Product Details
- An MVD Exclusive
- SKU: D31001
- Format: DVD
- UPC: 760137996491
- Street Date: 03/14/17
- PreBook Date: 01/10/17
- Label: DUB3 »
- Genre: Sci Fi/Fantasy
- Run Time: 84 mins
- Number of Discs: 1
- Audio: STEREO
- Year of Production: 1961
- Region Code: 1
- Box Lot: 30
- Territory: NORTH AMERICA
- Language: English
Cast & Crew
- Actors:
- Claude Rains
- Bill Carter
- Umberto Orsini
- Director: Antonio Margheriti
- Producer: Antonio Margheriti
- Producers: Antonio Margheriti
Product Assets
Battle Of The Worlds: Comic Book Collectors Edition
A runaway asteroid mysteriously begins orbiting the Earth and threatens it with destruction.
- List Price: $12.95
- Your Price: $12.95
- In Stock: []
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Antonio Margheriti's Italian Spaghetti Space Operas are some of the most interesting science fiction from the 1960s. Starting with SPACE MEN (or ASSIGNMENT: OUTER SPACE) and culminating with the brilliantly mod GAMMA ONE QUADROLIGY, Margheriti helped to shape the ultimate form of the genre -- Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY -- and gave it a truly modern ring (for the time) that was only bettered by the Soviet era science fiction like PLANETA BUR and MECHA NEVSTRACHU. A journeyman filmmaker with a background in production design, Margheriti was not as visionary in his approach as contemporary Mario Bava, who's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES remains the most impressive example of Spaghetti Science Fiction, but Margheriti had perhaps a more populist approach to his work that still endears forty-plus years later. His use of models, miniatures and pyrotechnics alone would have earned him a very respectable place in the annals of the genre by themselves. BATTLE OF THE WORLDS is his second trip into the galaxy for entertainment, and compared to the previous year's ASSIGNMENT: OUTER SPACE, this movie is almost a quantum leap forward in terms of ambitions for his plot, characters and action sequences. And I suspect that as is the case with ASSIGNMENT: OUTER SPACE a great deal of the critical responses this movie has accumulated ("Atsa one-a lousy meataball") has to do with the really crummy surviving prints of the film, or rather the surviving home video transfers available on public domain oriented DVD collections. BATTLE OF THE WORLDS was certainly a much more impressive experience when shown in it's correct original widescreen ratio, probably 2:35:1 Techniscope by the looks of the pan and scanning going on to condense the film for small screen. The color on the transfers -- which are likely traceable to the same early 1980s transfer to VHS -- are almost uniformly rotted nearly to sepia in spots, with plenty of surface noise & jumbled damage to individual frames. What most people are reviewing is the DVD they saw, not the film itself.
