Classic Horrors Club

It doesn’t feel like I really watched The Day the Sky Exploded (1958), much less its original version, La morte viene dallo spazio. The latter was Italy’s first science fiction movie, ostensibly directed by its cinematographer, Mario Bava. The former is the version released over three years later in the United States, which is in the public domain. You can find it almost anywhere, but in ghastly transfers with horrible dubbing.

While the picture and audio suffer greatly, there’s enough there to discern the plot and generate varying levels of action and suspense. What may hurt those two elements the most, though, isn’t the quality, but the 82-minute running time. While it’s a visual blessing, the movie’s attempts to develop character and evoke feelings of care for them are quickly introduced and then mostly left behind.

John McLaren (Paul Hubschmid) is the “pilot” chosen for the most ambitious experiment of all time, although I’m not exactly sure what that is. He takes a rocket into space, but when it starts veering off course, he ejects with the capsule to head home and leaves the atomic booster hurtling toward an asteroid fields. It eventually explodes, forming a huge cluster that is drawn toward Earth by its magnetism.

While not the least bit original by today’s standards, it’s a compelling situation. It’s main flaw by my standards is the lack of special effects to go with it. There’s a lot of talk about the phenomenon, such as animals changing their migrating patterns and people experiencing a shared mirage of a large sphere in the sky with a halo of light, but the promised fires and tidal waves are shared sparingly with stock footage.

Stock footage doesn’t bother me if it’s used in a way that enhances the story, and I think it might be here. It’s another blessing with the public domain version: it all looks the same, so you can’t identify the supposedly abundant use of stock footage. Even during the last-ditch effort to save the world, when many countries fire rockets to stop the meteor, we see many rockets and we know they’re all real.

The special effects created for the movie are probably spotty at best. A few shots of satellites or the original rocket traveling through space look like they’re crossing a wide black strip with a background of stars only on the top and bottom. There is a beautiful money shot at the end, though, as the streaks of light from all rockets head toward the meteor. That one shot made me more forgiving of the others.

As for the attempts at characterization, we have McLaren’s wife, Mary (Fiorella Mari), ironically accusing her husband of being selfish when he stays at mission control to help avert disaster, and their son, Dennis (Massimo Zeppieri), whose atrocious dubbing perhaps masks the annoying child stereotype. And in a sub-subplot, Peter Luduq (Dario Michaelis) attempts to woo Katy Dandridge (Madeleine Fischer).

Amid the blob-like black clouds that grow and obscure the picture in the public domain transfer, there are hints that Bava was involved. In some shots that are clearer, there’s distinct light and shadow used to accentuate the characters. I don’t know if the original movie exists, but I’d love to see it restored. It may not make The Day the Sky Exploded a better movie, but I bet it would be prettier. 

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