“Beyond this and into infinity is man’s last frontier.”
At the turn of the 21st century manned missions to outer space are not unusual. Space ship Faith I sends out a distress call requesting that, due to contamination from an infectious gas, the ship be destroyed. All are dead except one crew member and he is dying. Earth control destroys the ship.
A new ship, Hope I is sent on a mission to find a new planet to colonize. On board are four astronauts, sexist captain Colonel Hank Stevens (James Brown), scientist and wolf, Dr. John Andros (Baynes Barron), scientist Dr. Paul Martin (Russ Bender) and woman Dr. Lisa Wayne (Francine York). It seems that if it wasn’t for human foibles there wouldn’t be any science fiction movies.
After passing the Earth space platform the crew come upon an alien ship suspended in space. They are instructed by Earth Control to investigate the alien ship. On board Dr. Andros is attacked by an alien and Captain Stevens kills it. The radiation levels of the alien ship suddenly increase. Steven’s blows up the alien ship so it doesn’t risk getting caught in Earth’s gravitational pull and end up contaminating the planet.
Then the ship gets bombarded by a meteor shower. This results in a problem with the ships speed controls. The ship surges forward at a tremendous rate of speed and throws them off course. They attempt to land the ship on a random planet so they can make repairs but end up underwater instead of on land. Now the team, trapped underwater on an alien planet, must try to make repairs and deal with humanoid sea creatures and giant horrible looking monsters (crabs).
“Space Probe Taurus”, AKA “Space Monster”, AKA “First Woman In Space”, was released in 1965 and was directed by Leonard Katzman. The film is a made for TV movie.
The alien found on the derelict spaceship is the same prop used in “The Wizard of Mars” (1965). Also, the underwater "sea monster" that attacks Andros appears to be footage of one of the gill-men from “War-Gods of the Deep” (1965).
There are a couple things with this movie that were a little confusing. The main plot was the expedition into space to investigate a known planet to see if man could live on it and being sent off course and ending up on a different planet. That’s fine, but what was the purpose of the alien in the space ship that was very close to Earth? It felt like a random scene that was just stuck into the movie. Also, the beginning scene before the opening credits where the spaceship Faith got blown up seemed to be another random scene. There was no explanation for either of them unless the purpose was to interject some action into the movie. The closest I could figure out for the Faith I is that it was a prior attempt to find a habitable planet but instead landed on an inhospitable one. I couldn’t think of any explanation for the derelict space ship.
After watching a hundred of these movies it gets a little tiring listening to the petty squabbles of the crew members. And every man slobbering over the one woman. Apparently all the sexist tropes from the 50’s were still movie fodder in the 60’s. I’m sure I haven’t seen the last of them.
Otherwise it was an OK movie. Some of it plodded along but I did like the Barcalounger recliner space ship chairs. For most it may not be worth it, unless you are a rabid 60’s sci-fi fan, since it is very difficult to find and when you do you will pay a lot for it. Unless you just watch it on You Tube.