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The American Civil War: Not very lucky about being prisoners of war
of the Confederates, Captain Harding & his comrades Pencroft (Marshall
Reed), Gideon (Hugh Prosser), Bert ( Ralph Hodges) & Neb (Bernard
Hamilton) escape them in a hot air balloon, but unfortunately a heavy
storm blows them off-course & they land on a mysterious island,
complete with active volcano.
There they are menaced by some
futuristically dressed natives called the Volcano People, bearded madman
Ayrton (Terry Frost), the mystery man who walks the island in a
strange frogman-helmet but is rarely seen & Rulu (Karen Randle), the
girl from Mercury & her 2 minions who have ray guns & sometimes
travel around in an UFO that looks like a bucket. & while our heroes
still try to sort out the situation they are in on the island, a pirate
ship arrives, & the pirates, lead by captain Shard (Gene Roth) have
nothing better to do as to fight our quintet, too. In changing
alliances, our heroes fight the pirates, whose ship they want to get off
the island, but once Shard offers them a truce they realize who the real
enemy is: Rulu, who has a magic wand to hypnotize people & uses that
to make the Volcano People work in her secret mine to mine Uranium.
But
why does she do it ?
The mystery man, who is of course the benevolent
scientist captain Nemo (Leonard Penn) tells Harding & Shard, whom he
saves from sure death: Rulu is supposed to prepare an Mercurian invasion
of the earth, but she needs to mine enough Uranium for that.
Nemo
can make the Uranium useless with his raygun, only he will need Rulu's
magic wand to do that, & only Harding & Shard can get it for
him. Of course they succeed even thopugh Shard has to give his life,
& our five castaways are saved from the island that sinks when the
volcano breaks out. For a latter-day serial, this one is
pretty wild, relying less on endlessly repeated shots of so-so special
effects & more on a genuine carelessness in what genre-elements to mix
into the plot: So we have space-age thrills along with pirate-, deserted
island- & civil war-elements all thrown into an enjoyable romp. All
of this
has very little to do with Jules Verne's classic novel, though. The
space-costumes of Rulu & her soldiers as well as their UFO alone are
a hoot ! |
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