Watch 12 to the Moon For Free

Just perfect...

Brilliant and touching

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Very minor B grade sci-fi from Columbia Pictures tells the story of 12 men and women from around the globe, selected to be astronauts on a mission to the moon based on their area of expertise. After a fair bit of exploring (and some really stupid behaviour), they discover that an alien intelligence exists on the moon. The aliens, naturally, order the meddling humans to get the hell out, but the problems for planet Earth don't end after our heroes leave."12 to the Moon" may well be yet another example of the budget size limiting any ambitions on the filmmakers' part. As it is, it's a talky, dull, mostly uneventful picture. David Bradley's direction is flat and he fails to achieve any real dramatic tension. The script doesn't appear to have been that well thought out, which is surprising considering that the writer is DeWitt Bodeen of "Cat People" fame. The scenario fails to offer much surprise, or even much entertainment, although the movie is not without atmosphere. The one moment that comes closest to working is when one of the astronauts is sucked beneath the surface of the moon.The characters are predictable (the Russian team member is an arrogant prick), and the performances are, to put it charitably, pretty underwhelming right across the board. Ken Clark ("Attack of the Giant Leeches") is our jut jawed hero, Captain John Anderson. Tom Conway, co-star of three Val Lewton productions (including the aforementioned "Cat People") is the somewhat amusing Russian, John Wengraf ("The Return of Dracula") is the guilt ridden German, and lovely Anna-Lisa is the Swede. Francis X. Bushman wastes his time making a special guest appearance as the guy delivering the exposition at the outset.Dedicated sci-fi buffs might find some value here, but overall this is quite forgettable.Four out of 10.

This movie has been misunderstood and slammed by some of the reviewers. At the time of the production in 1959, we still didn't even know exactly what the Earth looked like from space! All we had were a pitiful few almost useless "trophy" satellites careening around the Earth... Martians and intelligent life on Venus were still open topics for scientific discussion! It was a great time for speculation and open-minded thought. And on the other hand, the Cold War era movies always had to have a political morality issue thrown in... they actually still tried to put values into their work. Todays audiences should be proud to stand on the shoulders of the people who built the world they have the luxury of spitting on. It's actually pretty cool to watch the maker's conception of future space exploration. It's a shame we are too prejudiced to share their dream for an hour or so. The rocket may resemble a butane lighter and the meteors may not be real, but hey... it's an old movie!!! Get a grip on yourself and a bowl of popcorn and enjoy this piece of pre-spaceflight speculation for what it is.

12 to the Moon (1960)* 1/2 (out of 4)The title pretty much gives the plot details but to expand on it you'd have to say ten men, two women, two cats, two monkeys and a dog enter a spaceship and head off to the moon. After finally getting there they are confronted by a faceless alien and on their way back to Earth they learn the U.S. has been frozen by the alien so they must thaw it out before they can land. This Columbia sci-fi film has pretty much been forgotten, which is somewhat of a shame but the bigger shame is that such an ambitious film is wasted in the hands of screenwriters who obviously don't care too much for the genre. Just about every possible cliché is thrown into this film and it even comes up with a few new clichés. The movie is certainly bad due to the special effects, acting and directing but at the same time I have a lot of respect for the movie trying to be something special. Every five minutes a new plot device jumps up to make things difficult and had the film enjoyed a bigger budget some of these ideas probably would have worked a lot better. There's a sequence on the moon where the astronaut's enter a cave where a couple are sucked down into some quicksand like material. The lingering shots of the arm sticking out are quite effective but a great item like this is followed by a silly scene on the spaceship, which looks incredibly fake and takes away the atmosphere. All of the special effects are beyond bad and I'd probably rank them down there with PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE in terms of awfulness. Just take a look at the scenes with the rocket flying through space. For starters, they keep showing the same scene over and over but to make matters worse is that you can see through the spaceship!! Other really bad looking scenes include the stuff on board when we see meteors coming towards the ship. Once again, incredibly fake looking to the point of being laughable. The performances really aren't anything good either and that includes Ken Clark and Tom Conway. The one interesting thing is that a multi-raced cast was used, which certainly wasn't the norm for this period in Hollywood's history. It was quite refreshing seeing a movie with so many different characters but this too leads to some rather dumb stuff including obvious references to the Holocaust. In the end, this is a pretty bad movie but there's so many interesting things that one can't help but wish a better budget and real writers were used to make it work.

Could any space flick be worse than The Angry Red Planet? Yes, it could. The script for the disaster at hand is so dopey and disjointed that it could have been scrawled out in crayon by a classroom of third-graders, each child submitting a short scene that teacher then patched together, helter-skelter. As for the actors, some of them are without doubt competent. They've exhibited this in other movies. But, here, with such dipsticky dialogue, no one could ever know. It makes it easy to understand why Tom Conway turned to drink and died broke. The story starts with a big strike against it: twelve characters with little to distinguish most of them. There are nine white guys, two women--Swedish and Japanese--and a Nigerian man whose accent never sounds West African and sometimes slips into Southern American. The hatch is scarcely secured when the inter-ethnic squabbling and recriminations start. Didn't these people get acquainted before blasting off in a rocket? From the amorous behavior of the females with two of the males, one would think so. But maybe there's something in the air--or lack of it. There must be some air, even on the moon, since the spacesuits don't have visors. The ship itself, with its bare-bones instrumentation and lack of even a beep or buzz, must be of such advanced technology that it all but runs itself. But, no, that can't be right. The teen math whiz has to use paper and pen to calculate a path through a meteor shower. The medical personnel has to struggle with wrap-around blood pressure cuffs--which they obviously don't know how to use. The only recorder on board--oh, forget it. There are, in addition to the dozen humans, two cats and two monkeys in plastic cases, two parakeets in a traditional cage, and one spaniel on a leash. The boy genius tells them they've been brought along to see if they'll mate on the moon. In the doggie's case, the answer is probably no. One silly circumstance follows another, but maybe the most asinine is that involving a screen-scrolled message from the Moonmen. Although it's somehow known that they communicate only telepathically, they have chosen to relay a series of repetitious, somewhat hieroglyphic-looking symbols. One crew member decides that the writing looks Chinese (it doesn't) so the Japanese woman is told to translate. She does, without a hitch. Now, who but a very young child could make such an assumption?