Reviews

I don't get all the negative, self-righteous criticism of the movie. It's a movie about a next-generation space shuttle that can take civilians into space and to the moon rather quickly. Of course it's not believable because it's impossible to do something like that. So set your belief aside and enjoy the movie for what it is: science fiction. Of course you can't talk back and forth instantly to a spacecraft that's near the Sun, but think about how boring it would have been if the director had made it realistic and we had to wait 8 minutes for each response. The person who criticized the part about the cell phone being used to call the shuttle obviously missed the part where the computer geek patches it through the company space communications system. The special effects were better than I expected, although I got tired of seeing the sun shown as a giant ball of lava-like material. Sun loops are magnetic and have a certain form -- nothing like what was portrayed. Since the entire movie is about how the Sun behaves, I would have thought they'd pay more attention to trying to make it look like what it actually does.

Bad acting, bad effects, bad script, bad all the way around. But I loved it. I couldn't stop laughing. The father is flying across the Atlantic in a little twin-engine plane and Air Traffic Control asks him to descend from 30,000 feet. What? There's a huge snowstorm that has shut down the airport in London and the father and new wife manage to rent a car. The steering wheel is on the wrong side for the UK. They're driving in a huge snowstorm with the temp well below freezing and rainwater is hitting their windshield along with the fake snow. An 8.4 earthquake hits Paris but many of the buildings, including the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe are still standing.

Here's a drinking game for the movie: take a drink every time the brother or sister fall down. I think I counted 30+ times. This is my new favorite "Worst Movie Ever." Invite your friends over to watch this really campy movie.

I find it hard to believe that I watched this movie being filmed in 1963 on location and have never seen the movie.

I was in a boy's camp that went out for a few days of camping. We ended up along the Brazos River, I believe and the movie company ended up right beside us. Some wild donkeys (or loose donkeys) came into our camp while we were gone on hike and ate our food in camp. The people with the movie company invited us to eat with them and that's how I met Johnny Crawford face-to-face. He was a really nice kid (he was only 3 years older than me) and we all were big Rifleman fans. We ate with him and he talked to us and it was just like a bunch of kids sitting around. He didn't act stuck up or anything. I also got to meet Jay Silverheels of The Lone Ranger fame, who played Crawford's father. I had never seen a movie being filmed before and it was a magical experience for me. The one vivid memory I have is that the Native American actors had rubber-tipped arrows and lances. I couldn't figure out how they wouldn't look rubber in the movie so now I'll have to see the movie and find out.