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  • Widescreen 2.35:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer ( )
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  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • French: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • German: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
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  • Theatrical trailer
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  • 2 Short film
First Men In The Moon
Paramount/Sony Pictures Home Entertainment . R4 . COLOR . 99 mins . G . PAL

  Feature
Contract

There's a neat twist at the start of First Men in the Moon.

The film is based on a century-old yarn by H.G. Wells, yet it opens in modern-day outer-space. Suddenly we're plunged back to Victorian Britain, to become involved in a very peculiar space-adventure indeed. It's a surprisingly good way to bring us back to Wellsian time-and-space.

In Wells's world, a traditional mad scientist has invented a special paste which, when coated on wood or steel or any other material, totally negates the force of gravity and sends that object rocketing through the earth's atmosphere, into outer-space.

His quest is, of course, to visit the Moon. And tagging along is his young next-door-neighbour, and next-door's American girlfriend.

No sooner are they on the moon, than they find themselves IN the moon, in the grips of a mysterious insect-like lifeform which has built itself a weird civilisation. This is a civilisation which doesn't know of war (except against giant caterpillars) and which has the remarkable ability to become fluent in English after only one 10-minute lesson. Remarkable.

No actors are harmed in the shooting of this sequence, because it comes to us courtesy of special-effects veteran Ray Harryhausen, who developed his amazingly absurd stop-motion Dynamation technique, responsible for a host of C-grade fantasy and sci-fi special effects. Take a piece of plasticine, construct a comical-looking monster, take a pic, move those plasticine limbs a fraction, take another pic -- do this at the rate of 24-frames per second, and you have unbelievably unbelievable life-forms populating your movie.

The movie is a mixture of professionalism (sets are very realistic, with outer-space sequences looking as if painted by Chesley Bonestell) and absurd amateurism (Ray Harryhausen's efforts leading the charge into naive absurdity-land).

It's ultimately very silly, but with a strangely engaging conclusion which boasts one of the oddest lines of dialogue to ever close a movie. I won't give it away -- but if you've read H.G. Wells, you'll find it not entirely unexpected. Rent this one when you have absolutely nothing better to do.......

  Video
  Audio
  Extras
Contract

This is a good quality anamorphic widescreen, with the original stereo soundtrack sounding not too exagerrated in its artificially-processed 5.1 Surround mode.

Extras are a vintage 'This is Dynamation' feature running for 3.25 minutes, and showing the full absurdity of Ray Harryhausen's Oscar-winning process (yes, he won an Oscar!), and then there's a 58-minute 'Chronicles of Ray Harryhausen' featurette featuring such unlikely participants as famed fantasy-writer Ray Bradbury, who wrote 'The Martian Chronicles', 'Fahrenheit 451' and other fine novels and short stories. He was a youthful friend of Ray Harryhausen, which is a reasonable excuse.... we however have no excuse for sticking with this documentary for almost an hour.

There's a theatrical trailer for one of Harryhausen's most famous works, Jason and the Argonauts, and a trailer for First Men in the Moon.


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  •   And I quote...
    "Sci-fi or comedy? This one inadvertently qualifies as both...."
    - Anthony Clarke
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