Movie starts with stirring music and close-up of national flag flapping in outer space. The crew of the Outer Space Explorer, on a mission to find new reserves of the rare fuel element Detonatium (actually their real mission is to create a sequel to a moderately successful video) discovers a mysterious uncharted planet.
They decide to land, hoping to replenish their fuel tanks if they can find a bowser. This is when they remember the hatch on their space ship is built too high up and they don’t have any means of climbing down to the surface. They need a ladder for that. So they circle the planet looking for one. By an enormous stroke of luck they find one and land alongside it. Of course then they realise they need a ladder to get down to the ladder. But by another enormous stroke of luck the impractical sharp fins on the rocket prove woefully inadequate to support the weight of the craft on the dusty surface and the ship sinks deep into the soil. The crew step out of their ship’s hatch at ground level amid flag waving and stirring music.
For most of the rest of the movie, the crew dig their rocket back out of the dust. Okay, it was supposed to be a more interesting plot than that but the producer had piled the film’s budget into sub-primes - hey, they were triple-A rated! - and so the format has gone from space opera to an atmospheric and moving piece about dust.
At this point the marketing manager interrupts shooting and says the focus groups aren’t responding at all well to any of the film’s planned promotional material. Sweet, airbrushed pictures of shovels and astronauts pushing wheelbarrows aren’t stirring up the kind of frenzy the marketing guy thinks is going to fill cinemas. He says they need a better visual than an airbrushed shovel. Can they drum up something big-impact? And so the script writer is told to write a climax that’s exciting, visually spectacular, and manageable on the film’s remaining budget of $9.50. A solution is found: the director’s son glues some fake horns onto his pet lizard and they film it, using rear projection to give the impression of it looming large over the set.
And so here we see that climactic scene - our heroes versus the giant monster from Planet X. Awaken by all that digging, the great beast emerges to confront a surprised and terrified crew. It makes a hideous, loud roar that has the astronauts cupping their hands over their helmets and reminds the viewers of an elephant’s trumpet with some sound distortion. The creature advances and one brave soul looks around for a weapon. Forgetting that in the previous scene he had shovels, spades, crow bars and dynamite, he rips his antenna off his helmet and holds it out to . . . Okay, so we know that’s not going to end well.
The lizard eats the astronauts. Well, not all of them. One of them runs away. I’m not sure what happens to him. Perhaps he’ll be in the next film in this series. And see that guy on the ladder? He figures now might be a really good time to duck back inside and close the hatch behind him, and so he alone returns to Earth, amid flag waving and stirring music.
