The vibe on Space Probe Taurus is weird, for lack of a more specific term. It has the bones of a typical 1950s-1960s hard science fiction near-future let’s-go-conquer-space flick. The four main characters, the only ones we spend any real time with, are stock types: the hard-driving commander, the older scientist/engineer, the tough-on-the-surface female scientist, and the wiseguy she eventually falls for. They crew a rocketship dispatched from Earth in the year 2000 to explore outer space and find a planet suitable for colonization.
Things start weird and get weirder. We open not with this crew, but with the last surviving member of a different rocketship. The ship is located on an undefined planet, the rest of the crew killed by an unspecified disease and/or radiation. Somehow in real-time communication with Earth (this movie’s hand-waving of time and space problems anticipates J. J. Abrams by over 40 years), he implores for Earth to destroy the ship and kill him. After some back-and-forth, Mission Control pushes a button on a panel (!) and destroys the ship.
On the one hand, this trope of self-sacrifice for the conquest of space was pretty common. The Quatermass movies were all over this territory; First Man into Space is another example. On the other, and this is going to be a pattern with this movie, we never really mention this crew and its sacrifice again. Our crew doesn’t travel to this planet; it’s not mentioned in dialogue. I’m not sure it’s a wrong choice–the planet was clearly unsuitable, no use throwing good money after bad etc–it’s just unexpected.
This movie has three monsters grouped into two encounters. The first of these takes place soon after the rocketship has left Earth and passed a space station. No time really seems to have passed, but they encounter an unfamiliar spaceship floating in space. Two of our crew board the ship and encounter an alien, who attacks them. They shoot and kill the alien and then destroy the ship with a bomb. The sequence is on YouTube, and I kinda dug the creature design (also seen in The Wizard of Mars):
Let’s leave aside that this is an (inadvertent) act of intergalactic war. I can’t recall ever seeing a more perfunctory first contact on screen. They report the encounter back to Earth and then get on with the mission. This whole situation–we found an alien and his ship, pretty close to Earth (?), and we killed him and blew up his ship–is never mentioned again.
The second encounter occurs on an Earth-like moon. Our crew has made a force landing in a body of water. The ship is upright, albeit underwater. It’s necessary to make repairs to the rocketship but meanwhile it’s being menaced by giant crabs, just as we all expected:
The crabs don’t really do anything except wander around outside the ship. The film’s soundtrack gives us repeated sonar echoes that sound like they were lifted from Run Silent, Run Deep. Finally, returning to the theme of sacrifice from the start of the movie, the wiseguy swims to shore to verify that the atmosphere is breathable. While returning to the ship, he’s attacked by one of the gill monsters from War-Gods of the Deep. He makes it back to the ship but dies shortly afterward. The crew departs and names the moon after him.
This isn’t a good film. Leonard Katzman, the director, was mostly an assistant director or producer; this is his only time in the chair. All four main actors worked steadily but aren’t prominent. The practical effects are amateurish. The creature work is better, but was sourced from other films. The writing avoids some of the usual tropes. I never felt myself cringing watching it. I come back to what I said at the beginning: it’s a little weird. If you like this kind of thing it’s worth a watch.