Though I'd like to put up some kind of wacky anecdote about why I'm reviewing this movie or an interesting piece of trivia about the flick, I've got nothing. I came across the title, looked up some info about it on IMDB, found a bootleg on eBay, and here we are. Sorry kids, sometimes a movie review is just a movie review...

A trio of British scientists open our movie by standing around and doing British scientist stuff, like writing on big panes of glass with markers, rewinding their reel-to-reels, and casually leaning on large '60s “super” computers (i.e. large panels of random flashing lights). The sciencey folks in question are our resident hero Dr. Joe “the Giant” Burke, his assistant Ben “Ladykiller” Keller, and their resident skirt Sandy “Eye Candy” Lund. Heap tall pale face Joe's “Star Talk” project exists to scan the galaxy for otherworldly radio waves in the hopes that one day they'll eavesdrop on some alien race's dirty phone calls and finally have proof of life on other planets. Unfortunately for Burke, it looks as if his meal ticket is losing interest amidst his financiers as the foundation funding this fiasco are starting to get impatient after four years of nothing, not even a stray broadcast of “Venutian Bandstand” or indecipherable space trucker CB jargon. As such, Dr. Joe and friends have only three months left on their grant before their equipment gets repo'ed and they're putting down their Ivy League references on a McDonald's application.

As Joe works desperately to discover something to keep his free money flowing, he conveniently enough records some kind of replaying signal he thinks might be an interstellar S.O.S. In his excitement, he regales his buddies with a flashback to his boyhood. Joe's interest in galactic communications stems from his uncle's work as an archaeologist, more specifically one important excavation on which young Joe tagged along where a strange black box with a funnel thing sticking out of it was found. Despite not knowing what the cube in question was, the rest of the dig team passed it off as some recent addition to the area that had nothing to do with the historical research they were doing and deemed it worthless crap. Joe's uncle thus gave it to him to keep, because kids have an inane love for mysterious box-shaped objects. Destroying the mystery cube in a freak water coloring accident, little Joe found it filled with strange pieces of glowing blue plastic “crystals”. Falling asleep with one of the blue chunks in his hand, Joe had a dream about being shanghaied on an alien planet, where brightly colored moons are painted on pieces of glass in front of the camera so it looks as if they're in the sky, only to be completely ruined by plumes of smoke in the background that completely shit all over the illusion, as illustrated in one of the screen shots below... Ever since this bizarre dream, Joe's been determined to dedicate his life to finding this mysterious planetscape again. Come on Joe, I took LSD when I was in high school and that was the most mind-bendingly fantastic moment in my life, but the difference is that I realized it was better to leave the experience alone and not try to duplicate it, hence why I'm here 10 years later clean and sober and enjoying the memories instead of junkied out under a bridge somewhere forever trying unsuccessfully to capture that same magic in a jar like some kind of brain frying lightning bug. Let it go man. Just let it go.

Surprisingly enough, despite his underlings realizing they've wasted the last four years of their lives working for a lunatic whose entire scientific life was formed around a mild boyhood hallucination (probably brought on by an unhealthy dose of radioactive gas released by the broken containment cube), Ben and Sandy stay on with Joe and his goofy Star Talk (“Your source for pan-dimensional talk during the morning commute!”) experiment. It's Dr. Burke's belief that the signal came from an asteroid, though his boss insists that the asteroid's size is far too small to sustain its own gravity and therefore it's impossible to sustain some kind of life. With the assuredness afforded to a guy with three months to prove his life's work hasn't been a total waste, Joe cashes in the rest of his grant money and heads to Vegas to blow it all on long shots and the best hookers money can buy! Well, that's what I would do with is, but Dr. Burke's a little more goal oriented, so he opts to blow his capital wad on the face of science instead, buying the materials needed to turn his high-powered telescope into a high-powered radio transmitter so he can beam his own message back into space. Hopefully his luck will hold up and the aliens won't be screening their calls.

Concerned with the sudden withdrawal of funds from Joe's account, the foundation behind his grant sends over a number cruncher named Josh Yellowlees (who frequently shifts his attention offstage in the middle of conversation, presumably to READ CUE CARDS) to audit the good doctor. If Joe's as smart as everyone thinks he his, he kept all of his patronage to The Emperors Club strictly cash. I'd hate to see the guy pull a Spitzer so early into the movie. Fortunately I don't vote, cuz I'd hate to think that I helped put someone into power who was stupid enough to pay for their hookers with a fucking credit card... Anyway, as the trio work to send their message out into the void, Yellowlees wastes no time slipping into the role of the jittery little paranoid, breaching the “What if there really are aliens out there... and they're hostile monsters with a taste for the Soylent Green” topic. Before you can say “To Serve Man”, an alien ship (so advanced that it's held up by fishing line) cruises down to our blue marble, scoops up Star Talk's one room research hut, and scuttles back off to space with Joe, Ben, Sandy, Josh, and their tea service lady Mrs. Jones! The latter's only there as a cautionary tale to viewers about what could happen to you if you stop to suck coffin nails with co-workers on company time. Also, it never gets old how alien ships that must be capable of lightspeed travel in order to traverse the galaxy in such short time always manage to look like they're only cruising along at a fair 60mph or so clip. It'd look more realistic if they just had an intern thrown the damn ship in front of the camera rather than watch it “glide” casually by.

Burke's boss Dr. Shore doesn't believe a lick about the stories of a spaceship making off with the Star Talk building, blowing off eyewitness accounts from other scientists on the grounds as being beer goggle hallucinations. As for his explanation for the disappearance of the building, Shore figures that Burke must've overloaded the facility's power with his crazy experiment, and complete atomized everything and everybody there... despite leaving no signs of an explosion in its wake... Are real scientists this shit-for-brains, or do movie creators just like to dumb them down to make themselves feel superior? It would explain why military and law enforcement officials are always getting the “we're all retarded grade school drop outs” movie makeover too. Back to the less insipid members of our cast, the kidnapped crew are greeted upon their arrival to the mysterious asteroid base by a robot host that speaks only in computerized sound effects and makes the original Daleks look like Michael Bay's Transformers in comparison. I'll refer to the 'bot as Tardtron for the remainder of the review.

Tardtron puts the group through various intelligence tests, making them earn their scotch and cookies like some gang of hairless lab rats. They also make friends with a hideous monster straight out of the Museum of Modern Art, and suffer hallucinations caused by an “ultra-sonic vibrator”. I know a few women who'd like to get their hands on an ultra-sonic vibrator... wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more. The group literally stumbles on some kind of teleportation platform that transports them to, yep, the alien world from Joe's childhood dream... which, I didn't mention before, looks like any random stretch of dirt road in rural England with cheap pieces of abstract sculpture lying around. Grabbing a gun given to them by Tardtron, Joe does the hero thing and hops blindly unto the transport platform, warping to the nondescript piece of land in pursuit of Sandy, who is being chased by goofy looking extras in bad alien togas and green body paint that don't look nearly as menacing as they're featured in the movie's poster art.

Thanks to his shiny plastic Dollar Store death ray (that doesn't actually shoot anything, it just blows up whatever you point it at), Joe scares off the pursuers before they can sacrifice Sandy on their big (particle board painted to look like) stone altar and the two escape back to the Matter Transposer. They also bring back with them some kind of decorative head condom dropped by the lead alien that, when popped onto your noggin like a swimmer's cap and plugged into one of those radioactive cubes, allows Joe to translate and relay information held within the boxes to the rest of the group. According to the alien iPod, the green guys are a violent race of space faring killers whose sole mission is to squish any and all sentient beings under their collective heels. Such was the case when they made contact with the group of beings who originally set up the asteroid space station to begin with. Despite their advanced brains though, it seems that the now extinct peaceful aliens were helpless to stop the violent brutes, who use some kind of energy field to reduce intelligent beings to the level of mindless animals. Now the berserkers are eyeballing sweet lady Earth for their next round of unwanted advances, and only Joe and the rest can keep Earth's hymen safe from alien rupture in a surrealistically Ed Wood-like finale that I suspect Taito stole from heavily a decade later when they made Space Invaders...

The word “inept” is usually thrown around in reviews for movies like this, sometimes modified with adjectives like “painfully”, but other times modified with terms like “deliciously”. Which version would I use to describe The Terrornauts? I'm in a pretty good mood right now, so let's go through the really irritating parts of the movie first and see if that doesn't change. As far as characters go, I had no problem with Joe or Sandy or Mrs. Jones, and I’d gladly invite all three over for Top Pop Blue Pop and a viewing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show! Hell, I’d even invite the ornery Dr. Shore over so long as he brought some Pringles to pass. As for the other two major cast members, Yellowlees's constant shift of attention (including numerous looks directly into the camera) make me want to strap his head into a vice and force him to watch 37 hours of “2 Girls 1 Cup” until he either learns to hold his fucking head still or it causes his condition to worsen exponentially to the point that he twists his head like a cartoon owl and the damn thing pops right off his shoulders. He's just a poor man's Arnold Stang and I doubt even his family mourned his death. And what's with Ben's obsessive fruit consumption!? In every scene the guy's either peeling a banana or munching on a friggin' apple! Was he having an affair with the re-animated corpse of Carmen fucking Miranda?! Seriously, what in the name of Miss Chiquita is this guy's problem?! Call me a shithead if you must (or if you just generally like to email people telling them they’re a shithead), but if he has some kind of terrible vitamin deficiency where he'll get scurvy unless he consumes mass quantities of fresh fruit, could someone at least explain this to us so he doesn't just look like one of those jack-offs who's constantly stuffing his face during work hours? He’s not Artie Lang after all...

As far as everything else that bugged me about the movie, it’s all pretty much special effects based. The story was actually interesting and the acting and dialogue were good enough so as not to grate on my eardrums. A little cheesy, but it’s ‘60s sci-fi, so if you’re lactose cinema intolerant you shouldn’t be eating it anyway. Back to those not-so-special effects though, peeeeeeeeeyew could they give a can of Lysol™ a fight for its life! As our crew look out their flying shack’s window or open its door while they’re being tractor beamed into the transport ship, “space” consists of goofy backdrops painted with stars and illuminated by a blue light. The group’s single “laser gun” literally looks like some piece of crap KB Toys tosses into their orange sticker bin to make shelf space for the next wave of “Based on the characters of the blockbuster movie!” plastic poo-poo. The “Terrornauts” themselves are the definition of ridiculous (their weapons consist of spears and knives, yet they build their own spaceships...) and the less said about ‘em the better, and the head condom reading devices are almost as hard on the brain to witness as the whole space fleet finale. Speaking of which, I shit you not, Ed Wood’s Space Invaders. Stick, fork, done.

I originally intended to get high before watching this, but I discovered that every time I did get high I was either too tired to watch the movie or I’d suddenly found something really really funny to watch on TV and by the time the show was over, well, I’d completely forgotten why I’d gotten high in the first place… In the end though I think it best that I didn’t watch Terrornauts while under the influence, because I think my head would’ve exploded into a fireworks display of caramel corn and chewy nougat during the final 20 minutes. Even if you have absolutely no interest in the first chunk of the flick, trust me when I say you should do yourself a favor and just watch those precious final 20 minutes and see if you aren’t thrown into fits of laughter and/or disgust. Not recommended for pregnant women or people with bladder control issues.