Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

microfame This is part of a larger 50's movie portrayal of people shot into space who are so over-emotional and unbalanced, you wonder how they beat out all the other astronaut candidates.I really just wanted to see if any other viewers shared my laugh-out-loud moment from the film......when the reporter punches out that other guy and the camera fast-pans over to the female lead in the doorway, who witnessed it, and she has absolutely NO EXPRESSION on her face! Not even a trace of any reaction....This is fine as a "background movie", on a rainy weekend day when you're puttering around the house.

Flak_Magnet Here is your assignment for today, honorable reader: PICK A DIFFERENT SCI-FI MOVIE. You are almost certainly not going to enjoy this one. I'm a fan of this director, who later went on to produce excellent works of trash like "Yor: Hunter from the Future" and "Cannibal Apocalypse," so I watched this movie out of a particular, targeted interest. However, I can't really defend "Assignment: Outer Space," because no amount of cheeze, directorial inventiveness, unintentional hilarity, or good storytelling can make up for the quality of the picture on this DVD. I mean, its FUGLY - so grainy, color is barely differentiateable, dust marks, smudges, etc. This film is actually in the public domain, and you can download a free copy at Archive.org, which I'd recommend versus wasting a rental slot. If they could clean up the picture, this film would be a decent pick. Until then, I'd say avoid.

MartinHafer While this film may be slightly better than PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, at least technically speaking, overall it is much more dull and less fun to watch. In fact, during the first twenty or thirty minutes I kept finding my self falling asleep. I don't think this says a lot about my sleep habits but more about how tedious and uninteresting the film was--at least for the first half or so. About the only interesting things at all are that there is an important crew member ("Al") who is Black (a little unusual for 1960) and it's fun to watch the Captain and Al make fun of the reporter who they were forced to take along with them on the mission. In the second half, things pick up a bit (they couldn't have gotten any slower or duller--otherwise audience members would have begun committing suicide), as they are called away from their mission to rescue the Earth. It seems some space ship built by the Earth is screwed up and its engines will vaporize the Earth when it returns. So it's up to the useless reporter to spring to action and save them all--and teaching us an important lesson that when the safety of the planet is in question or you need someone who's an expert in astrophysics, get a reporter.By the way, the special effects were awful--even by 1950s or early 1960s sci-fi movie standards. As usual, the space rockets have flames that come out at an angle (due to gravity--which should NOT be a factor in the vacuum of space), they wear silly silver suits and there are a lot of useless dials and gizmos. The film was originally an Italian flick and with a bit of re-dubbing (with really awful voice work), it became this "masterpiece"---yech! Even for fans of bad films (and I am one), this one is pretty tough going!

winner55 Very odd sci-fi film. Filled with quirky little details of some historical interest: The film is Italian and overdubbed in English; but if you watch the actors' lips carefully, they are mouthing the English words; so the film was intended for an English language market from the start.The writers assume that the Russians will win the space-race of the time, hence the reporter refers to the spaceship crew as "cosmonauts).The film claims to be shot in Technicolor; this simply cannot be the case. Occasionally the color red shows through, but much of it does look black and white. When Technicolor washes out, it takes on a light blue tint - other processes get very blue, light green, or, as here, simply washed out all together.Gabriella Farinon is very easy to look at; she later did a very pretty spread for the Italian edition of Playboy Magazine (1975)(some of it can be searched for on the 'net), but her film career went pretty much nowhere.The year is 1960; that may make this the first film ever to depict a black male as extremely intelligent, brave, wistfully philosophical, and treated by the other crew members as simply another crew member, no reference to race whatsoever. I'm afraid that would make this one of the most important films ever made, in terms of social history (which doesn't mean it's a good film - it isn't).Director Antonio Margheriti, AKA Anthony M. Dawson, was extremely prolific; however, a filmography search, both here at IMDb and on Google, only discovers his fantasy films, and a small handful of westerns; but I remember his name popping up on almost every other spaghetti or sauer-kraut western produced in the '60s, at least until Sergio Leone came along (and radically changed that genre).Yes, I can see the influence of this film on Kubrick's 2001; but beyond the film's essential pessimism, it's unclear why Kubrick would be impressed by a film so poorly made.My viewing confirms a previous reviewer's note that the explosion of a spaceship is represented with brief stock footage of a car blowing up in a parking lot. Why?! Not the lowest budget imaginable for such a film can excuse this gaff - it would have been more effective to take the spaceship miniature and toss it on the ground - and then step on it.Yet despite flaws like this, the writers seem to be determined to deploy science and technology (at least as it was popularly known at the time) in a fairly realistic manner.A real stew of a film, made of leftovers as yet not fully cooked.