Special effects
Just goes to show cheesy special effects can't hurt a winning story and good acting (I mean Mona of course, although Paul wasn't bad either).
shareCheesy? Considering the movie was made in 1964, and that it was going for a hitherto unheard of sense of realism, I'd say the SFX are brilliant and stand the test of time relatively well.
shareAh come on. The fake meteors or whatever they were supposed to be were hilarious. Made no sense whatsoever wandering around the landscape. Ed Wood would have been proud. On a completely different topic, why did they bring Mona along? You only use monkeys when it's too dangerous to risk people.
shareThey were planning to send Mona down to the surface (as a test subject, I suppose), while they stayed in orbit. However , Captain Batman decided against it, fearing she'd be cooked in that "fire swamp", as I believe he put it....
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They brought Mona along for S-E-X! Gawd, you people are sooooooo like dense. But it didn't matter anyway because the sex was handled by Adam (get your hands off my cape) West and Burt (that's not your cape and that's not my hands) Ward offstage.
shareThose fireballs whizzing across the ground like tumbleweeds didn't make any sense, but they sure looked cool!
And comparing the effects in this picture to Ed Wood's movies? Get real! Ed Wood would have liked to have SFX a tenth as good as the ones in RCOM.
The Death Valley locations with the matted-in Martian sky are still some of the most convincing alien planetscapes ever filmed.