The Bamboo Saucer (1968)

Purely Joyful Movie!

just watch it!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

How sad is this?

"The Bamboo Saucer" begins with an F-104 fighter jet being chased by a BADLY animated UFO. In the process, the plane crashes and the pilot is killed. Eventually, the eggheads realize that the UFO, oddly, has come from China. Hank Peters (Dan Duryea) leads a small team of agents into China to discover the craft and either destroy or capture it. Soon, however, they are shocked to come upon a group of Russians (complete, of course, with a hot lady) there to do the same and they work together.The film marks a milestone for Dan Duryea. While he was very prolific in films, he died soon after the movie was made...and he was only 61. And, even sadder is that this wonderful character actor chose to be in this dull movie. In addition, the UFO effects were horrible...even by 1968 standards. Compare, for instance, the crappy look of the film to "2001" which came out the following year. While I am not a fan of "2001", it was technically gorgeous and a huge step ahead in special effects. Overall, a film that is very skippable with little to offer for most viewers.

'The Bamboo Saucer' attempts far more than its obviously tiny budget can manage, and at 100 minutes takes much too long to deliver too little. Writer-director Frank Telford's garrulous script feels like one written in the fifties that took ten years to get made - so was then brought up to date by making Red China rather than the Russkies the heavies. A competent cast led by the late Dan Duryea does their best, and Lois Nettleton as a hot Russian scientist with lovely blue eyes gamely spouts some particularly atrocious dialogue. (There's a lot of Russian dialogue in the script; and it would be interesting to learn what a native Russian speaker makes of her accent and how convincing the dialogue spoken by her and the other actors playing Russians actually sounds).Competently lit in an overlit TV movie sort of way by twice Oscar-winning Hollywood veteran Hal Mohr, the 'Chinese' locations resemble an episode of 'Star Trek' and the Chinese church where much of the action is played out is presumably a standing set from something made earlier. But where the corner-cutting really shows is in the dreadful music score and the perfunctory special effects. The score is obviously carelessly selected odds and sods taken from a library when a halfway decent score would have generated a bit of much-needed atmosphere to make up for the slack pacing. And the special effects are spectacularly inadequate.The budget evidently didn't exist for the design & construction of a full-sized flying saucer exterior for the studio scenes, so we instead get a flatly lit superimposition that looks even worse than Edward D. Wood Jr's notorious hub-caps of ten years earlier. When the thing finally takes off, the flight to Saturn and back (aided by shots of outer space, the Moon, Mars and so on presumably lifted from other films) certainly makes for a final ten minutes that is fascinating for what it attempts with so little.

The budget for this movie was never going to allow it to get beyond the B level, barely at that. The cast and crew seems to have decided that despite the limitations, they were going to make an honest effort in a bad situation. They succeed in creating a movie that manages to be worth watching as a curiosity. Notable successes are some decent scientific references, the authentic Russian language, proper weapons for the Russians and Chinese and acting that is better than expected. There were some good people at work here. Inevitably, some contemporary clichés slip in (e.g. seemingly canned feminine screams, California scenery you have seen many times before) that date the film in a way that pulls it back into its B level pedigree. If you are a genuine movie buff, you'll probably like this but it is limited.

A team of American scientists, under the leadership of a military man, go to Red China to investigate the report of a downed flying saucer. They encounter a similar Russian team with the same object. The two are forced into an uncomfortable alliance to avoid the Chinese army. They find the saucer in the ruins of a church; the local villagers hate the government for killing the priest. They work together to figure out how the saucer works. In the end, as most of the expedition dies fighting off Chinese troops, three of them make their escape in the saucer. In keeping with the "lets end the cold war" spirit of the film, they agree to take the saucer to a neutral site, Switzerland. The script and the acting are rather wooden but the movie makes an honest attempt at believable science fiction.