Let's face it.  Italy has stuck it's finger in a lot of film genres throughout the years.  Everything from horror to westerns to erotica to comedy to sword and sandle to sci-fi.  Some genres, they have a great aptitude for, like those great old spaghetti westerns, and some would say they made some very memorable horror films as well, though I've never been a particular fan of their brand of horror.  The sword and sandal films are a particular favorite of mine though.  Hercules, Ulysses, Atlas, etc....  All the great Italian musclemen running around beating up bad guys and living lives of high adventure while at the same time rescuing beautiful women in distress.

When it comes to sci-fi however, I have to say, I've never seen a really good, high quality Italian sci-fi film.  Mostly, they're just cheap looking and so far beyond cheesy that it almost hurts to watch them, but like...in a funny, good kind of a way.  I said they weren't high quality, but in the cheesy fun department, they can be quite entertaining.  Check out my reviews for War of the Robots and War of the Planets to see what I thought of those particular Italian sci-fi flicks.  While many of these films are fun in their own way, Assignment Outer Space really isn't, but neither is it a bad film.  It's just boring.  Long, slow paced, filled with characters you couldn't care less about and just really, really boring.  The space scenes were the only ones that generated any genuine interest on my part, and even many of those were so long and drawn out that I found it hard to keep my focus for very long.

So what's the film about? Well...

Ray Peterson is a reporter.  He's been given a crash course in space *stuff* and sent up into space to take up residence in a far off satellite where he's supposed to report on some infraradiation flux in galaxy M12.  What he actually ends up doing when he gets there is a whole other story.  It turns out that, and I'm admittedly a little foggy on the details here because it was hard to follow, a spaceship passed too near a star, and due to a malfunction, it's two photonic deflector picked up a ton of photon radiation from it, which was then amplified around the ship in a 5,000 mile zone of death, perpetuated by the deflectors on the ship and something in the ship's power system.  Basically, anything that entered that 5,000 mile zone around the ship was burnt to a crisp by the intense heat of the field.  The ship was on an automated course back to Earth, and because of a malfunction with the ship's electronic brain, the pilot had died in the hibernation pod, so there was no one on board to stop it.  Now the team from the space station must intercept and stop the ship before it returns to orbit the Earth, at which time it will destroy all life on the surface of the planet.

Alas, there is hope however. The radiation field around the ship isn't solid. It's radiating out the sides with a narrow strip down the center, like an orange that's been sliced in two. If they can manage to get a missile through the gap, they can blow up the ship and save the Earth.  Sadly, this didn't happen however, and Al lost his life trying.  Ray had a better idea though.  He leaves the ship and hops on a maintenance taxi, sort of like a space scooter, and flies down the center gap in the field toward the rogue ship, tossing out items to both sides to see where the edges of the field are.  You can probably guess the rest.  He makes it to the ship, kills all the ship's power, and the radiation field along with it.  However, he also kills his only chance of escape, because now the door of the ship won't open for him to get out.  Will the rest of the crew from his ship be able to save him before his air runs out?  That's the question.

This film was, as I said earlier, boring.  Not bad really, just boring.  It had its good points and its bad points and overall, it wasn't bad, it was just...boring.  But why?  Well...

The first reason is actually something I admired this film for doing.  There were a lot of aspects of this film where they tried to be realistic about space travel.  Everything from the forces felt during accelleration to existence in low gravity environments to whatever.  It was really pretty cool that they went into as much detail as they did without over doing it, but that said, we didn't need to see it.  It didn't add anything to the story.  They could have included various aspects of it without being so obvious about it.  Certain scenes just took up way too much time in the film and were way too slow to be of much interest.

Another reason this film was boring was because of the poor performance of the voice acting.  This is an Italian film, so obviously, it was dubbed into English. Normally, that would have been fine, but it caused two major problems. First, I'm totally unable to evaluate the quality of the acting by the original cast because I'm not hearing the line delivery of the actors themselves.  Second, the voices they used to dub these people were all rather monotone and sounded like little more than disinterested radio announcers.  Good enough to tell the story, but not enough to really pull the viewer into it and make them care about the characters.  It's hard to feel for them when they're dubbed with those kinds of voices.  The dubbing was done ok at some points of the film, while at other times, it was horribly out of sync with the mouths of the actors, which only served to enhance the disconnect I was feeling towards them.

One area where this film really worked was in the special effects they used, and they weren't shy at all about using them. Rockets and missiles flying through space, landing on planets, space walks, asteroid fields, a space re-fueling operation, etc... There was a lot of work put into the look of the film, and it shows.  Are all the effects spectacular looking?  Not really, but neither are they horrible.  I'd even go so far as to say they're far better than I would have expected from a 1960 Italian sci-fi flick.  The one thing I found a bit awkward though were the space walks.  They didn't seem to have jets on the suits or anything, nor were they tethered to the station.  It seems to me that a movie that tried so hard to be realistic about the various aspects of space travel would have thought to have included tether lines on the astronauts when they went out on space walks rather than just allowing them to free float through the dark void of space.  Other aspects of failed reality can be forgiven because of the year the film was made and the lack of knowlege about the realities of our solar system.  For example, I'm sure they had no way of knowing this, but in reality, the surface temperature of Venus is hot enough to melt lead and the whole planet is covered by an incredibly thick cloud layer of sulfuric acid.  Not really someplace you'd want to build a base at.  Does it matter?  Not in the least.  You don't watch these films for a science lesson, and certain aspects of what they showed in the film were actually pretty realistic, despite the lack of space experience at the time.

The DVD release I have of this film is from Alpha Video. It's a horrible looking transfer that basically looks like it was taken from a bad copy of the film, converted to VHS, and then the VHS was converted to DVD. The shots you see above were cleaned up considerably by me in Photoshop before I put them in the review. I always clean up and adjust the shots I use, but in this case, they're not representitive of the quality of this DVD release at all.  Now, it's bad yes, but I don't want to give the impression that it's unwatchable, because it isn't.  It's perfectly watchable, but the lack of quality is definitely noticeable.  The great thing about Alpha releases though is, they're cheap.  So if you drop five bucks on this DVD to add another piece of film history to your collection, it's no big deal that the quality isn't awesome.  I mean think about it.  It's, as of this writing, a 51 year old film that wasn't a major studio release.  How many pristine copies do you think exist out there that they could make a transfer from?  My guess is not only "none", but also that they were lucky to have even found this one.  I can't help but wonder how many films have been completely lost over the years due to fires, loss, accidents, film degredation, etc....  Alpha has done a tremendous job of digitally archiving an incredibly massive number of these films, while at the same time making them available for a super reasonable price.  No they're not all pristine and restored like the kind of stuff a company like Kino releases, but at least now they won't be lost or forgotten, which in my opinion, is very awesome indeed.

In the end, despite the fact that various parts of this film were visually interesting, it never really manages to become fun, which is what you really want from these old sci-fi flicks.  The characters aren't likeable and the pace of the film is horribly slow throughout much of it.  Because of its attempts at realism, it lost of a lot of the cheesy fun that was so beautifully put on display by a variety of other Italian sci-fi films that went for the fantastic rather than for the realism.  While those films, may have been technically bad, they were at the same time entertainingly cheesy, which is an element that I personally found rather lacking in this film.  Mostly, I just wanted to get through it so I could move on to something else.  Again, it wasn't a bad film, just boring, and as such, I had no choice but to give it the acutely narcoleptic rating of...