You won't be disappointed!

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Let me say right off the bat that at least for me, there were two things working in this film's favour even before I started it (as 2 nifty percent of my infamous Mill Creek 50-pack, 'Nightmare Worlds'): a) I love the old-time serials, a part a week at the theatres, each with a cliffhanger ending; and b) I'm a fan of Buster Crabbe, from seeing him previously both as Tarzan and in a Flash Gordon serial. Directors Beebe and Goodkind were masters at the format, and this is no exception (although since it's from the 30's, and with B-movie budgetary restrictions at that, I readily dismiss all negative comments from people complaining that for the 1950's, it's really crappy filmmaking--it's NOT from the 50's, but simply edited then into a feature-length film the company could then sell, most probably to television stations).I enjoyed it, though I wish that instead of seeing this, I was watching the unedited, undiluted full serial that was originally made. I have read that the best and most exciting parts were edited out.

Planet Outlaws was a science fiction movie that was cobbled together from material taken from a 1930's Buck Rogers serial. This was no doubt done because in the post-Atomic bomb Cold War years of the 50's science fiction was really popular. In fact, the film-makers have presented the story as an allegory against the evils of communism, with a dictator whose minions are turned into unthinking servile robots! But whatever the underlying message, this is an old-style action movie where the good guys are really good and the bad guys are complete rotters. There is no ambiguity at play here that's for sure.The film begins with a brief sequence to set the scene - a hot air balloon piloted by Buck Rogers and his buddy crashes and is buried in snow in the North Pole; they go into suspended animation and are awoke 500 years in the future where they immediately align themselves in a conflict between decent folks and a criminal overlord called Killer Kane.This would very possibly have seemed like quite an old fashioned film even in the early 50's. It was after all culled from material from a 30's serial. But they have tried to make it as relevant to the times as they could, however, editing a serial down to a 70 minute movie does present some problems. The result is a somewhat frantic movie with lots of big events dealt with very briefly; we have, for example, three trips to and from Saturn as opposed to one proper one. Buster Crabbe stars in the lead role and I suppose he has an uncomplicated clunky charm, if a little dull; his nemesis Killer Kane is not a very interesting villain either. It's unquestionably a very silly film indeed with some amusingly daft spaceships and costumes but it does have some decent sets and some quite impressive model work for the cityscapes. The incessant soundtrack in the background does become a little wearing though, as does the film overall to be honest. As all of these types of movies are, this one does have a time capsule appeal but it's excessive clunkiness makes it a little too tedious, despite the constant action.

Someone at Universal Studios got the bright idea to edit out all the cliffhanger chapter endings and re-release an old Buck Rogers serial as a feature film in 1953. The advances in science have rendered it laughable in those Cold War years, now the film is high camp.The original serial had the notion that a 20th century dirigible pilot and junior sidekick Buster Crabbe and Jackie Moran crash near the North Pole and their bodies are cryogenically frozen and thawed out by those who found them 500 years later which is about the same time that the Starship Enterprise was doing its thing. But this is not a Star Trek world that they've come back to. Although in the original Star Trek series in one of the comic episodes a humanoid people did take on the gangster culture from 20th century earth.In this film because we did not deal with the Al Capones and Lucky Lucianos back in the day as we should have, they're on top now and the boss of all bosses is a guy named Killer Kane played by Anthony Warde. Fortunately Crabbe and Moran fall into the hands of the Resistance who have holed up in a Hidden City. There are some other humans on Saturn and most of the film is devoted to making an alliance with them.Science Fiction as a film form does have a half life. Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov can write about the wonders of the future, but you can read it and use your imagination and a hundred, a thousand years from now it will adjust depending on how far humans advance. But once it's on film it stays. The Buck Rogers films are pretty laughable and campy for today, but I wonder what Gene Roddenberry's vision will look like a hundred years from now, just how much will he have gotten right?Tacked on is a prologue and epilogue of narration where a Cold War era message is hammered home. That too is a relic of the times.

This is one of four feature version attempts made from the serial 'Buck Rogers' (1939). This one, released in 1953, in addition to condensing the story down to a trim 69 minutes, has an added prologue and epilogue filmed that year. The prologue narrator suggests that as the submarine, airplane and atomic bomb were written about years before they actually became a reality, so too will the existence of flying saucers be proved in the near future. What a non sequiter! He makes reference to the science-fiction writer (it was Cleve Cartmill) who was investigated by the FBI which thought that he had used classified information to write about the A-bomb years before it was created.Supposedly, this is the prologue to the story of Killer Kane and his quest to rule the Earth. Cut to the condensed archival footage of the 'Buck Rogers' serial, with Buster Crabbe, Jackie Moran, Constance Moore, Anthony Warde and C. Montague Shaw. Not much derives from the original story or comic strip-- Buck (Buster Crabbe) and Buddy (Jackie Moran) go into suspended animation and wake up 500 years in the future, where they meet Lt. Wilma Deering (Constance Moore). That's it. Very quickly they take sides with Dr. Huer (C. Montague Shaw) and 'The Hidden City' in its war against the tyrant Killer Kane (Anthony Warde). For some reason, in order to win the war they need to form an alliance with the government of Saturn, so our trio of heroes wind up going there three times. The alliance is made; they storm Kane's city, and he is turned into a mindless robot. The continuity is pretty good in condensing the story, but as a result, in several scenes we see things going on in the background that are never explained since so much from too many chapters has been skipped.Travel to the far future was a common trope in science fiction from H. G. Wells on, and the emphasis was usually on the contrast or differences between our time and that of the future. Here, in Buck's new 25th Century, we get anti gravity belts (from the original story), terrestrial spaceships that double as interstellar ones, a high speed tunnel car, a mind control device, and a funny triangular space gun. The best part for me was the great art deco sets of Killer Kane's city.Killer Kane just doesn't make it as an evil tyrant, since about all he does is stand around berating his council members for their incompetence, except when he tries to put the Robot Battalion coffee pot on Buck Rogers (deleted from the feature versions). I had this same reaction when I watched the entire serial. Anthony Warde didn't have a menacing enough tone of voice, but had more of a high pitched yell. He was better in other serials where he was not the lead villain. The 1953 epilogue narrator warns us of the rise of any future Killer Kane (an obvious reference to Joseph Stalin of Russia), and facing the camera says, "God bless America!"We get a lot of music from Max Steiner's great score for 'The Bride of Frankenstein' (1935), Buster Crabbe's winning personality and cheerful take charge attitude, and the great deco and recycled 'Flash Gordon' sets. It's too bad that neither this nor the original serial is very good. Unfortunately this squeezed down version moves so quickly and does so little that I can only give it a 3.