"First Spaceship on Venus"

[ChrisM]

This past week, I was walking past a display of some ultra-cheapie DVDs when one caught my eye. I had seen the movie "First Spaceship on Venus" on TV when I was a kid back in the '60s and it just stuck out in my mind.

I picked up the DVD and, as I expected, it was a pretty poor transfer but the movie itself still seemed pretty cool. In fact, I can see things in there which were eventually adopted by Star Wars and Star Trek (like the little robot buddy which seemed like a precursor to R2D2).

The print on this DVD is the butchered 78 minute Amercian edit and I've read that there was nearly an hour of footage cut from the original German version. There was also a slightly edited version for German TV presentation.

Since the movie was originally a German production (co-produced with Poland?), I decided to check out amazon.de and found the film available under its original title "Der schweigende Stern" (roughly translated as "The Silent Star") with a running time of 90 minutes... AND in widescreen.

I'm tempted to order this version (I do have a multi-region DVD player) but, I'm keen to know if there is a longer version available anywhere. Also, does this version have English subtitles?

link (http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004XPRG/qid%3D1103982187/028-8569846-8562951)

Anybody else a fan of this film?


Cheers,
Chris

[ksmitty]

I have never seen this. I like those cheapo 50's & 60's Sci-Fi films though. I may have to check into this one. Recently I picked up a two-fer of "Invaders From Mars" 50's original and " The Crawling Eye". It was a poor transfer as well and the audio quality suffers but it only set me back 10 bucks so was worth that much I suppose.

[bldg blok]

I prefer the MST3K version myself.