They said I stole three cars.”
“So?”
“So it was five cars. What do they know?”
Outside, the sheriff wants to look in the missile but Dirk Green is skeptical. But the sheriff presses him: “They could be anywhere. One of the prisoners is a pretty shrewd kid. The other one’s smart. Too smart.”
Oddly, Dirk Green enters the missile, leaving the armed sheriff outside. Green sees the two escaped prisoners, but he appears to concoct a plan on the fly. “Everything’s all right,” he whispers to Gary and Lon. Then he shouts down to the sheriff, “There’s no one here!” He closes the hatch and leaves, but the escapees soon discover that Dirk Green locked them into the cabin of the missile.
Dirk Green returns to Steve Dayton and June Saxton. They confirm that the colonel and the sheriff are gone, after which Dirk Green reveals his plan. “I designed and built that ship to fly into space. And I’m going to see that it does.” He walks to his desk and pulls out a handgun, then says sinisterly, “I can teach them a lot about space. I’ll give them something they’ll never forget.”
Back in the missile, Dirk Green gives Gary and Lon some food. Then he fiddles with the hatch, prompting Gary to ask, “Hey, what’s the big idea, huh?”
“I have a proposition to make,” Dirk Green says. He wants to launch the missile into space tonight, before the government can get their hands on his work.
Lon quips, “We’re trying to get away, but not that far!”
“Now get this straight. I’m taking this ship to the moon tonight. I can make it alone, but it would be a lot easier with your help.”
When Gary attempts to leave, Dirk Green pulls his gun. His proposition is that either they help him or he shoots them.
Sensibly, Gary asks, “Are we coming back?”
Dirk Green responds confidently, though with no evidence, “If we reach the moon, coming back’s a simple matter.”
In the house, Steve Dayton and June Saxton discover lights blinking on the control panel. “Somebody’s mucking around out there.” In a brilliant move that can only be satirical on the part of the filmmakers, Steve opens the desk drawer, sees the handgun is gone, then opens another drawer and pulls out another handgun.
Steve and June go outside to investigate why the control panel is blinking. Seeing somebody in the ship, they enter the lowest level, but it is too late for them to escape. The door closes automatically.
The missile launches into space, quickly leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. Lon opens the hatch to the lower compartment and yells, “Hey, there’s somebody down here! They’re dead!”
When the film cuts to the ship’s bunks, it is clear that Steve and June are not dead. When Steve wakes up, he sees Lon and Gary, so he asks Dirk Green, “Who are they?”
“The two escaped convicts,” Dirk Green laughs. “I needed a crew!”
Steve laughs too and of course lets the issue drop.
Later, they go about their duties, and Gary arranges to be in the control room alone with June. He immediately touches her hair and acts creepy. Then he kisses her on the mouth. Fortunately, they are interrupted by Dirk Green, who tells him to stop it. When he talks back, the two get into a fight.
However, they are interrupted by beeping, which means, as it always does in rocket ship movies, the ship has entered a meteorite shower. Unfortunately, the force of the meteors zooming near the missile threatens to destabilize some wooden shelves, which support some kind of boxes.
Dirk Green attempts to hold the shelves up, but one of the boxes falls on him and he unfortunately is fatally injured. Before he dies, Dirk Green takes an amulet out of his shirt pocket and gives it to Steve Dayton. “It’s all up to you know,” he says with his dying breath, then, mysteriously, “Lido. My Lido. Forgive me. Forgive…”
Minutes after the older man’s death, the ship reaches the moon. “It’s a dream come true,” says Steve Dayton.
“I’m so happy I don’t know what to say,” adds June Saxton.
“If everything goes well,” Steve says, perhaps needlessly, “we’ll be seeing a lot of the moon.”
The missile lands automatically, according to its programming, at a specific location on the lunar surface.
Donning spacesuits, the four leave the missile behind and walk across the strange gray landscape. Steve, of course, brings a gun. They walk across landscapes that almost look as if they could be in the American West, and they for unknown reasons fail to note the plentiful brush growing at the base of the lunar rocks. They also fail to notice a rock creature that breaks out of a boulder.
They do notice a second rock create, however, and they run, then turn around and shoot at one of the creatures. The monster is unfazed by bullets so the four explorers make their way to a cave. “For some reason, they don’t want to come in here,” says Steve ominously. They move deeper into the cobweb-shrouded cave. Eventually, they find a burning torch attached to the wall. Steve immediately removes his helmet, reasoning that “Fire can’t burn without oxygen. Believe it or not, there’s oxygen in this cave. Go ahead and take your masks off. It’s okay.”
They remove all their astronaut paraphernalia until they are in their regular clothes. Steve finds some footprints on the cave floor and Gary, spooked, runs away. Then some kind of gas fills the cave and everyone falls unconscious.
They wake up in a lunar palace, where they are welcomed in perfect English by a woman from the moon!
Her name is Lido and she is the high ruler of Orlanda. When she rings a bell, a group of attractive moon maidens brings food to the explorers. They notice the amulet Steve wears and assume he is actually Dirk. Lido takes “Dirk” aside and explains that things have gone badly on the moon since he last visited. “Our oxygen is fast disappearing. Our food supply is dwindling. Soon this satellite will be barren. Devoid of life.” She also reveals that she has become blind, which explains why she did not recognize Steve as Dirk. An additional shocking detail is that Dirk was betrothed to a little girl named Alpha on his last trip, and now that she has grown up, the marriage ceremony will take place as soon as possible!
When Gary (whose attempted assault on June is never mentioned again) goes off with a moon maiden, Lon tries to excuse him by telling June he doesn’t mean any harm. June replies wisely, “Deliver me from the people who don’t mean any harm. They’re the ones who cause it all.”
When Gary is alone with the maiden, he discovers that not only are there no men on the moon, but also diamonds are common, found in the caves. He forces the young woman to take him to the cave so he can take as many diamonds as he can carry.
Back in the throne room, Steve explains to June how the human(ish) civilization on the moon dwindled to its present circumstances, but the filmmakers cut away to Lon making out with another moon maiden so the audience never finds out the details.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the situation devolves when June learns that Steve (as “Dirk”) is engaged to a young moon woman, which results in June attacking the woman and biting her. The jig being up, Steve, June, and Lon rush off toward the caves, where they intend to pick up Gary and escape to the missile. Upon realizing the Earth people have escaped, the moon maidens unleash their secret weapons: the dark creatures, which are grotesque giant moon-cave spiders!
The creature kills the moon maiden Lambda, but the Earth people are kidnapped again and brought back to the throne room. Then, in a complicated series of events, the moon maiden Alpha, who is betrothed to Dirk, assassinates Lido and assumes leadership of Orlanda. She also hypnotizes the Earth men and sentences June to death. June is taken to an extermination chamber where she will be attacked by the giant spider, and the wedding ceremony begins with ceremonial dancing.
Fortunately, with the aid of Zema, one of the maidens, Gary and Lon are able to find their spacesuits and rescue June by shooting the spider.
Zema releases Dayton from hypnosis but she is telepathically overpowered by Alpha, though she resists enough to somehow throw a bomb at a window, which releases the oxygen from the moon maiden civilization, sentencing all of Orlanda to death.
Eventually, the Earth people make their way to the surface, where they kill the rock creatures with oxygen bombs. The only human casualty is Gary, who, unwilling to part with heavy bags of diamonds, stumbles into the unfiltered sunlight and explodes, leaving only a burning skeleton.
Moments later, the three survivors prepare the missile for takeoff. Before they can go, June needs to ask Steve a question. “Do you think I’m prettier than that girl, the one called Alpha?”
Thinking fast, Steve replies, “Honey, there’s only one thing I’ll ever expect to see that’s prettier than you, and that’s old mother Earth looming up in the view-plate.”
Lon winks at Steve and the film ends.
An unofficial remake of another classic, Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), Missile to the Moon (1958) presents a similar story (astronauts finding a secret, dying, female civilization hidden in air pockets on the moon) but has nothing to do with cats. In fact, Missile to the Moon is a textbook distillation of the great but short-lived genre of the 1950s rocketship movie epitomized by the low-budget Rocketship X-M (1950) and its big-budget rival Destination Moon (1950), released 25 days later. Missile to the Moon has all the hallmarks of the rocketship film: an exciting launch, a meteor shower, conflict on the spaceship, monsters on the moon, etc. But it adds its own touches that make it a classic, like grafting two juvenile delinquents onto the plot, thus making it a cross-genre classic. With She Demons and Missile to the Moon, Richard E. Cunha made history as one of the most innovative directors of the late 1950s.