The Beast in Space (Review)
Monday, 19th July 2010, 16:30

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The Disc

Extra Features
Not a great deal as most of the time and effort went into rebuilding the film to its most complete version permissible on these shores. What you do have in terms of supplementary material is the theatrical trailer, trailers for all of Shameless’ other releases and a hilarious 30 second feature called The Beast in Space Redux which uses split screen to compare a couple of scenes from the softcore version to this one.

The Picture
The film gets off to an inauspicious start when the opening few minutes are covered in white spots and the overall picture quality is fairly soft and blurry. As this is a rebuilt film, with scenes from various different sources, the quality varies throughout the running time and there are some scenes that look fairly awful with some aliasing, softness and detritus on the screen whereas others look extremely colourful, sharp and with good contrast levels. Whoever was responsible for the set design, costumes and other aspects of the art department must look back on this and just think 'Wow! I can't believe I got paid for doing that!'

The Beast in Space is fairly typical for a science-fiction B-movie in the costumes and visual effects departments as both are extremely laughable and, when it comes to the scenes involving spacecraft, are utterly unconvincing. Somehow these just add to the charm as, let's face it, this isn't exactly 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars or Silent Running.

The Sound
Presented with the original Italian 2.0 Mono soundtrack, the dialogue comes across clearly enough although this won't be too much of an issue to those of us who don't speak Italian fluently and will be relying on the optional English subtitles. Fortunately, these are well written and error-free making the film easy to follow but you do look at the actors and notice when the dubbing isn't exactly spot-on as there is a distinct lack of synchronisation between the words and the mouth moving.

The score is nothing to write home about and neither are the sound effects which are meant to convey a sense of realism when it comes to the scenes involving spacecraft enough space. You have to feel for Marcello Giombini as he was basically asked to do two scores for one film with one set of music for the science-fiction parts and another composition for the Euro erotica sections so he must have felt like a schizophrenic by the time he had finished.

Final Thoughts
The Beast in Space is nonsense from start to finish and is an extremely cheap, badly made and only acted movie. It is also extremely enjoyable due to the amount of kitsch, cheese and utterly ridiculous costumes and dialogue on show. If you have, as I do, a soft spot for cheap science-fiction B-movies and don't mind the odd sex scene thrown in for good measure then this will be right up your street. It's rubbish, that much I admit, but it is enjoyable rubbish and surely that isn't a crime. As Shameless releases go, it is up there with the best of them as far as enjoyment is concerned and it is fantastic to see a version this complete released in the UK.

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